Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

Scott Dixon made history in IndyCar’s return to Exhibition Place, winning his fourth Honda Indy Toronto and finally getting his first win of the 2022 season.

The No. 9 pit crew got Dixon the lead early, jumping Colton Herta in the pits with the undercut as Herta dealt with traffic on pit exit. From there, Dixon stayed clear of the chaos behind and put on another masterful performance as only the “Iceman” could do. Herta remained composed and held onto second place, while Felix Rosenqvist once again threw his name into the conversation for Arrow McLaren SP‘s 2023 driver lineup with a podium finish in third.

This win also marks a historic milestone for the six-time champion, tying Mario Andretti for second all-time on the IndyCar Series wins list with 52.

“It’s amazing, honestly, to be close with Mario,” Dixon said of the record post-race. “Everytime I’m asked these questions I’m just so thankful that we still have A.J. (Foyt, winningest driver in series history) and him in the pits and we get to see them and to talk to them, it’s just fantastic.”

Herta led the field to green with Dixon alongside him, but before the field could get settled a caution was thrown on lap two for Takuma Sato, who was forced into the outside wall of turn one by Pato O’Ward while running three-wide in the back of the pack. The subsequent debris was the call for caution and ended Sato’s day.

The last time Chevrolet won a NASCAR Xfinity Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the division was called the Busch Series and the #1 song was Rihanna and Jay-Z’s “Umbrella”. Over fifteen years after Kevin Harvick won at Loudon, Justin Allgaier ended the Chevrolet dry spell in convincing fashion as he dominated the final stretch for his third win of the year.

Allgaier did not lead any laps until the last fifty. Up to that point, he maintained solid pace as the Toyotas of Trevor Bayne and Ty Gibbs were the main leaders, though Allgaier was involved in an early incident when lap 90 contact with Xfinity Series newcomer Julia Landauer resulted in her wrecking.

Despite pressure from Landon Cassill and Bayne, Allgaier kept them at bay after clearing the former for the lead with twenty laps to go. The win is Allgaier’s first at Loudon and a rebound after finishing runner-up to JGR’s Christopher Bell in 2021.

“We finished second here last year to [a Toyota] and I told these guys I really wanted to win here,” commented Allgaier. “This place has been so much fun over the years.”

Bayne settled for second for the second straight start, incidentally losing out to Allgaier again after doing so in Nashville in June. While he has been enjoying a solid part-time campaign for JGR with top tens in all but one race (the exception was twenty-eigth at the superspeedway-like Atlanta), he will have to wait until Las Vegas and Homestead in October to get another chance unless more races are added to his schedule.

McLaren Racing have announced the signing of 2021 IndyCar champion Alex Palou, who will make the switch at the end of the current season. Palou will see the year out with Chip Ganassi Racing, before becoming a McLaren IndyCar driver.

Palou became the first-ever Spanish champion of the NTT IndyCar Series, where the twenty-five-year-old won three races and achieved eight podiums on his way to the crown, in just his second season of racing in the championship.

His move to McLaren will also have a massive effect on the McLaren F1 Team, with Palou to join the side’s testing programme once the season is complete. As part of the programme, Palou will test old McLaren F1 cars, for example, the MCL35M that fellow-IndyCar driver Colton Herta tested last week.

Palou is “extremely excited” to be joining McLaren, where he loves the fact he’ll get to drive an F1 car.

“I’m extremely excited to join the driver roster for such an iconic team as McLaren. I’m excited to be able to show what I can do behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car and looking at what doors that may open. I want to thank everyone at Chip Ganassi Racing for everything they have done for me.”

McLaren Racing announced a brand-new partnership last week, with K-Swiss, a Los Angeles-based heritage footwear brand. As part of the new multi-year partnership, K-Swiss will become an official partner of the McLaren F1 Team.

Despite being over sixty-years old, K-Swiss have never entered Formula 1 before as a partner, meaning that McLaren will be helping the brand to break into the pinnacle of motorsport. K-Swiss will be hoping to attract a more global audience, due to the millions who follow the championship around the world.

The partnership will see McLaren and K-Swiss design a new collection of performance-based footwear, which will be worn by the McLaren team around the world. As well as designing footwear for the team to wear, a footwear-line for consumers will also be available. The pair will work closely together at certain Grand Prix’s, especially at key races for the company based on their current market.

