Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

Ever wondered what a Dakar Rally vehicle would look like if it went on a diet?

Audi seemed to bring this pondrance to reality with the unveiling of the Audi RS Q e-tron E2, a thinner and lighter version of the RS Q e-tron that will enter October’s Rallye du Maroc ahead of the 2023 Dakar Rally.

“We have combined all the important lessons in a very short time. The result of our ideas is the E2 evolution,” said Audi Sport Head of Vehicle Operations Uwe Breuling. “Our development team’s determined and cost-efficient work has prepared us perfectly for our second Dakar Rally.”

The E2 is a stark departure from its predecessor, being much lighter to comply with new regulations for the T1U category that mandates a 2,100-kg weight limit; this consequently also lowers the car’s centre of gravity. The lighter weight also comes from using easier-to-remove body parts, which helps crews change tyres.

The cockpit is much wider to accommodate new designs for the roof and both hoods, though drag is still reduced due to the new body. Inside the cockpit, the driver and co-driver’s tools generally remain the same save for certain changes like the introduction of four “system areas” that can be be toggled by either pilot: “Stage” to open functions for racing like a speed limiter, “Road” for turn signals and the rear-view camera, “Error” to diagnose problems with the car, and “Settings” for mechanics.

Jessica Hawkins is not only an Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One Team Driver ambassador, W Series and TCR UK driver, she is also a role model and inspiration to thousands of women around the world. The twenty-seven-year-old hasn’t had life the easy way by far, with the Brit having fought tirelessly for every seat she’s ever had in motorsport.

She’s paving the way for a brighter future for females in racing, with the Brit being a key voice in getting a female driver back into Formula 1. 2022 has been an impressive year for Hawkins on the track, after claiming her first ever W Series podium at the season opening weekend in Miami, where she claimed a brilliant second place. Hawkins even won her first race in the TCR UK championship, by claiming Race Two victory at the season opening weekend at Oulton Park. In doing so she became the first female to win a touring car race in the United Kingdom.

When she’s not driving for Click2Drive Bristol Street Motors in W Series, or for Area Motorsport with FASTR in TCR UK, she’s travelling the world with the Aston Martin F1 Team, proving to women around the globe from all backgrounds that they do have a place in motorsport.

She also finds time to be a stunt driver, having worked on the most recent James Bond film ‘No Time to Die’.

She is back with the team at this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix, where she spoke exclusively to The Checkered Flag. The British side are aiming for their fourth consecutive points finish, after Sebastian Vettel claimed a solid eighth-place finish at last weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix, demonstrating that the team are “making steps in the right direction”. Given how the team were often found towards the back of the grid at the start of the year, it’s been a resounding few months for the team as they’ve made substantial progress into the points places.

With Extreme E‘s Copper X Prix still four weeks away, Tanner Foust will give short course off-road racing another go this weekend as he enters Championship Off-Road‘s Polaris World Championship Off-Road Races at Crandon International Raceway. He will compete in the Pro 2 class once again, driving the #34 truck owned by fellow Yokohama Tire athlete Andrew Carlson.

Although Foust has competed in a variety of racing codes from rallycross to hillclimbing, his short course experience is limited by comparison. He first ran the discipline in 2014, driving a Pro 2 at Lake Elsinore with the now defunct Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series alongside fellow motorsport star Travis Pastrana.

Seven years later, Foust and Pastrana joined forces again as they entered their maiden Crandon World Championship with backing from Yokohama, though Pastrana ran the Pro 4 race while Foust stayed in Pro 2. Foust would finish seventh in the World Championship followed by fifth in the next day’s Red Bull Crandon World Cup.

Being the most prestigious event in short course racing, the World Championship frequently attracts special one-offs like Foust, Pastrana, and Bryce Menzies. However, Menzies has opted not to run the 2022 edition as he wants to spend time with his family following his son’s birth while Pastrana is in St. Petersburg with the American Power Boat Association Offshore National Championship Series.

