Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

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.

Carlos Sainz Jr. says Scuderia Ferrari were out-developed by both Oracle Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, which meant they ended the year without a race win in the final eleven races.

Ferrari started the year well with Charles Leclerc winning two of the opening three races in Bahrain and Australia, but they would only taste victory twice more during the season, although one of those was Sainz’s maiden win in the British Grand Prix.

Sainz believes their rivals got the upper hand in the second half of the campaign, with Red Bull running away with the Constructors’ Championship and Mercedes coming close to overhauling Ferrari in the closing races, which included their one and only victory of the year in Brazil.

Red Bull scored more than two hundred points more than Ferrari in 2022, while Mercedes ended thirty-nine points behind them in third, with Sainz hoping 2023 will see a much better campaign, not just for the team but also for himself.

“We didn’t get a win [in the last few races] that was the target but I think, very simply, we got out-developed by Red Bull and Mercedes in the second half which made our second half of the season relatively weaker than the first half,” Sainz is quoted as saying by PlanetF1.com.

How much Yuki Tsunoda can improve ahead of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship season depends on him, according to Scuderia AlphaTauri Team Principal Franz Tost.

Tsunoda will remain with AlphaTauri for a third consecutive season in 2023 and will inherit the role of team leader now that Pierre Gasly has left the team to race for the BWT Alpine F1 Team, although he will be hoping for a much better campaign next year compared to 2022, where he scored only twelve points in an under-performing AT03.

This compared to thirty-two points in his rookie season, but Tsunoda showed more consistency throughout his sophomore season, making less mistakes than in 2021 and bringing himself closer to the kind of pace Gasly was showing in the other car.

Tost says he is expecting a strong 2023 campaign for the Japanese racer, who will have a new team-mate in Dutchman Nyck de Vries next season, but it will be up to him to see how much he can improve himself.

“Yuki Tsunoda has developed reasonably well, was able to improve and was faster than Pierre Gasly in the last qualifying sessions,” said Tost to Speedweek.

Nico Hülkenberg’s performances during his stand-in drives across the past few seasons prove that the German will be on it from the start of the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, according to his new Team Principal Guenther Steiner.

Hülkenberg lost his full-time role in Formula 1 at the end of the 2019 season when he was dropped by the Renault F1 Team, but since then, he has competed in five Grand Prix in place of COVID-19 hit drivers, three for the BWT Racing Point Formula 1 Team in 2020 and twice more for the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula 1 Team in 2022.

The German will now return to the grid on a full-time basis in 2023 with the Haas F1 Team alongside Kevin Magnussen after being chosen to replace Mick Schumacher, who loses his seat after two years with the team.

And Steiner believes that the thirty-five-year-old will be straight on it when the season gets underway in Bahrain next March, and he was happy to see the German look strong after completing a good number of laps in the post-season test in Abu Dhabi last month.

“We looked at that one as well, but when he came in, when he replaced drivers in the last years, he was pretty on the ball straight away,” said Steiner to Motorsport.com.

On 14 December, seventeen days before the 2023 Dakar Rally begins, The Checkered Flag spoke with T3 racer Aliyyah Koloc ahead of her début in the race.

This interview was conducted prior to recent developments such as Koloc racing T1 in the 2023 South African Rally-Raid Championship and sister Yasmeen withdrawing from Dakar.

Below is the full transcript of the interview. Some text has been altered from the actual dialogue to improve readability and remove verbal pauses.

An article summarising the interview can be read here.

Transcript

TCF: It’s been a few weeks since you won the Cross-Country Bajas Middle East Cup. Has it fully sunk in yet that you’re already an FIA champion this early into your career?

Zak Brown is unconcerned that the McLaren F1 Team could end up losing Lando Norris to a rival outfit if they do not provide the British racer with a race winning car.

Andreas Seidl’s departure as Team Principal at McLaren at the end of the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship to join the Sauber F1 Team (currently Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN) as their new Chief Executive Officer next year has begun rumours about Norris potentially joining the Hinwil-based team when they become the works Audi Sport team in 2026.

Norris’ current contract currently runs until the end of the 2025 season, but Brown says he is confident McLaren can provide him with the car needed to become a race winner and potentially a challenge for the World Championship in the next couple of seasons.

“No, because I’m convinced we’re going to give him a winning car,” Brown is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com when asked if he was worried he could lose Norris to a rival team.  “We have a long-term contract with him. I think he feels very comfortable within the team.

“Other than obviously the pressure we put on ourselves, because we don’t want to just give him a winning car, we want to give us a winning car. So, I think we’ve got a runway to get there.

