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Mike Krack says the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula 1 Team are open to Fernando Alonso staying on at the team beyond his time behind the steering wheel in a non-driving role.

The Spaniard will join Aston Martin for the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season in place of the retiring Sebastian Vettel, with Alonso agreeing a multiple year deal with the Silverstone-based outfit having been offered only a single year deal with the BWT Alpine F1 Team.

This means Alonso will race with Aston Martin until at least the end of the 2024 season, and he will be forty-three-years-old by the time of the final race of the 2024 campaign. 

He is already the most experienced Formula 1 driver in history having overtaken the record of Kimi Räikkönen towards the end of his 2022 campaign, and he is twice a World Champion in the sport, having won back-to-back titles in 2005 and 2006 whilst racing for the Renault F1 Team.

Krack, the Team Principal at Aston Martin, says the early conversations with his new driver have been promising, and even beyond his driving days in Formula 1, Alonso could take up non-driving roles with the team in the future.

Frédéric Vasseur says it was pleasing to see Zhou Guanyu ‘shut up’ a lot of people by scoring a top ten finish on his FIA Formula 1 World Championship debut in the 2022 Bahrain Grand Prix.

Zhou became the first Chinese Formula 1 driver when he joined Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN ahead of the 2022 season, the twenty-three-year-old forming an all-new line-up at the Hinwil-based team alongside Valtteri Bottas, the duo replacing Kimi Räikkönen and Antonio Giovinazzi.

Many critics called Zhou a pay driver ahead of his debut after stepping up from FIA Formula 2, but he put in a strong performance across his debut weekend, scoring a tenth place finish at the Bahrain International Circuit, a result that his outgoing Team Principal Vasseur was delighted to see.

He may have scored only two additional top ten finishes throughout his rookie season, but he was getting much closer to the pace of Bottas in the second half of the season, even outqualifying the veteran Finn in a handful of races.

However, it was the opening race’s performance that stood out for Vasseur, who will now become Team Principal at Scuderia Ferrari in 2023.

The Argentine brother duo of Alejandro and Marcos Patronelli dominated the Quad category when the Dakar Rally ran through their home country in the 2010s. After running their last Dakar in 2016, the two intend to return to the now-Saudi event in 2024.

“The brothers are coming!!! Saudi Arabia 2024,” posted Marcos on Instagram. “Seven years later we’re returning to the toughest rally in the world.”

Marcos, the younger of the two, finished runner-up to in the Quads’ first Dakar in 2009 to Josef Macháček before leading a Ptronelli 1–2 finish in 2010. Although Marcos retired in 2011, Alejandro broke through for back-to-back wins with the latter being yet another top two sweep for the brothers, before Marcos won again in 2013. The two took a hiatus before returning in 2016, where Marcos finished first ahead of Alejandro by one spot again.

With their performances, neither brother has ever finished worse than second. In the seven years since their last entry, Marcos has been a bassist for the punk band Capitán Nightrain. The younger brother has also competed in rockcrawling, racing a UTV at the famed King of the Hammers.

Argentinians have consistently been among the Quad riders at Dakar even after the Rally moved to Saudi Arabia in 2020. Nicolás Cavigliasso won the final South American event in 2019, while Manuel Andújar did so two years later. In 2022, Francisco Moreno finished runner-up to eventual World Rally-Raid Champion Alexandre Giroud.

A lot has changed for Mick Schumacher and his mentor Sebastian Vettel in the past year, but one thing that will remain constant is them running the Race of Champions together as Team Germany.

“It’s great to be back at the Race of Champions and to see all the drivers again,” said Schumacher. “Even better that Sebastian will be competing too, so that Team Germany can hopefully live up to the tradition of fighting for the title in the ROC Nations Cup. I’m really looking forward to driving on ice again, and to spending time and fighting battles with this impressive roster of drivers attending.”