Lindsey Eckhouse, Director of Licensing, ecommerce & esports, McLaren Racing, is excited to get working with K-Swiss and can’t wait for their footwear collection to be released.

“It is a pleasure to welcome K-Swiss to the McLaren Racing family and Formula 1. We are excited to work with a brand which has such a strong heritage and can provide our team with footwear that is reliable with a focus on performance while looking fantastic. I can’t wait for the release of the collection.”

Following the exciting closure of round 8 of the 2022 FIA Formula 2 championship in Spielberg last weekend, we are now just past the half-way point of the season meaning that a summary of how the latest rookie class have got on in their first eight races is fairly due.

Just like last season which saw Oscar Piastri triumph in his first season in F2, the rookies have been well within the fight and account for six of the possible sixteen race wins so far.

With Hitech Grand Prix being the exception, every other team has fielded at least one rookie in their 2022 line-up with Logan Sargeant sitting in second place and being the highest placed driver in the standings. He is the first driver we’ll take a look at:

#6 – Logan Sargeant (Carlin)

Current Championship Position: 2nd

The Williams junior is having an extremely solid rookie season and has two Feature Race wins to prove it. He has been one of the most consistent drivers on the grid since the start of the season, only finishing outside of the points three times which includes one DNF.

KAMAZ-master is the master when it comes to truck rally raid programmes, and they continued to flex their muscles at the Silk Way Rally. The team’s quartet dominated the ten-stage event with Dmitry Sotnikov scoring his fourth Silk Way win and second in a row.

Wuth the exception of Tatra in 2011, the team has won the SWR’s T4 (Truck) category every year since the inaugural event in 2009. KAMAZ trucks won every stage in their class: Sotnikov claimed the most with four, Eduard Nikolaev took three, and Andrey Karginov scored the last three. By the end, Sotnikov’s time of 31:33:44 was the best of the race’s forty-three entrants while Nikolaev, whose run was effectively killed when he suffered a major gearbox failure following a ford crossing in Stage #8, was third overall and second in class at 32:43:28. The Belarusian MAZ-Sportauto of Sergey Vyazovich finished third in T4.

Despite Karginov’s stage wins, he was relegated to eighth in class due to a disastrous Stage #4 in which his KAMAZ-43509 lost its right-front wheel and its gearbox, followed by a broken axle and driveshaft. The fourth KAMAZ driver Sergey Kupriyanov, who was in a diesel/gasoline truck, was fourth in class.

The Mini of Denis Krotov finished second overall to win the Cars (T1) class, continuing a strong Silk Way stretch for him after finishing runner-up in 2021. Krotov faced a brief scare during the eighth stage when he drove over dry grass which ignited in his brakes, forcing firefighters to extinguish it with a hose.

Although Krotov was outclassed by Vladimir Vasilyev who won the first six stages, mechanical trouble in Stages #7 and #10 eliminated him from the win and he had to settle for third behind Krotov and Alexander Rusanov. Even Rusanov’s rally was far from clean as Stage #8 began with his GAZelle NEXT getting stuck in the stand.

The LeDucs are a decorated household in the off-road world: Curt LeDuc is a 2015 Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame inductee who has raced in events ranging from the Dakar Rally and SCORE International to short course, his son Kyle LeDuc has over 100 victories in short course racing and won in Extreme E last week, and Kyle’s brother Todd is a Monster Jam star. On Saturday, Kyle’s nine-year-old son Reed joined the family heritage of success as he won the Championship Off-Road Short Course Kart race at ERX Motor Park.

LeDuc, in his second season of short course racing, entered Saturday as the Short Course Karts points leader and riding a four-race streak of runner-up finishes. After starting sixth and quickly clearing Friday winner Carter Zahara, he chased down Race Visser before making his move on the inside with less than six minutes remaining. Visser was eliminated from contention when he hit a berm serving as the median for the lane split, which left LeDuc fending off Zahara and Gavin Plummer.

The top three quickly pulled away from the rest of the field, with fourth-placed Jax Romenesko being over sixteen seconds behind LeDuc. Plummer took second from Zahara on the final lap and caught the leader’s bumper, but could not complete the overtake.