Pierre Gasly continues to call upon the FIA to change the penalty points system in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship, with the Frenchman insisting he is not a dangerous driver and should not be anywhere near a race ban.

Gasly, who will switch from Scuderia AlphaTauri to the BWT Alpine F1 Team for the 2023 season, currently has ten penalty points on his Superlicence, meaning he is only two away from becoming the first driver since the points system was put in place to earn a race ban.

Only half of those points were for on-track clashes, with three points earned for two incidents with Lance Stroll, and the other two for another clash with Sebastian Vettel.  Penalty points were also awarded for driving too fast under red flag conditions in Japan, failing to stay within ten car lengths of the car in front behind the safety car in the United States, and for track limit offences in Austria.

He is not the only driver to be accumulating points, with Stroll on eight, Alexander Albon on seven and Fernando Alonso on six, but unlike Gasly, those three drivers will lose points early on in 2023.  Gasly will need to get through at least the first six races to see any of his penalty points disappear.

“I try not to think because I see myself as not as a silly driver or dangerous driver,” Gasly is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com. “I try to be careful with all the, let’s say, silly penalty points you could lose with procedures and stuff like that.

Adrian Newey feels Oracle Red Bull Racing in hindsight may have put too much time in developing their 2021 car that took Max Verstappen to his maiden Drivers’ Championship, which ultimately limited the development time of the 2022 RB18.

Whereas some teams stopped development of their 2021 machines early to allow full concentration on the new aerodynamic regulations coming in for the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, Red Bull continued to develop the RB16B to give Verstappen the best opportunity to claim the Drivers’ title ahead of Lewis Hamilton.

Despite the RB18 becoming the most successful car of Newey’s career – it took victory in seventeen of the twenty-two races during the 2022 season – the Chief Technical Officer at the Milton Keynes-based squad admitted the time focused on the RB16B compromised them and meant a lot of work needed to be done in a short amount of time ahead of the new season.

“We had quite a short development period, particularly because we kept developing last year’s car in the battle for the championship, arguably longer than we should have done,” said Newey to Motorsport.com.

“That gave us a lot to do over the winter. What we tried to focus on was getting the fundamentals of the car right as this year’s car, and then hoping that would give us the development potential to kind of refine it.

James Vowles, the Head of Strategy at the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, insists George Russell’s first season with the team was a successful one and the British racer did a ‘very good job’ after coming in to replace Valtteri Bottas alongside Lewis Hamilton.

Russell took his maiden victory in the São Paulo Grand Prix in November having already achieved his maiden pole position in Hungary, and he ended up fourth in the Drivers’ Championship, thirty-five points clear of his seven-time World Championship winning team-mate.

Vowles admitted to being impressed by Russell’s performances throughout the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, with the former Williams Racing driver showing speed alongside consistency all year long despite being in a new team and with a difficult car.

“I think, on the whole, it doesn’t really take us to tell you this, but George did a very good job this year,” Vowles is quoted as saying during a Mercedes-Benz debrief by PlanetF1.com.

“He is against the best in the world and that’s your reference. What is very clear is that, at the beginning of the year when we had a car that was difficult, Lewis was using his wealth of experience to help us in order to improve the car, and to really move us forward as part of the team.

Stefan Parsons will race with Alpha Prime Racing in the NASCAR Xfinity Series for the second straight year, the team announced Friday. Like in 2022, he will make “select starts”.

Parsons began 2022 with plans of running the full slate for B.J. McLeod Motorsports. However, this was dropped after eight rounds and he reverted to a part-time slate like he had been contesting for the past three years. He bounced between BJMM and APR for the rest of the season, making twelve starts with the latter including four of the final five rounds. He scored his first career top ten at Bristol by placing eighth in APR’s #45; it was one of two top tens for APR in 2022 alongside Kaz Grala‘s fifth at Daytona in the #44.

“It’s a huge boost to our program to keep a driver like Stefan in the building,” said APR Vice President David Schildhouse. “His talent brought some incredible results to our team in 2022 and he believes in what we are building here at APR. We look at Stefan as a core piece of our upwards growth trajectory and bringing him back to our roster was a top priority this offseason.”

He made his Xfinity début in 2019 with BJMM, a year after first appearing at the national level in the Truck Series. He is the son of former driver and commentator Phil Parsons, nephew of 2017 NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee Benny Parsons, and brother-in-law of fellow Xfinity driver Sheldon Creed.

“I’m super excited to be able to call Alpha Prime home again in 2023,” Parsons stated. “I can’t wait to build on the momentum we gained in the last half of 2022.”