After beginning the 2022 Formula One season on the grid, Schumacher lost his seat at Haas and was picked up by Mercedes as their reserve while Vettel ended his decorated career. Vettel, a four-time World Champion, was Schumacher’s guide throughout his career and a close friend.

The duo first teamed up at Race of Champions in 2019, during which Vettel won the ROC Skills Challenge. When the event resumed three years later in Sweden, they joined forces again but were eliminated by Team USA’s Jimmie Johnson and Colton Herta in the Nations Cup. In the individual tournament, Schumacher was knocked out of the preliminary round by Jamie Chadwick of Britain while Vettel defeated Emma Kimiläinen (Finland), got revenge on Herta, and beat Tom Kristensen (Nordic) before falling to France’s Sébastien Loeb in the final.

Vettel previously won the 2015 ROC. He and Schumacher’s father Michael, who served in Vettel’s position to Mick, won the 2007 through 2012 Nations Cups for Germany.

Pierre Gasly knew it was the right time to move away from Scuderia AlphaTauri and join the BWT Alpine F1 Team for the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, with the Frenchman feeling he had hit the ceiling with the Faenza-based team.

Gasly had already been informed that 2023 would be his last season with AlphaTauri, and with the line-up at the sister Oracle Red Bull Racing squad filled up until at least 2024, he knew that he would have to make the decision about where his future lies sooner rather than later.

When Alpine came calling, Gasly was immediately interested in joining the Enstone-based team alongside countryman Esteban Ocon, believing he has a better opportunity to fight for bigger points with them rather than with AlphaTauri. 

Gasly said he was not satisfied about fighting over the minor points paying positions, so to further his career, moving to Alpine was going to be the best opportunity for him.

“I think at the stage of my career, with the experience that I’ve gathered over the last few years, definitely,” Gasly said to GPFans.com.  “It’s definitely the time to move forward, also with the fact that Red Bull is also sealed until the end of 2024.

Yuki Tsunoda feels whoever is fastest at Scuderia AlphaTauri during the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship will become the de facto team leader of the Faenza-based outfit.

Ahead of his third season of his Formula 1 career, twenty-two-year-old Tsunoda will have a brand-new team-mate at AlphaTauri, with Pierre Gasly being replaced by Dutchman Nyck de Vries. 

Gasly was the effective team leader and had been a multiple podium finisher as well as a race winner, but his departure to the BWT Alpine F1 Team means Tsunoda will be the most experienced driver at AlphaTauri.

De Vries may be a former champion in both FIA Formula 2 and the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship, but he only has one start to his name in Formula 1, which came in the 2022 Italian Grand Prix when he was a last-minute replacement for an unwell Alexander Albon at Williams Racing.

Tsunoda knows that the Dutchman is going to be a quick team-mate, and although he is the more experienced of the two, it is going to be whoever is the quicker of the two drivers that ultimately becomes team leader.

Mick Schumacher still believes he has what it takes to become a top driver in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship despite the German losing his seat with the Haas F1 Team at the end of the 2022 season.

The twenty-three-year-old spent two years with Haas but will be replaced by countryman Nico Hülkenberg ahead of the 2023 campaign, with Schumacher also losing his place within the Ferrari Driver Academy.  He scored points on only two occasions during his time with Haas, an eighth-place finish in the British Grand Prix of 2022 and a sixth in the very next race in Austria.

His season, however, was blighted by big crashes in Qualifying for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix that ruled him out for the rest of the weekend, and during the Monaco Grand Prix where he lost control and crashed into the barriers.

However, it is not all bad news for the German, with Schumacher moving to the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team as their reserve driver for 2023.

Despite losing his racing seat, Schumacher has ambitions to return to the cockpit and compete at the very front of the grid, feeling that he can achieve great things should be get another opportunity down the line.

Otmar Szafnauer is excited for the future of the BWT Alpine F1 Team, particularly when they solve the reliability issues that blighted them during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season.