In his podium interview, which is significantly shorter for youth drivers rather than their older counterparts for obvious reasons, LeDuc described the feeling of victory as “really good”, concurred when asked if he felt “today would be the day” he finally won upon taking the lead, and added “the whoop-de-doos” were his favourite section of the track.

“We have won allot of races and I remember my first even, but now I know what my dad felt like back in 2003 when I won my first race,” his father posted on Instagram. “It’s an amazing feeling to know the work he had dedicated and we have all dedicated along with some great sponsors has paid off. Great weekend for the rising star!!”

Andretti Autosport seems to have put the drama from Mid-Ohio behind them as Colton Herta takes the pole for the Honda Indy Toronto, the first repeat polesitter this season.

After starting the day at the top of the second practice session, and topping his group in round one of qualifying, Herta swiped the top spot from Josef Newgarden right at the end of the Fast Six session.

“That was an intense session,” Herta said. “We hadn’t really found that time until right at the end, I was really happy with that lap.”

Alongside him will be three-time winner at Toronto Scott Dixon, who also managed to jump Newgarden at the end of the session but didn’t have enough to surpass Herta. After leading most of the final session, Newgarden’s slide ends in the third position, benefitted by a new engine changed after second practice.

Alexander Rossi will start fourth, showing a lot of pace so far this weekend, while rookie David Malukas dazzled once again in qualifying, with a fifth place start marking his second trip to the Fast Six this year. Rounding out the session was Scott McLaughlin, who will start sixth.

Colton Herta believes he has the pace needed to be successful in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship after enjoying his first test with the McLaren F1 Team earlier this week at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve in Portugal.

Herta, a frontrunner in the NTT IndyCar Series with Andretti Autosport, was signed to a testing programme with McLaren earlier this year and completed one hundred and sixty-two laps of the Portimão track across Monday and Tuesday.

The young American ran in the 2021 McLaren MCL35M in Portugal, but despite Formula 1 having raced at the track last year, Herta says it is impossible to compare lap times to those set by Lando Norris or Daniel Ricciardo.

“This is a track that is so hard to understand that aspect because of the winds and so many different factors,” Herta is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com. “It’s a little bit cooler today than it would have been on the race weekend.

“I was happy with the lap time but we’re on a little bit of a different tyre than we’d have had on a race weekend. And if you look back to the quotes from a lot of guys from a year ago, they would talk about how windy it gets here and how much that can change the car here from corner to corner.

Nick Cassidy took his maiden FIA Formula E World Championship victory in amazing circumstances as a heavy rain shower saw the leading drivers hit the wall.

The Envision Racing driver was leading the race when the rain came, and he, second placed Lucas di Grassi and fourth placed Stoffel Vandoorne all aquaplaned heading into turn six. 

Other drivers also got caught up in the melee including championship leader Edoardo Mortara, Pascal Wehrlein and Sébastien Buemi as conditions became impossible. 

Buemi hit the back of Wehrlein on the run to turn six after being another to aquaplane, with the Tag Heuer Porsche FE Team driver then stopping at the exit of the turn and was hit from behind by Jaguar TCS Racing’s Sam Bird and Avalanche Andretti FE Team’s Jake Dennis.

Cassidy, ROKiT Venturi Racing’s di Grassi and Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team’s Vandoorne all took big hits into the barrier and into each other, although all three were able to get out of their cars under their own power as the red flags flew in New York.

The BWT Alpine F1 Team have revealed they have found the causes of the mechanical issues that affected them during the recent British and Austrian Grand Prix, and fixes have been identified.

Fernando Alonso was unable to start the Sprint race at the Red Bull Ring last Sunday as the car would not fire up, and it was initially thought that a problem with the ECU was the cause.

However, inspections since the race in Austria have pinpointed the problem to be related to getting power into the ECU, so more an Alpine issue rather than a problem with the standardised ECU.

“At that point in time, we thought it was an ECU failure,” Otmar Szafnauer, the Team Principal at Alpine, said to Motorsport.com.  “We took it back to the factory, and we were able to replicate the problem. And it wasn’t the ECU. It’s a box that powers the ECU.

“And so the ECU was fine, but the power box that powers the ECU wasn’t fine. And if you don’t power it, it looks like the ECU is dead. All indications were that the ECU had failed, but we didn’t know then that the power box wasn’t working. And it’s an Alpine part.”

