Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

The mystery surrounding the final seat in the CUPRA Leon has been solved with Will Powell set for his BTCC debut with Team HARD. Racing from Brands Hatch onwards (14-15 May).

Taking the seat previously vacated by Jack Goff, Powell is the reigning British Endurance champion and has experience in GT3, GT4, Touring Car and TCR prior to making his BTCC debut. He has also priorly tested in the CUPRA at Snetterton last July and will now make his debut.

He runs alongside Bobby Thompson in the Autobrite Direct with JourneyHero banner in a team also featuring Nicolas Hamilton and Aron Taylor-Smith under a different banner. The 37-year-old is also well known for running Motus One, who act as a motorsport marketing company.

“This is the realisation of a boyhood dream, going back to when we would skip school to camp out at Brands Hatch and watch the BTCC,” said Powell. “I’d like to thank Tony Gilham and his family for the opportunity to make the dream a reality, along with our friends at Autobrite Direct, JourneyHero and all my partners at Motus One.

“I think the series is the pinnacle of British motorsport and – despite unusual circumstances – I’m over the moon to join the grid at Brands Hatch. I don’t underestimate the scale of the challenge, but I’m looking forward to racing with the best.”

It was a frustrating day in Monte-Carlo for the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team, after showing early pace in the day, both Porsche 99X Electric cars failed to finish the FIA Formula E Monaco e-Prix.

Both André Lotterer and Pascal Wehrlein showed fantastic pace in qualifying, making it through to the head-to-head stages, with both Porsche drivers pitted against each other around the narrow streets of Monaco. Wehrlein managed to set a faster time that his teammate, despite making contact with a barrier on his lap, moving on through to the next stage.

Wehrlein would face Jaguar TCS Racing‘s Mitch Evans in the battle for pole position, unfortunately for the German driver it would be the Kiwi that would edge ahead with an impressive lap to start from pole position.

Starting from the front row of the grid, Wehrlein showed promising pace, which included a pass after the tunnel exit before the harbour chicane which would see him take the lead of the race. As he pushed on to move away from the chasing field the Porsche 99X Electric suddenly lost pace, forcing him out of the race.

“What a disappointing weekend. On the positive side, the qualifying went well and we were fast in the race. We don’t yet know why the car suddenly stopped while I was in the lead.”  said Wehrlein following the race.

The duo of Lucas Auer and Luca Stolz snatched first and second place for Mercedes-AMG Team WINWARD and Mercedes-AMG Team HRT.

Auer and Stolz capitalised from the safety car restart, which saw the leader and pole-sitter Mirko Bortolotti become swallowed by the main group. Before fighting his way back to third at the flag.

A daring move by Auer during the opening laps, going past Mikaël Grenier on the inside of turn 5, set the tone for his win.

 “On Saturday, it went really well. The first race of the new season and the first win straight away,” said the Austrian post-race.

Thomas Jäger, Sporting Director DTM said: “For Mercedes-AMG Customer Racing, Saturday was a perfect start of the season! We hadn’t expected to be able to start the season with a 1-2 straight away”.

BWT Lechner Racing driver Dylan Pereira got his 2022 Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup campaign off to the perfect start in a rain-drenched opening race of the season at Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari in Imola.

Five minutes before the start of the race the heavens opened, soaking the circuit and delaying the formation lap as the teams scrambled to swap tyres to the full wet compound.

With the rain still falling and no more time to delay the race, the field pulled away from the grid behind the safety car, with former Supercup race winner Bernd Mayländer leading the field in the Aston Martin Vantage, completing three laps of the race behind it before the conditions allowed for the field of 33 cars to get racing underway on lap 4.

As the field prepared to get the race underway, Pereira controlled the grid, bunching the competitors up before unleashing the power of the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car and leading into the first corner.

Reigning champion Larry ten Voorde held on in second place as he come under pressure from the second BWT Lechner Racing car of Bastian Buus. Behind the leading trio Porsche Junior Laurin Heinrich was settling in to fourth place while the battle for fifth raged on behind him. Marvin Klein lost out as he run wide, letting Dorian Boccolacci, Harry King, and Rudy van Buren through.