Foust tested at Crandon in August to prepare for his entry. He was twelfth of sixteen drivers in Thursday’s practice session and qualified in the same position with a lap time of 1:31.134, over four-and-a-half seconds behind pole winner Ryan Beat.

As the Stadium Super Trucks prepare to support YouTube personality Cleetus McFarland‘s Bristol 1000 at Bristol Motor Speedway, joining the grid are a pair of reality TV stars as “Diesel Dave” Kiley and Dave “Heavy D” Sparks, co-hosts of the Discovery Channel reality show Diesel Brothers, make their maiden starts. The duo spent Thursday testing at SST headquarters.

Kiley and Sparks, who are not actually related but close friends, originally began their media breakthrough with websites to sell diesel truck parts before starting a YouTube channel to showcase truck antics. Their popularity grew from their videos, which led to an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno before Discovery picked them up for their own show—continuing the premise of their YouTube videos—in 2016. Diesel Brothers is currently in its seventh season.

While most of their show and Youtube channel’s content focuses on building and driving various heavy vehicles, the duo has also dabbled competitively. In 2017, they ran the Mint 400 in the Trick Truck class, an effort that was featured in Season 3 of Diesel Brothers. They also competed in Monster Jam with the BroDozer and BroCamino monster trucks from 2018 to 2020, and the former participated in the 2019 Monster Jam World Finals with Sparks.

Sparks was initially scheduled to be the only one of the two running the SST weekend before Kiley confirmed his entry. The former’s stadium truck will sport a livery emulating the BroDozer.

“What I love about [SST] is it’s got plenty of power, it’s got plenty of suspension, and you’re not using it all,” said Sparks during testing. “It’s all about what the driver’s doing and I’m shaving little bits off of each lap by making dumb little changes, not big wide open pulls. That’s impressive. That’s definitely going to make not only me but everybody who gets a chance to do this a better driver.

Fernando Alonso has apologised to Lewis Hamilton for his comment made over the radio during the Belgian Grand Prix following their first lap tangle at Les Combes.

The BWT Alpine F1 Team driver was defending from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team racer going down the Kemmel Straight only for the two to make contact at the chicane, with Hamilton being launched into the air as a result.

Hamilton was forced to retire from the race as a result – his first retirement of the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season – while Alonso was able to keep going to take fifth.

In a spur of the moment radio outburst, Alonso was heavily critical of Hamilton, saying that his former team-mate only knows how to drive at the front.

“What an idiot closing the door from the outside,” said Alonso’s radio message.  “I mean, we had a mega start but this guy only knows how to drive and start in first.”

The Stadium Super Trucks‘ maiden trip to Bristol Motor Speedway will be a unique one. Held in conjunction with Cleetus McFarland‘s Bristol 1000, five of the thirteen drivers entered are media personalities like McFarland and have never raced in SST.

Netflix Hyperdrive star Fielding Shredder and DemolitionRanch’s Matt Carriker will respectively drive the #007 and #0.5, and both are the first in SST history to have numbers in which the first digit is a 0. With his decimal point, Carriker also joins a rare group of drivers whose numberplates contain other characters, a company that includes Jeff Hoffman/Travis Milburn’s #50:1 in 2017, Jett Noland’s #66x in 2020, and Stanton Barrett‘s #F26 at Nashville last month. Shredder, who has shifted to running his YouTube channel since his contract with Netflix ended, will be in the Continental Tire truck.

Derek Bieri of Vice Grip Garage will pilot the #52 with sponsorship from PEAK Performance and BlueDEF. The Diesel Brothers, “Diesel Dave” Kiley and Dave “Heavy D” Sparks, run an automotive channel but are perhaps more known for their Discovery Channel television series of the same name.

Carriker’s DemolitionRanch has the most YouTube subscribers of the sextet’s main channels by a wide margin with eleven million, followed by McFarland’s three million. McFarland will hope to turn around his luck after crashing out in both of his SST weekends at Long Beach and Nashville.