Joe Graf Jr. will not return to SS-Green Light Racing after three seasons in the NASCAR Xfinity Series. Team owner Bobby Dotter announced the news in a Christmas greeting video posted Friday, though they had agreed to part ways in advance.

“As we close out another season, it’s a time for change here,” began Dotter. “We’ve had three great years with Joe Graf Jr. and his family. Can’t say enough for him and happy I was to work with him and how grateful I am for everything they’ve done for us. But it’s time for some new change. We’ll be looking at some different drivers next year.

“We had an excellent year last year getting our first team win. Joe showed a lot of signs of speed, and I think we’ve got what it takes to move this team up the ladder and hopefully this year proves we can do it.”

Graf joined SSGLR in 2020 after spending the last year years in the ARCA Menards Series and making select Xfinity starts. He finished twenty-second in points as a rookie before running all but certain road courses in 2021, and scored his maiden top ten at Talladega.

He notched a career-best finish of eighth in the 2022 Ag-Pro 300 at Talladega. However, it was a difficult year for Graf that included failing to qualify at Fontana, where team-mate Cole Custer recorded SSGLR’s first win, getting disqualified the following week at Las Vegas, and missing races in the summer for a family matter. Graf finished 2022 twenty-seventh in points and also raced for RSS Racing at Fontana (making a driver switch after his DNQ) and B.J. McLeod Motorsports at Road America.

While NASCAR is mainly in the United States, its global footprint has grown in recent times including South America, where the sanctioning body now oversees the NASCAR Brasil GT Sprint Race. In neighbouring Argentina, Baltazar Leguizamón seeks to become the first of his countrymen to compete in a NASCAR national division as he joins MBM Motorsports to run the Xfinity Series road courses.

“I am really proud to be the first Argentinean with a NASCAR national series license. It’s been a long way on my career living my dream in international motorsports. All the hard work is paying off right now,” Leguizamón stated.

“I am very thankful to everyone involved with this project: the NASCAR administration; my manager and agent of eight years, Bruce Bohlander; and Carl Long of MBM Motorsports, who opened this door for me and is helping me to reach this level. We’ve won in seven different series, and we want to keep going at this very seriously. Still, we need to find sponsors.

“This is huge for us, for my country, and for South America. It’s my childhood dream beginning to come true.”

Leguizamón made his name in open-wheel racing, finishing runner-up in the 2017 F3 Americas Championship and winning the following year’s Atlantic Championship; he also won in the Formula 4 United States Championship. He returned to Argentina in 2019 to compete in touring cars like the Top Race Series, and he finished eighteenth in the 2022 standings with a podium in the season opener.

Zak Brown has heaped praise on Lando Norris, feeling the McLaren F1 Team driver continues to deliver performances even when the team are not expecting them to happen.

Norris ended seventh in the Drivers’ Championship at the end of the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, and he was the only driver outside of the top three teams to secure a top three finish, the Briton securing third place in the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.

He completely dominated the inter-team battle with Daniel Ricciardo, with the Australian scoring only thirty-seven points compared to Norris’ one hundred and twenty-two, and perhaps contributed to McLaren’s decision to bring in Oscar Piastri as his team-mate for 2023.

Brown, the CEO at McLaren, spoke about the way Norris continues to improve as a Formula 1 driver ahead of his fifth season in the sport, with the twenty-three-year-old putting in Qualifying laps that seem to come out of nowhere.

“He’s just getting better and better,” Brown said on McLaren’s social media channels.  “He puts together some amazing qualifying laps, I don’t think he probably gets enough credit for how awesome he can be when it’s time to set a lap.

Charles Leclerc is expecting a resurgence from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team during the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season after the most dominant team from the hybrid era finished only third in the Constructors’ Championship in 2022.

Mercedes won each of the first seven Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships between 2014 and 2020, and although Max Verstappen won the Drivers’ title in 2021, Mercedes still won the Constructors’ Championship that season.

But 2022 was different, with Mercedes struggling to adapt to the new aerodynamic regulations, which meant they could only take one victory across the twenty-two races thanks to George Russell’s win in the São Paulo Grand Prix, and one pole position for the same driver in Hungary.

Lewis Hamilton saw his record of winning a race in every season of his Formula 1 career end in 2022, with the Briton also failing to earn a pole position as he finished a lowly sixth in the Drivers’ Championship, thirty-five points behind team-mate Russell, who beat Carlos Sainz Jr. to fourth.

Sainz’s Scuderia Ferrari team-mate Leclerc, however, believes Mercedes will come back stronger in 2023 and bring themselves into contention for both championships, and the Monegasque driver reckons it could be a three-way battle at the front involving Mercedes, Ferrari and Oracle Red Bull Racing.