Alpine ended fourth in the 2022 championship despite a number of high-profile retirements related to their power unit and ancillary components, with Fernando Alonso taking the brunt of those problems with retirements in Italy, Singapore, Mexico City and Abu Dhabi all being linked to the engine in some way.

At the end of the year, Alpine ended only fourteen points clear of the McLaren F1 Team in the Constructors’ Championship, and Szafnauer, the Team Principal of the Enstone-based team, says 2023 promises to be much better if they can go into the year with a more reliable car.

“I think fourth is probably where we deserve to be,” Szafnauer is quoted as saying by Racer.com. “We should have had a few more points than we do, we had some reliability issues so not really on performance, and I look forward to fixing those next year because they’re allowed to be fixed from a powertrain perspective. You can make those changes.

“We should have a more reliable powertrain next year even though some of the issues we had weren’t really with the powertrain, they were with the ancillary bits. We have to redesign those and fix them.”

Toto Wolff does not believe the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team would have solved the issues they had with its W13 during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season even if there was not a budget cap in place.

Mercedes had a troubled 2022 season, winning only once across the twenty-two races as they saw their run of eight consecutive Constructors’ Championships come to an end, the team dropping to third behind Oracle Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Ferrari.

Problems began to show themselves up during pre-season testing, with the W13 being affected by ‘porpoising’ throughout the season, with the bouncing it caused down the straights making it a difficult car to drive for both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell.

Mercedes attempted to find solutions throughout the season and were able to lessen the bouncing somewhat, but the problems remained right through to the season-closing Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in November.

And Wolff, the Team Principal of Mercedes, says it would have taken a lot more to get completely on top of the problem and having more of a budget to do so would not have been enough.

Adrian Newey knows Oracle Red Bull Racing risk having a much more difficult 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season on the back of the aerodynamic testing penalties handed to the team following their breach of the cost cap regulations in 2021.

Red Bull will lose ten per cent of its available wind tunnel and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) time in 2023 for exceeding the budget cap in 2021, and with technical regulations surrounding the floor changing ahead of next season, Newey says it could pose more problems to the team that could affect their on-track performances.

Newey, the Chief Technical Officer of the Milton Keynes-based team, says it will not affect them if they are smart and get everything right, but he feels this is not a realistic dream and ultimately some things will not work as planned, which could have a negative effect on the team.

“There’s no testing, so it’s very difficult to put an answer that will cost us so many tenths of a second per lap,” Newey is quoted as saying by Racer.com. “And the reduction of internal testing means we can therefore evaluate less — less different components, less different ideas…

“If we’re really smart and always put the right things on the model, then it doesn’t make much difference. But that’s not how it works; there are always some parts that you hope will work and don’t and vice versa. So, it’s difficult. It’s a restriction for sure that will affect us.

Kevin Magnussen felt he returned to the FIA Formula 1 World Championship in 2022 as a ‘changed person’, with the Dane re-joining the Haas F1 Team as a late replacement for Nikita Mazepin.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian athletes were banned from competing in international event”, and Haas were forced to terminate the contract of Mazepin as well as title sponsors Uralkali just before the 2022 season began.

Magnussen was set to compete in the FIA World Endurance Championship with Peugeot in 2022 prior to a call from Haas Team Principal Guenther Steiner asking him if he would like to make a return to the team that he previously raced for between 2017 and 2020, and the Dane jumped at the opportunity to return to Formula 1.

And having convinced himself that his time in Formula 1 had been over, Magnussen was able to return with a much different mindset, and he was rewarded with a top five finish in the opening race of the season in Bahrain.

“I feel like a changed person coming back, I became a parent and just thought that Formula 1 was over,” Magnussen is quoted as saying by F1i.com.  “So I had quite a different perspective on life after that year, so it was significant for me.

Charles Leclerc felt it was a ‘good season’ for him despite all the mishaps and mistakes made by Scuderia Ferrari, but there was no real satisfaction in splitting the two Oracle Red Bull Racing drivers in the Drivers’ Championship.