The remaining seven drivers are all series regulars led by Robby Gordon, who returns to SST after skipping Mid-Ohio and Nashville due to overseas business obligations with SPEED UTV. He is the only driver in the field to have prior racing experience at Bristol, having competed on the traditional oval layout twice annually from 2000 to 2011 as a full-time NASCAR Cup Series driver with a best finish of twelfth in 2004.

Carlos Sainz Jr. hopes Scuderia Ferrari will be able to get back out on track and compete at the front of the field this weekend at the Circuit Zandvoort, with the Spaniard not anticipating any kind of repeat dominance from Oracle Red Bull Racing at the Dutch track.

Max Verstappen was in dominant form last weekend at Spa-Francorchamps, overcoming a grid penalty for engine component changes to charge from fourteenth on the grid to claim victory by more than twenty seconds, while Sainz was only third behind the second Red Bull of Sergio Pérez.

Sainz does not believe Ferrari will be as far off the pace as they were in Belgium this weekend at Zandvoort, and he believes they should be back in the fight for the win come Sunday afternoon.

“After the race at Spa-Francorchamps it’s great to have the chance to get straight back onto the track here in the Netherlands,” said Sainz. “This is a circuit with totally different characteristics and I expect that we will be back to being much closer to our main rivals from this year.

“We shouldn’t forget that for 13 races out of 14 we have been competitive and I can’t imagine that we will see at Zandvoort a similar performance gap to the one from Belgium.”

Pierre Gasly was pleased to score points in the Belgian Grand Prix last weekend, particularly when a problem just before the start meant he was forced to start from the pit lane.

The Scuderia AlphaTauri driver was starting his one hundredth Grand Prix last Sunday and he was set to start the race from ninth on the grid, but a problem with his AT-03 saw him wheeled to the garage, and the car was restarted just in time for him to compete.

Gasly says scoring points at Spa-Francorchamps was good for the morale of the AlphaTauri team, with top ten finishes hard to come by in a season where they were hoping to progress.

“Scoring points is good for team morale, but I had to work hard for them after a last-minute problem meant I started my 100th Grand Prix from the pitlane, so getting back into the points from there was amazing,” said Gasly.  

Last year saw Gasly enjoy a strong Dutch Grand Prix, starting and finishing inside the top four, and although the cars are very different to how they were twelve months ago, he hopes what AlphaTauri learned in 2021 can help them be competitive again at the Circuit Zandvoort in 2022.

Leading the way for PREMA in the FIA Formula 3 championship is rookie Oliver Bearman. The British driver impressed in Spa-Francorchamps, taking the sprint race win on Saturday and then following it up with a podium finish on Sunday, picking up twenty-five points in the process. This leaves the seventeen-year-old second in the standings, only one point behind fellow rookie Isack Hadjar. Bearman will be hoping to repeat his success from his  F4 days in Zandvoort, and put himself one step closer to lifting the championship trophy.

Another man that will be looking to replicate past glory in Zandvoort, is Bearman’s PREMA teammate Arthur Leclerc. The Monegasque stood on the top step of the podium in Race one at Zandvoort in 2021, and as he currently sits fourth in the championship, five points off top spot, a repeat of that feat could see him climb the standings. 

The final member of the PREMA team is Red Bull junior Jak Crawford. Crawford currently lies sixth in the championship after picking up no points in Spa, due to a mistake in qualifying that saw him start both races, last on the grid. The American has winning potential as he showed in Spielberg, taking the victory in Saturday’s sprint race, however as he currently trails the championship leader by twenty six points, he will have to put in a monumental performance in Zandvoort and the final round in Imola the following weekend.

PREMA currently lead the constructors championship by eighty six points, meaning a large haul of points in Saturday’s sprint race could bag the team an early constructors crown.