Chase Elliott is regarded as one of the top road course racers in the NASCAR Cup Series, but also has a pretty solid oval résumé with six wins on such tracks entering the DuraMAX Drydene 400 at Dover Motor Speedway, the site of his maiden oval triumph in 2018. However, he had not won on an oval since the final race of the 2020 season at Phoenix to claim the chanpionship. Over a year and thirty-nine oval starts later, he returned to Dover and finally snapped that drought as he led the final fifty-three laps of a rain-delayed event to win for the first time in 2022.

Stages #1 and 2

Kyle Larson inherited the top spot from a pitting Denny Hamlin shortly before the race was red flagged on Sunday and pushed to Monday following seventy-eight laps for rain. He continued to lead when it resumed twenty hours later on lap 84, only for another pause four circuits later when Austin Cindric and Todd Gilliland spun. A good restart by Elliott propelled him past his Hendrick Motorsports team-mate Larson.

Hamlin reclaimed the lead on lap 113 and eventually the stage win ahead of Elliott, Christopher Bell, Ross Chastain, Martin Truex Jr., Larson, William Byron, pole winner Chris Buescher, Kyle Busch, and Brad Keselowski. However, the leader’s race collapsed between segments when his left-front tyre came off as he was exiting pit road, which will result in a four-race suspension for crew chief Chris Gabehart and the crewmen who failed to tighten its lug nut.

With Hamlin penalised, Chastain assumed the lead alongside Bell, only for the latter to suffer the same fate as his Joe Gibbs Racing ally Hamlin as he pitted for a loose wheel. Larson crashed on lap 156 for the first caution of Stage #2, followed by Kurt Busch hitting the wall thirty laps later and Joey Logano on the ensuing restart.

Brief periods of Justin Haley and Bowman leading ended upon Kyle Busch, who was celebrating his thirty-seventh birthday, taking the spot on lap 212. As the end of the stage approached, Tyler Reddick and Ty Dillon suffered downed tyres that forced them to pit. With nine laps remaining, Cody Ware spun off turn four and Hamlin attempted to avoid him by ducking to the apron, but Ware’s car slid down the racing surface and contact occurred anyway.

Toyota Gazoo Racing team principal Jari-Matti Latvala has hinted that they could expand the team to a five-car entry for the team in the FIA World Rally Championship but the final decision have to be approved by the Toyota’s management in Japan.

Since the start of the new Rally1 hybrid era in WRC, there have been talks that the teams can expand their entries in rallies by adding more cars to its line-up, one of them that have done so is M-Sport Ford World Rally Team, which will be fielding five Ford Puma Rally1 cars in Portugal later this month.

Speculation about Toyota increased during Rally Croatia when the team arrived with the new portable service park structure which includes a larger building of five bays for the Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 cars.

Previously the team have used a smaller temporary structure which could fit three out of the four cars used for the rallies, with Takamoto Katsuta’s car being operated in a tent.

In an interview with Motorsport.com, they asked Latvala about the potential five car entry in the future; “We have that possibility basically in the second half of the season but it is depending a lot on what Toyota wants to do, we don’t know at this point if we are going to have it [a fifth car] or not so they [Toyota] will decide.”

This year marks the 55th anniversary for the wildest mix surface motorsport on the planet, named rallycross, a sport that was created by Robert Reed to be broadcasted on Saturday afternoons TV, and where Vic Elford won the first-ever rallycross event in Lydden Hill in 1967, with a red Porsche 911, a car that have become iconic in the sport and ever since then the Porsche machinery has been powering around the rallycross circuits of Europe.

This year also marks the 10th season of the Motorsport UK British Rallycross Championship 5 Nations Trophy’s Retro Rallycross class which is features an iconic Porsche 911, piloted by the reigning Retro Rallycross champion Barry Stewart.

The car is one of the oldest surviving rallycross Porsches out there, the car was originally driven by the European rallycross star Rolf Nielson from Sweden, he brought the Porsche 911 over to Great Britain for the first rallycross round to be held at the legendary Brands Hatch in 1982 – an event which he won.

After being used by Nielson for several seasons after the first win in UK, Stewart bought the 911 in 1989 to be used in British rallycross and later in 1998 he handed it over to the British female driver Sue Jeffrey.

After one year learning to obtain the flame-spitting machine, Jeffrey decided to enter the top tier class of Supercar, where she become the first female to do so and finished her first season in impressive fourth place.

Hyundai Motorsport is currently working hard to adjust and find the right setup for the Hyundai i20 N Rally1 cars for the upcoming gravel rally in Rally de Portugal this month, which will be the first proper gravel rally for the new hybrid Rally1 cars.

