Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

Daniel Ricciardo has departed Visa Cash App RB and will be replaced by Liam Lawson for the remainder of the 2025 campaign.

Ricciardo replaced Nyck de Vries at, the then named, Scuderia AlphaTauri team for the 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix and has gone on to race for the Red Bull junior team since then, albeit missing a few races when a crash at Zandvoort kept him out of action for a number of race weekends.

Following a disappointing spell at McLaren F1 Team, Ricciardo aimed for this to be his chance back into Oracle Red Bull Racing alongside Max Verstappen, and despite rumours over the summer break that he was in line to replace Sergio Pérez, nothing ever materialised. 

An Instagram post from Ricciardo seems to signal that his career is at an end: “I’ve loved this sport my whole life. It’s wild and wonderful and been a journey. 

“To the teams and individuals that have played their part, thank you. To the fans who love the sport sometimes more than me haha thank you. It’ll always have its highs and lows but it’s been fun and truth be told I wouldn’t change it. Until the next adventure.”

Formula 1 is taking a long break before returning for an action packed end to the 2024 FIA F1 season.

Max Verstappen is leading the Drivers Championship, but is being chased down by Lando Norris with McLaren F1 Team recently having taken the lead from Oracle Red Bull Racing in the Constructors Championship.

In this piece, we’ll be taking a look at what’s to come in the next few rounds and the road to the season finale in Abu Dhabi.

Austin

The Circuit of Americas is the next circuit that will be home to the F1 paddock, but it won’t be any time soon with a four week gap.

There’s been plenty of speculation in the paddock surrounding Daniel Ricciardo leaving the sport and we’ll certainly know the outcome of that by the time F1 arrives for the second USA race of the season, and based off reports it does look likely that Liam Lawson will be driving for Visa Cash App RB next time out, although we’ll only know when we get official confirmation.

When their Can-Am Maverick takes the start at the Rallye du Maroc, Ndoki Racing Team will be the first outfit from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to compete in a World Rally-Raid Championship event. In partnership with BTR Racing Team, the team will compete in the SSV category with Michaël Devos as driver and Xavier Hottelet as navigator.

“The NRT team is back to announce its participation in the Rallye du Maroc, which will take place from October 4 to 11,” reads a team statement. “This marks a first for a team of Congolese origin. We are grateful to everyone who has helped, directly or indirectly, make this dream a reality, and to BTR for preparing an amazing vehicle to introduce us to this discipline. Stay tuned, share, and we invite you to follow us in a few days on this adventure at the second largest rally raid in the world, at the origins of the legendary Dakar Rally.”

Located in the capital city of Kinshasa, the team primarily competes in the national cross-country rally championship organised by the Ecurie Panthère de Kinshasa RDC. Devos and Hottelet, Belgians living in the DRC, raced a Century CRT buggy with victories that included back-to-back 6 Heures de Bombo Lumene in 2018 and 2019. Both have also competed in Ecurie Panthère’s motorcycle races and Groupe Number One’s enduro series on Yamaha 250cc bikes.

BTR is a Belgian operation that has fielded SSVs in the W2RC and Dakar Rally. At the latest Dakar in January, they had two Can-Ams for Benoit Lepietre and William Grarre, the former finishing twenty-third in SSV while the latter retired; the team also supported the Century CR6 of Frédéric Chesneau, who bowed out as well. For the Rallye du Maroc, BTR has prepared the new Can-Am Maverick R for Christian Lavieille.

The Rallye du Maroc will take place on 6–11 October.

GRallyTeam will have a pair of former Dakar Rally FIM champions on the roster for the Rallye du Maroc as Alexandre Giroud and Charan Moore make their FIA débuts.

Giroud will be the driver of a GRally OT3 with fellow Quad alumnus Jérémy Jacomelli as his co-driver. Moore will be the navigator of another OT3 piloted by Puck Klaassen. The team will also field two more entries for Rui Carneiro and Ola Fløene as well as Lionel and Lucie Baud.

Moore teased his vehicle switch on Tuesday when he wrote he “won’t be going back to Dakar on a bike.” He won the 2023 Dakar Rally in the Original by Motul (Malle Moto) subcategory before moving into the broader Rally2 class for 2024, where he finished ninth overall. Despite his successes on two wheels, he has been frank about the expenses of continuing a bike career, especially as a longtime privateer.

His driver Klaassen was a motocross rider before a leg injury prompted her to change to driving. She ran the Dakar Classic in January before going on to race in the World Rally-Raid Championship in a Taurus T3 Max.

On the quad side, Giroud is a two-time Dakar winner with back-to-back victories in 2022 and 2023. He also claimed the category’s inaugural World Rally-Raid Championship following his first Dakar victory, and won the 2023 Rallye du Maroc in the class. The Frenchman nearly achieved a three-peat in January but came up eight minutes short.