Rene Rosin, PREMA Team Principal expressed his delight at the teams results and emphasised the importance of qualifying in Zandvoort, “We are enjoying a positive moment in FIA Formula 3, and Ollie has been particularly impressive with five podiums and a win in the last seven races. 

The Dutch Grand Prix returns this weekend for the second consecutive season on the FIA Formula 1 World Championship calendar. BWT Alpine’s F1 Team’s Fernando Alonso will be looking for another strong points finish to end his Alpine career on a high.

Alonso spoke of his excitement for the incredible Zandvoort atmosphere along with getting back in the car and fighting for points.

“Zandvoort is a fun place to visit. We have only been there once before, but it’s now obviously much bigger thanks in part to the rise of Max [Verstappen]. The whole atmosphere and buzz from the Dutch fans reminds me a little of the early 2000s when the Spanish fans really fell in love with the sport.

“The atmosphere is really great and I’m sure we will experience the same thing again this weekend. It’s a double header but we are excited to get back in the car especially after the team’s performance in Spa also with the fastest pit stop.”

Esteban Ocon – “A huge amount of focus and commitment”

Teammate Esteban Ocon also spoke on his love for atmosphere at Zandvoort and the difficulties of the fast and thrilling circuit.

BWT Alpine team principle Otmar Szafnauer is looking forward to the upcoming Dutch GP and he is hoping that his team can stay consistent and extend their lead in the fight with McLaren F1 Team for the fourth spot in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship.

Szafnauer is relishing the electric atmosphere created by the Dutch fans at Zandvoort.

“Last year, the Dutch Grand Prix was a highlight of the season, as it brought something a little bit different to the calendar. Above all, it’s a great race for the fans, who create a fantastic atmosphere and that only makes racing even more enjoyable.“

Szafnauer also spoke on his expectations and targets for his team this weekend as they look to battle with McLaren for fourth place in the Championship.

“It will be interesting to see how the event has improved since last year. The on-track racing was great last season with overtaking possible around the lap. Our target is to be in the mix for points again and aim to have a similar, if not better, result than we did last weekend in Belgium and extend our lead in fourth place in the Constructors’ Championship. There’s a long way to go in the season but being consistently strong is at the top of our priority list.”

Nephew of seven time Formula 1 champion Michael Schumacher, David Schumacher will return to FIA F3 this weekend, after missing six rounds due to commitments in DTM. 

Schumacher completed one race weekend for Charouz Racing System earlier this year, replacing Ayrton Simmons for round two in Imola. However, due to his commitments to the 2022 Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters with Mercedes-AMG Team Winward, the German was replaced by Lirim Zendali, starting at the Spanish Grand Prix.

The twenty-year-old began his Formula 3 career in 2019, but after failing to finish inside the top ten of the championship standings in his three year stint, Schumacher turned his attention to touring cars for the 2022 season.

However, due to Christian Mansell vacating the third seat at Charouz, Schumacher jumped at the opportunity to get back in an F3 car and he will likely complete the final two rounds of the season at Zandvoort and Monza, with the Czech outfit.

When questioned about how he would approach the weekend, Schumacher responded,“I know the track from last year and that could be a little advantage, also given that the weather situation could be variable and open different scenarios. 

Sebastian Montoya will make his FIA Formula 3 debut this weekend, taking the place of Hunter Yeany, who misses a third race weekend in a row due to a race injury he picked up at the Red Bull Ring in Austria.

Danish driver Oliver Goethe impressed in the Campos Racing car over the course of his two round appearance in Budapest and Spa-Francorchamps. Montoya will be hoping to follow Goethe’s fourth place qualifying and feature race positions, and take home some key points for the Campos team.

Montoya’s primary focus this year has been Formula Regional, finishing seventh overall with two wins in the Asian championship, in a part-time campaign with Mumbai Falcons and currently sitting tenth in the European championship for Prema with three remaining in the season.