Hyundai is behind in the development of the new 2022 regulations compared to the rival teams of M-Sport Ford World Rally Team and Toyota Gazoo Racing, and the testing between Croatia and Portugal will be very crucial for the Korean manufacturer to find the right things to change and improve the cars’ reliability for the upcoming gravel rallies over the summer.

The drivers in the team have admitted the team is still missing important data for the car on gravel as most of the focus have been on developing the car for asphalt rallies with the season-opener in Monte-Carlo as being the main priority and therefore they are behind the other teams.

The team is currently talking part in pre-event testings in Portugal for the upcoming rally and they have also carried out some tests in between Sweden and Croatia that took place in Southern France. With the next five rounds on the calendar being all gravel rallies with two of them being a hard challenge to conquer, the Safari Rally Kenya and Rally Finland, the team have a lot of work ahead.

Thierry Neuville was the first driver to do the first gravel tests in Portugal on Wednesday in damp conditions before the returning Spaniard Dani Sordo took over the wheel on Friday in drier conditions, it is not yet known what day Ott Tänak will be doing his tests.

Hyundai Motorsport announced last week a fairly anticipated line-up for the fifth round of the 2022 FIA World Rally Championship that takes place in Sardinia with Rally Italia Sardegna in early June.

The Korean manufacturer will field three Hyundai i20 N Rally1 cars driven by the two full-time drivers of Ott Tänak and Thierry Neuville, meanwhile the Spanish hero Dani Sordo is lining-up in the third car in the rally which takes place on the Mediterranean island.

Sordo was expected to be the presumed choice from Hyundai for both Rally de Portugal, where he makes his Rally1 debut and Rally Italia Sardegna. In previous seasons, the Spaniard has celebrated victory in Sardinia twice in a row in 2019 and 2020.

Hyundai’s third factory car will be shared this season by Sordo and Oliver Solberg, Solberg who hasn’t had the best start of his first season for the factory team had to retire from the season-opener at Rallye Monte-Carlo where he was stuck in a ditch and was also exposed to leaking exhaust in the cockpit throughout the rally and last time out in Croatia Rally, he went off the road and the car caught fire. On his home rally in Rally Sweden, he finished in sixth place.

Solberg will be driving for the team still in Portugal at the season start of Hyundai’s WRC2 team bid, where he will be entered in a third Hyundai i20 N Rally2 car. It is also rumored that he will be starting for the WRC2 team in Sardinia.

Adrien Fourmaux‘s future at the M-Sport Ford World Rally Team was not looking promising after the three-first rallies of the season,and the young Frenchman was facing the prospect of demotion for Portugal.

Now with the entry list for Rally de Portugal published, it shows that the French driver will still be able to drive a Ford Puma Rally1 car. Fourmaux’s early season has not gone well, with many interruptions in the three previous rounds.

Last time out in Croatia, he went off the road into a garden as he lost the control of the car on wet tarmac and was unable to continue the rally, and earlier in January in Monte-Carlo, he rolled over a guardrail with the chassis being written off.

M-Sport’s management weighed in after the Croatian asphalt rally to see if Fourmaux should be sidelined from the Portuguese round but now he has been given a new opportunity to improve as reported by DirtFish.com.

In an interview with the American publication DirtFish, the team principal Richard Millner said; “We believe it would be detrimental to Adrien’s development as a driver if we were to take him out of the car and put him in another category in Portugal. He’ll be at the event in a Puma.”

VW chief executive Herbert Diess has revealed that the company will be entering both Audi and Porsche in to Formula 1, in a move that is hoping to bring the company a better return on investment than it will cost.

There have been rumours for years that the brands were considering entries to the FIA Formula 1 World Championship, but this is the first official word that confirms the plans.

Speaking at an event at the Wolfsburg, Diess said that there is a strong case for the brands to be involved in the sport rather than not being involved, “You just run out of arguments,” he said.

Diess said that Porsche’s preparations for entering Formula 1 were a little more concrete than Audi’s, with Porsche entering into a long-term partnership with Red Bull Racing “in several years’ time.”

For Audi there has been speculation that they were ready to offer around €500 million ($556.3m) for McLaren, taking control of not only their sports car brand, but also their Formula 1 team.

With just two weeks left until the start of the first gravel rally of the 2022 FIA World Rally Championship calendar at Rally de Portugal on 19-22 May, the teams have started to carry out their pre-event testing to prepare the all-new Rally1 hybrid machinery for the upcoming challenge.