The Monegasque driver started the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season with two wins in the opening three races, but he would only taste victory once more throughout the year in Austria as Max Verstappen began to dominate at the front of the field.

Retirements from the lead in Spain, Azerbaijan and France did not help, nor did the strategy errors that Ferrari made in Great Britain and Hungary, but he was able to end the year second in the standings, his best result so far of his career and ahead of the second Red Bull of Sergio Pérez.

Leclerc says the improvements shown by Ferrari in 2022 were promising, particularly on the back of difficult campaigns in 2020 and 2021, and he hopes 2023 will offer another step forward for the Maranello-based outfit.

“Not too much satisfaction, to be honest,” Leclerc is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com when asked about splitting the Red Bulls in 2022.  “Looking back at the season, I think it’s been a good season, especially looking at 2020 and 2021 that have been two very difficult years for the team.

Nicholas Latifi admitted 2022 was the wrong time for him to have his worst season in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship, with the Canadian going on to lose his seat with Williams Racing for 2023.

Latifi endured a tough 2022 season, with just one top ten finish coming in the Japanese Grand Prix, while he was dominated throughout the year by team-mate Alexander Albon, particularly during Qualifying sessions.

Across his three seasons in Formula 1, Latifi scored points in only three races, and although he improved during his sophomore season in 2021, 2022 was a big let-down for the twenty-seven-year-old.

“I think it’s safe to say it’s been a very up-and-down year,” Latifi is quoted as saying by F1i.com.  “My first two years were… I guess what you can expect, as the first two years in Formula 1: a rookie season is a rookie season.

“Second year, I think there was some really big improvements all across, all around, and I guess this year, as a team, collectively we took a step backwards and I just struggled to get on top of the car.

The Hungaroring is set to begin a development drive ahead of the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, with the aim to update the facilities at the Hungarian Grand Prix venue.

The track, which holds a contract to host Formula 1 until at least the 2027 season, has already undergone some changes in recent years, with resurfacing work and grandstand maintenance being on top of this list.

However, they are set to now upgrade the entrance, headquarters and customer area of the track, as well as improving the water and electrical networks that will benefit the already confirmed sell-out crowd in 2023.

“I took over the management of Hungaroring in 2010, and we have been waiting for this moment practically since then,” Zsolt Gyulay, the CEO of Hungaroring Sport Zrt. is quoted as saying by F1i.com. 

“Of course, we did not rest on our laurels in the past period either: our track has undergone a number of renovations, we have worked continuously to meet the new safety requirements.

Extreme E is one of the more revolutionary ideas in racing, setting itself apart from other electric championships with its off-road premise and other off-road series in its unique and distant locations, as well as its Legacy Programmes and climate awareness campaigns. This even extends to emergency transport as rescue workers attend to wrecked cars in a heavily modified military light vehicle.

At the season-ending Energy X Prix in November, the series débuted a pair of rescue vehicles dubbed the MDD-1 and MDD-2. Constructed by XE team Chip Ganassi Racing, both are built on the platform of HDT Global‘s Storm Search and Rescue Tactical Vehicle (SRTV) used by the United States Armed Forces.

“We recognised the remote and extreme locations that would require a purpose-built medical response vehicle that would be able to quickly access a crashed or damaged Extreme E race vehicle in challenging environments,” explained CGR XE manager Dave Berkenfield. “There is nothing more important to Chip Ganassi Racing, Extreme E and all the teams in the paddock than driver safety, especially when you factor in how extreme and remote some of these events are.”

Berkenfield was a United States Navy SEAL for over two decades before joining Ganassi as a mobility specialist and being named their Extreme E director ahead of the inaugural season in 2021. Via his military connections, he procured a pair of unused SRTVs from their creator BC Customs which were then converted into their current state. The process, occurring at CGR’s base in Indianapolis, took over a hundred hours and was a joint project with Whelen Engineering.

The “MDD” designation in the vehicles’ names refers to MDD Europe, who supplies medical goods for the FIA and sanctioned championships including Extreme E.