Janus van Kasteren will be sitting out the Dakar Rally in 2025, but reports from Dutch media indicate he plans to return in a car for the 2026 race.

The 2026 team, whose name and vehicles were not immediately revealed, will consist of three cars for himself and fellow Dutchmen Michiel Becx and Roger Grouwels.

Van Kasteren had exclusively raced at Dakar in the Truck class since 2018, winning the 2023 edition and eventually the category’s final World Rally-Raid Championship. His sixth career Dakar in January started off strong when he won the Prologue followed by three of the first four stages, but his hopes of a repeat were dashed by a mechanical failure during the Chrono Stage. He ultimately salvaged a fourth-place run.

Team de Rooy, whom he had worked with since 2020, revealed their 2025 Dakar lineup on Tuesday without van Kasteren. Anja Van Loon is the team’s only returning driver from 2024, while they have added this year’s runner-up Aleš Loprais and car racer Vaidotas Žala to the fold.

Becx also raced a truck for de Rooy in 2024, finishing behind van Kasteren in fifth; he is no stranger to driving a car at Dakar, having made his début in a MitJet Offroad buggy in 2019. Grouwels, a former one-make pavement racer and two-time Supercar Challenge Super GT champion, piloted a Can-Am Maverick in the latest Dakar’s Challenger class for Dakar Team Spierings RaceArt but retired after halfway.

X-raid Team will bring a petrol-based Mini John Cooper Works Rally to the Rallye du Maroc in October, a break their usual diesel-engined Minis. The Mini JCW Rally 3.0i was revealed on Wednesday.

The 3.0i uses an engine dubbed the RS24, which generates 263 kW of power at 570 Nm of torque; by comparison, the BMW diesel engine produced 263 kW and 570 Nm. Both motors have 2,993 cubic centimetres of displacement, while the diesel counterpart has a higher top speed of 180 km/h to the RS24’s 170 km/h, though the latter is due to FIA regulations.

Otherwise, the car is generally the same as its predecessors.

“For many years, we have successfully fielded the X-raid Mini JCW Rally with a diesel engine, which has been powered by the environmentally friendly HVO fuel for the past two years,” said team principal Sven Quandt. “Since the team was founded in 2002, we have been very successful with BMW diesel engines and have won the Dakar Rally six times and many championships with this concept. With the high-performance turbo petrol engine that our development team has spent the last nine months working on with Alpina, we are taking a big step and breaking completely new ground.

“With immediate effect, our customers can choose between the two engine variants. Our proven and highly reliable diesel engine will continue to be offered alongside the petrol engine. The Morocco Rally will be the first test under competitive conditions for the MINI JCW Rally 3.0i. After that, we will know where we stand.”

Greece is probably not going to be on the World Rally-Raid Championship anytime soon, but that’s not going to stop Baja Greece organisers from exploring double duty on both the FIA World Baja Cup and the European Baja Cup calendars.

Following the inaugural Baja Greece in May, the second round of the World Cup, organisers conducted a survey among competitors to poll their opinions on the race, such as their satisfaction with the event’s quality and input for future editions. The results were released five months later on Tuesday.

71.4 percent of poll takers found the race was “above standard” compared to other rounds on the World and European Baja Cups, while the remaining 28.6% were split between thinking it “complies with standard” or is “below standard”. The former percentage also thought the Selective Sections were exemplary.

When prompted on what series they would prefer it to be on, 42.9% expressed hope that it would support both championships followed by a 28.6%-apiece tie for either. Consequently, nobody felt it should be on the W2RC or as a non-FIA event.

The World and European Cups do not have any combination races in 2024, though half of the former’s dates are also the entire schedule for the FIA Middle East Baja Cup (Saudi Baja, Qatar International Baja, Dubai International Baja, and Jordan Baja). This arrangement was previously done for the European Cup in 2021 when all five of its rounds doubled as the back half of the World Cup.

Christian Lavieille will be among the first drivers to pilot the FIA-spec Can-Am Maverick R at the Rallye du Maroc in October. BTR Racing Team will prepare the car while Valentin Sarreaud remains as co-driver.

Lavieille typically races in the premier Ultimate class, most recently finishing twelfth overall at the Dakar Rally in an MD Optimus. Morocco will be his first World Rally-Raid Championship start outside of Dakar.

The Maverick R has been taking the off-road world by storm since its reveal in August 2023. After enjoying immediate success in North American desert racing, the side-by-side has been seeing increased use in international cross-country rally. With FIA homologation not yet complete, most of its entries in the discipline have been in national rallies.

In June, the Maverick R made its W2RC début at the Desafío Ruta 40. As it was still not approved for competition in the regular SSV class, Jeremías González Ferioli instead won in the Open Cars category. A Maverick R also contested the Silk Way Rally the following month, while three-time Dakar winner Francisco López Contardo plans to race one at the 2025 Dakar.