The two teams of Hyundai Motorsport and M-Sport Ford World Rally Team started their first tests last week with most of them being carried out over the weekend. The teams are keen to find new adjustments to be able to beat the dominating Toyota Gazoo Racing outfit, which has won two rallies already with the championship leader Kalle Rovanperä. For Toyota’s part it’s not yet known when and where they are doing their pre-event tests.

On YouTube some local videographers have captured the tests carried out by M-Sport over the weekend, the team have used the legendary Fafe special stage for their tests with the Ford Puma Rally1 where the Irishman Craig Breen and Frenchman Adrien Fourmaux have been behind the wheel.

Breen is the highest placed Ford driver currently in the standings, which is expected from the team’s number one driver. The Irishman has one podium finish this season and two-four place finishes, Breen drove the rally last time in 2018 where he ended up in seventh for Citroën. The rally will be a new challenge for Fourmaux who hasn’t competed there before and he hopes to get his bad season turned around after two retirements in three rounds.

Rally de Portugal organiser Automóvel Club de Portugal has published the entry list which sees a bumper entry of 100 crews for the first gravel round of the 2022 FIA World Rally Championship, which contains 12 cars in the Rally1 and a massive field of 41 cars in WRC2.

Championship leader Kalle Rovanperä, has won in Rally Sweden and last out in Croatia Rally, he headlines the three-car entry from Toyota Gazoo Racing and will be joined by the teammates Elfyn Evans and the reigning champion Sébastien Ogier who replaces Esapekka Lappi in third car for this round.

Toyota’s development driver Takamoto Katsuta will be piloting the fourth Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 in the team’s second string outfit.

Hyundai Motorsport will also have a line-up change for first time this season as Dani Sordo replaces Oliver Solberg in the third Hyundai i20 N Rally1 machine and will join Ott Tänak and Thierry Neuville.

M-Sport Ford World Rally Team is the first team to be fielding five Ford Puma Rally1 cars this season with the nine-time champion Sébastien Loeb, Craig Breen and Adrien Fourmaux in the point scoring squad meanwhile Gus Greensmith and Pierre-Louis Loubet are listed as additional cars.

Reigning FIA World Rally Champion Sébastien Ogier will be coming back in the Toyota Gazoo Racing line-up for Rally de Portugal on 19-22 May and will face his fellow countryman Sébastien Loeb again, as he did in Rallye Monte-Carlo earlier this season.

The Frenchman is sharing the third Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 car with Esapekka Lappi as he decided to take a step back from a full programme this year. The eight-time champion will be making his second start of the season as Lappi competed in Rally Sweden and the Croatia Rally.

Ogier drove in the season-opener at Monte-Carlo where he finished second to Loeb, who claimed the first win for the all-new Rally1 hybrid machines and became the oldest driver in the history to do so at the age of 47. Ogier led the rally with around half a minute until the penultimate stage where he caught a puncture and that promoted Loeb to take the crown.

The Rally de Portugal entry list can be found here.

From 26-28 August, The Classic is set to display its largest ever array of FIA Formula 1 World Championship cars ranging from the latest generation to icons of the past. The festival, to be held at Silverstone Circuit, will feature all seven of Lewis Hamilton’s title-winning cars as well as contenders from BWT Alpine F1 Team, Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant F1 Team, McLaren F1 Team, Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team, Red Bull Racing and Williams Racing. 

Festival-goers will be able to explore the F1 showcases as well as the Silverstone grandstand and paddocks. Along with plenty of racing action, the track will host the sights and sounds of iconic F1 cars from the ‘90s– set to be revved up for the special event. 

Aside from the rare exhibition of cars, several motorsport-related activities and attractions will also be available, including a pit stop challenge, racing simulator and reaction test. Live music will be featured nightly, with performances from Sister Sledge, Gabrielle and Rick Astley. Tickets will also include access to the Foodie Fest, which will host a Pop-up from Diddly Squat Farm of the Amazon Prime show, Clarkson’s Farm. 

“I can’t think of anywhere better to honour Formula 1’s incredible living history than at The Classic at Silverstone,” Nick Wigley, CEO of The Classic promoter Goose Live Events, said.

“The Classic is the biggest retro racing festival on Earth and Silverstone is not only the home of the British Grand Prix but also the birthplace of the modern Formula 1 World Championship.”