Montoya conveyed his feelings towards his first F3 appearance and his approach to the weekend,“I am very pleased to be joining Campos Racing for the FIA F3 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort.

“Despite the fact that it will be my debut and that everything was very last minute, my preparation for the weekend with the team has been excellent. I have to focus on learning as much as possible, but also try my best to be fast.”

The second and third rounds of the FIA World Rallycross Championship will take place this weekend (03/04 September 2022), as Latvia plays host to the first double-header round of the championship at the historic Biķernieki circuit in the country’s capital, Riga. With each day over the weekend containing a full round of the championship, it promises to be a jam-packed weekend of action for both the teams and the fans.

Situated on the outskirts of Riga in the Biķernieki forest, the circuit has been a popular feature on the WorldRX calendar since 2016. With 12 corners and a length coming in at 1.3km, the track is one of the longest on the calendar, and the narrowness of the track, combined with the ever-present danger posed by the immovable barriers, demands total focus from the drivers with little to no margin for error.

One man well versed in faultless driving is championship leader Johan Kristoffersson. Despite a poor start in his semi-final last time out in Hell, he managed to claim his twenty-eighth career WorldRX win and is surely the man to beat this weekend. With 40 points up for grabs this weekend, he has the potential to massively extend his lead.

Kristoffersson’s problem, however, is that he will be facing a growing threat from all quarters, not least from his own team. His Norwegian teammate, Ole Christian Veiby, finished third in the opening round after a seven-year hiatus from the sport. While he may not yet know the track, it surely won’t take him long to find his way back to the top. Niclas Grönholm definitely won’t have that hurdle to overcome. He secured a spectacular first and second in last year’s Latvian double-header, and the Construction Equipment Dealer Team proved their potential in Norway. This pairing of car and driver may prove to be a thorn in Kristoffersson’s side. Grönholm’s teammate, Klara Andersson, garnered a lot of praise for her debut in Hell and has her eyes firmly set on progressing and maybe even taking her first podium.

And of course, Kristoffersson will have to face his biggest rival of them all, compatriot and fellow world champion Timmy Hansen. Hansen finished second and third here last year, and won in his championship-winning season back in 2019, and is feeling confident that he can replicate that success.

The fourth round of the 2022 FIA European Rallycross Championship takes place at the Biķernieki Circuit in Riga, Latvia, this weekend (03/04 September), with the home hero and fan favorite Janis Baumanis in top form. The #YellowSquad driver won at this historic venue last year and will be keen to repeat his success as we head into the second half of the season.

Biķernieki has been a popular feature on the EuroRX calendar since 2016. A popular but challenging circuit for the drivers, the weekend is also typically a big hit with fans, in part due to the events that take place around the main action. This year features a drivers parade in downtown Riga on the evening of Thursday 1 September, where the loudest cheers will surely be reserved for the man who currently lies second in the championship; Janis Baumanis.

Indeed, Baumanis certainly seems to be relishing his homecoming. “This is obviously the most wonderful time of the year for me, with all of the things I am involved with before and after the weekend” he said. “For sure there is more responsibilities for me than any other race, but also more support too.”

This is the perfect time for Baumanis to make full use of his home event if he wants to stand any chance of catching championship leader and double event winner Anton Marklund. The Swedish superstar was unlucky at the last event in Norway, with first corner contact in the final dropping him out of contention for the win. He ended up only losing one point to Baumanis, and his lead currently stands at 17 points. Even if he manages to win the full 20 points available, Baumanis will surely be praying for his rival to have a torrid weekend.

However, there are many other drivers who have the potential to spoil the party for the championship frontrunners. Sondre Evjen came second in a Norwegian 1-2 last time out, showing his own potential as well as demonstrating the power of his JC Raceteknik Audi S1. Also driving an Audi is Belgium’s Enzo Ide. Ide is currently 5th in the championship but has shown incredible pace throughout this season, his efforts spoiled in Norway by an unfortunate puncture in his semi-final.