South Racing Can-Am unveiled their FIA-spec Maverick R last Tuesday, which they plan to field at the Rallye du Maroc for drivers like Erik Van Loon. Van Loon had raced a prototype Maverick R from South at the Morocco Desert Challenge in April, where he dominated before retiring with a late mechanical snag.

Erik Van Loon will get behind the wheel of two new vehicles in Morocco when he tests his Audi S1 before tackling the Rallye du Maroc in the Can-Am Maverick R.

He plans to enter the Audi in the 2025 Dakar Classic, a side event to the Dakar Rally for historic vehicles. Van Loon did the main rally from 2009 to 2023, but stopped afterwards due to the physical toll that such a gruelling race had on him.

Nevertheless, he has remained involved in the sport by doing races like the Morocco Desert Challenge and Baja Aragón. South Racing Can-Am prepared a Maverick R for him at the former, where he dominated before retiring with a late mechanical issue.

South eventually refined the Maverick R before unveiling the FIA-spec version last week. The Maverick R been extremely successful since its reveal in August 2023, primarily in American desert racing but with achievements in cross-country rally that include winning the World Rally-Raid Championship‘s Desafío Ruta 40 Open Cars class in June.

Hein Verschuuren will again serve as his navigator for the Rallye du Maroc on 6–11 October. Van Loon retired from the 2023 edition, where he competed in the Challenger class; the Maverick R is intended for the production-based SSV division.

Charan Moore will not race the Dakar Rally in 2025, at least not on a bike. On Tuesday, he wrote he does not intend to do a fourth Dakar on two wheels, ending a three-year stint in which he won the Malle Moto subcategory in 2023. He has not specified his plans for 2025.

“It’s been a year,” began a post from Moore. “2025, I won’t be going back to Dakar on a bike. Grateful for this chapter of my life and everyone that has been involved in the greatest adventure on two wheels.

“Time to start writing the next chapter.”

Moore made his Dakar début in 2022 in Original by Motul; also known as Malle Moto, it is an amateur for riders competing without assistance from teams. After narrowly missed the class podium that year, he broke through in 2023 with nine stage wins en route to the Malle Moto overall win.

Malle Moto winners are forbidden from returning to the class in later starts and must move up to the broader Rally2 category, so Moore joined HT Rally Raid Husqvarna Racing for the 2024 edition. Although Rally2 is a much bigger field and the race was what he called “the hardest one yet”, he consistently ran within the late top twenty en route to a ninth overall with a best finish of eighth in Stage #2.

After about eleven months, Guillaume de Mévius‘ time with Overdrive Racing has come to an abrupt end. On Tuesday, AUTOhebdo reported—with confirmation from Overdrive head Jean-Marc Fortin—that the Belgian left the team and will instead race a Mini John Cooper Works Rally Plus for X-raid Team starting with the Rallye du Maroc.

The news comes as a massive shock even to Fortin, who admitted he was “as surprised as I am disappointed.”

After racing primarily in the Challenger category, de Mévius graduated to the top level with Overdrive last October when he made his début at the Rallye du Maroc. Piloting a Toyota Hilux Overdrive, he finished twelfth in class.

He then committed to the 2024 World Rally-Raid Championship with the team, and impressed from the start when he finished runner-up at the Dakar Rally. The next two races were set back by a compressed vertebra from a hard landing at the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge followed by mechanical issues at the BP Ultimate Rally-Raid.

De Mévius did not enter the Desafío Ruta 40, the latest and penultimate W2RC round, but he returned to action at the FIA World Baja Cup’s Baja España Aragón and won. Aragón also marked the first race for his new co-driver Mathieu Baumel, a five-time Dakar winner and twice World Rally-Raid Champion with Toyota.

After nine Dakar Rallies in a car, Vaidotas Žala will try his hand at the big boys in 2025 when he makes his debut in a truck. He will race an IVECO PowerStar fielded by Team de Rooy with sponsorship from Skuba.

“New to the team is Vaidotas Žala, he is a well known Lithuanian rally and rally raid pilot who will try his luck in the truck category,” reads a statement from Team de Rooy. “During testing, Vaidotas has proven to be a great pilot and instantly got the right feeling for the rally truck. He impressed us with his driving skills and techniques.”

Žala most recently raced the Dakar in a Mini John Cooper Works Rally Plus, with which he placed fifty-second in the Ultimate class. He was the category’s last finisher after an up-and-down race in which he finished as high as second but was set back by a myriad of mechanical problems like a pothole destroying the hydraulic jack system, an engine failure, and the alternator cable detaching and causing the battery to lose power.