Nick Cassidy took the three points on offer for pole position as he denied Stoffel Vandoorne in the final of the Qualifying duels for race one of the New York City E-Prix on Saturday.

The Envision Racing driver returned to form at the right time to deny Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team’s Vandoorne another FIA Formula E World Championship pole position by just 0.008 seconds, with Cassidy having the edge in the first and third sectors of the lap.

Cassidy had beaten Tag Heuer Porsche FE Team’s Pascal Wehrlein in the semi-finals, while Vandoorne got the better of ROKiT Venturi Racing’s Lucas di Grassi.  However, it will be di Grassi who will line-up third on the grid for the first of the two races this weekend in the United States thanks to having the faster of the two losing times.

The quarter finals had seen Cassidy beat Jaguar TCS Racing’s Sam Bird after the Briton made an early mistake, while Vandoorne got the better of Mahindra Racing’s Alexander Sims despite the latter enjoying the advantage early on.

Di Grassi finished ahead of his long-time rival Sébastien Buemi of Nissan e.dams, while Wehrlein got the better of Envision Racing’s Robin Frijns by eight-tenths of a second.  Buemi will start fifth ahead of Sims, while Frijns and Bird will share row four.

Jody Egginton admitted the Austrian Grand Prix was a difficult race for Scuderia AlphaTauri, with neither Pierre Gasly nor Yuki Tsunoda finding themselves in contention for the top ten.

Gasly collected a penalty for a collision with Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant F1 Team’s Sebastian Vettel, as well as another for exceeding track limits, on his way to fifteenth at the Red Bull Ring, while Tsunoda struggled for pace throughout as he ended sixteenth.

Egginton, the Technical Director at AlphaTauri, says the team were on the back foot throughout the weekend in Austria, and there is a lot of data and information to look over before the French Grand Prix later this month in order to prevent a repeat of their struggles.

“A very difficult race for us today, as we weren’t able to make any progress,” said Egginton.  “Additionally, on Pierre’s side we had a couple of penalties which set us back further.

“It was clear early on that it was going to be a two-stop race, so we brought Pierre in to try and move forward with that, however he hit a bit of traffic, holding him up, and from then on it was tough.

Pierre Gasly says Scuderia AlphaTauri can write off the Austrian Grand Prix weekend after ending the race on Sunday down in fifteenth, and with a penalty for colliding with Sebastian Vettel.

The Frenchman had a disappointing weekend at the Red Bull Ring, colliding with Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team’s Lewis Hamilton at turn one on the opening lap of the Sprint race on Saturday, and it was a similar story on Sunday as he collided with Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant F1 Team’s Vettel at turn four.

Even without the collisions, the pace of the AT03 was not strong enough to compete for points, and Gasly is hoping a planned upgrade to the car will help them regain their position amid the midfield after seemingly falling off the back in recent events.

“I think we can write off this weekend, we just didn’t have the pace,” said Gasly.  “I haven’t seen the footage yet, but I obviously received a penalty in the race, so I guess I’m the one to blame for the incident with Sebastian. I tried to fight as hard as I could, it’s always tricky in that corner and unfortunately he spun.

“We need a big reset, we’ve got a week and a half to try and understand why we were slow and then learn what we can do to improve in the upcoming races.

Mike Krack admitted that the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant F1 Team were hoping to bring home some points from the Austrian Grand Prix on Sunday, but it was not to be as Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel missed out on finishing inside the top ten.

Stroll ran as high as fifth early on as he managed his opening set of tyres but opting on a different strategy to many of his rivals meant he was vulnerable to attack late on, and he ultimately fell to thirteenth by the chequered flag.

Vettel was climbing through the field and was homing in on the top ten, only for the German to be spun into the gravel trap after contact with Scuderia AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly.  Gasly earned a five-second time penalty for the contact, but Vettel’s race was heavily compromised, and he finished the day seventeenth and last after also taking a five-second penalty for excessive track limit violations.

Krack, the Team Principal at Aston Martin, says the team were lacking some performance at the Red Bull Ring on Sunday, but he hopes they can return to the points in the next couple of races, starting with the French Grand Prix at the Circuit Paul Ricard later this month.

“With Lance starting twelfth, we felt there was a reasonable chance to score points this afternoon,” said Krack.  “He drove well today, despite our car struggling a little for performance.