The Mini T1+ was the fifth different vehicle that he raced Dakar with. He made his début in 2016 in a SEAT Leon before switching to a Toyota Hilux Overdrive in 2018, a standard Mini JCW Rally in 2020, and the Prodrive Hunter in 2023. His best finish was an eleventh at the 2022 race.

Since Dakar, he has mainly focused on the Lithuanian Rally Championship in a Škoda Fabia RS Rally2. Nevertheless, he continued to dabble in various cross-country rallies such as the BP Ultimate Rally-Raid in Portugal in April, where he retired after a crew member inadvertently used contaminated fuel to refuel his Mini.

In January, Carlos Santaolalla and Jan Rosa Viñas won the Dakar Classic in their Toyota Land Cruiser HDJ80. Eight months later, they continued their winning ways in the deserts of Morocco when they crushed the RallyClassics Africa.

The duo recorded the lowest average score to beat fellow Land Cruiser driver and Dakar Classic competitor Asier Duarte by nearly 200 points. Santaolalla won the first stage before Carles Bracons in his own Land Cruiser topped Stage #2, then the former claimed the last leg to finish the job.

Defending winner Antonio Rius broke up the Land Cruiser party with a Stage #3 victory in his SEAT Toledo Marathon, though he finished seventeenth. Nevertheless, the Spanish marque joined Santaolalla and Duarte on the overall podium courtesy of Jose Enrique Ruiz Perez.

The SEAT entries were prepared by SEAT Históricos, the manufacturer’s historic car collection and restoration programme. Isidre López Badenas, the head of the division, finished twenty-first in a SEAT Ateca.

Rafael Lesmes and his pink Mercedes-Benz 1844 AK, nicknamed Elefante Rosa (“Pink Elephant”), overcome an early navigation error to place fourth. He was the highest finishing truck, just as he was at Dakar.

The 2024 FIA European Baja Cup has been a battle of the Portuguese as João Ferreira is pursued by Fernando Manuel Barreiros and João Dias. The penultimate round of the season took the trio back home to Portugal, where a stout Ferreira stout won outright to maintain his position atop the standings while also passing Dias for the Portuguese Cross-Country Championship lead.

Ferreira entered the weekend leading Barreiros by thirteen points and Dias by thirty-four in the overall. The race ran smoothly for Ferreira’s Mini JCW Rally Plus as he won the first two stages while Dias was left to battle with Tiago Reis for third. Things seemed to take a turn for the leader when his power steering pump malfunctioned just three kilometres into the third and final stage, but he managed to nurse the Mini to the finish in sixth overall and second in Ultimate.

Helder Oliveira, another Mini driver, won the last stage to secure the runner-up in his co-driver Fausto Mota‘s maiden Ultimate race. Dias managed to beat Reis for the last spot on the outright podium and the Challenger class win by fifty-two seconds.

With Francisco Barreto’s retirement due to a Stage #1 rollover, Ferreira has all but locked up the Ultimate title. In the overall, the 2022 champion maintains his thirteen-point advantage on Barreiros while Dias trails him by twenty-sixth.

Ferreira also leapfrogs Dias in the Portuguese Championship (CPTT) after going into Sharish Gin behind by a single point. However, both drivers will likely have to make sacrifices of some kind as the European Baja Cup and CPTT season finales, respectively the Baja Troia Türkiye and Baja Escuderia Castelo Branco, are on the same weekend.

Mitch Guthrie is the latest driver to graduate from Challenger to Ultimate as he joins Ford Performance for the 2025 Dakar Rally, where he will drive the new Ford Raptor T1+ from M-Sport.

Guthrie narrowly missed out on the 2023 World Rally-Raid Championship in what is then the T3 class, winning twice at the Sonora Rally and Desafío Ruta 40 before losing to Seth Quintero in the final race by just five points. The Americans and former team-mates will renew their friendly feud in 2025 as Quintero currently races for rival Toyota Gazoo Racing in the Ultimate class.

After the 2023 season, Guthrie had his first taste of the premier category when he drove a Ford Ranger T1+—the predecessor to the Raptor—as part of the W2RC Next Gen Tryouts.

“Since I was younger, I’ve always been interested in Ford. Originally, when I was going to school and before I could even drive, I saw the Raptor come out and it was my dream car,” Guthrie recalled. “Eventually, thankfully, I was able to buy one in 2019. I still have it and still really enjoy it. Ford is such a well-known brand and synonymous with the United States, so that was of course a dream of mine to be part of the brand. To now be in the T1+ category, driving for Ford, it’s all coming full circle and is really a dream come true for me. I’m really excited to be part of the Ford family.”

Despite running the full 2023 W2RC, Guthrie has only entered the Dakar Rally in 2024. He had been leading the Challenger class during the second half of the rally before a disconnected turbocharger hose and gearbox failure on the final stage dropped him to second.