Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

The first round of the 2022 FIA Formula 3 Championship brought the series to the Middle East, and the Bahrain International Circuit for the first time.

The standings after the weekend reflected many’s pre-season expectations, with highest-placed returning driver Victor Martins winning Sunday’s Feature Race.

Strong Feature Race performances from his ART Grand Prix team-mates Gregoire Saucy and Juan Manuel Correa helped the French outfit to the top of the Teams Championship after the first two races of a scheduled 18-race calendar.

The format has changed again for 2022, with the unpopular three-race setup from 2021 revoked and Qualifying determining the grid for both races. The Sprint Race result therefore no longer influences the grid line-up for Sunday.

Saucy and Martins collided in the Sprint Race, but the pair recovered to take third and first in the Feature Race respectively.

Dave Robson, the Head of Vehicle Performance at Williams Racing, says the team are expecting the unexpected this weekend as Formula 1 races in Saudi Arabia for the second time in four months.

The Jeddah Corniche Circuit hosted the penultimate round of the 2021 season last December but is the venue for round two of the 2022 campaign, and the track is a very different one to the Bahrain International Circuit that hosted the opening race just last weekend.

As a result of this, Robson is expecting some challenges to present themselves to the team that they were not expecting, but he hopes to see a competitive weekend for the FW44 and for his drivers Alexander Albon and Nicholas Latifi.

“The second race of the year is an opportunity to see the 2022 cars at a very different type of track,” said Robson.  “The nature of the corners and the long straights in Jeddah will introduce some new challenges for the FW44 and whilst we have done a lot of preparation, it is likely that we will encounter something unexpected.

“This is simply the nature of taking a whole new car to such diverse tracks early in the season. We are looking forward to the challenge and to seeing how the new generation of cars tackle this high-speed street circuit.”

Last weekend’s season opening Bahrain Grand Prix was one that the Haas F1 Team will not forget for a long-time, after Kevin Magnussen on his return to the sport, scored Haas’ first points since 2020, with a fifth place finish.

It was a day that will live with Haas Team Principal Guenther Steiner for a long-time, after all the difficulties the team went through in 2021. Steiner was impressed with how all the cars on the grid performed last weekend, including his own, although he does believe that Haas’ Mick Schumacher didn’t have the best Grand Prix.

“I think we saw the speed of the cars and they will be similar until the upgrades kick in, but we still have to wait for a few more races, including street circuits, to know where everybody is at – Red Bull didn’t finish the last race but they will in future. Our drivers, from where we came to where we ended up was pretty good.

“Mick struggled a little bit more last weekend – in qualifying with his fastest lap having a little mistake and then in the race he got compromised by Ocon, who ran into the back of him, and he spun. That’s never good because you then have to clean up your tyres again and you just fall back, but he will make this up in the next races.”

Looking ahead to this weekend at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Steiner is excited to be going back to Saudi Arabia after only four months away, even though it was a painful event for the team last season, with both Schumacher and former-driver Nikita Mazepin crashing heavily.

The Haas F1 Team go into the second round of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship this weekend on the back of an incredible fifth place finish for Kevin Magnussen, on his return to the sport.

Last weekend was magical for Magnussen, who probably couldn’t have dreamed of not only finishing in the points but also ending the race in the top five on his first race back in the paddock. The Danish driver is still on a high following his incredible Bahrain Grand Prix.

“It was pretty unbelievable – to be top five was crazy. The car felt very good and we were able to push the entire race. We maybe had more degradation than we expected in the first stint but we made up for that in the second and got back on track. The team has done such an amazing job to get us into this position.”

This weekend’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix represents an enormous challenge for Magnussen, who of course has never raced at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit. The track which is the second longest as well as one of the fastest on the calendar, has Magnussen feeling very excited, after being impressed by the track when watching last year’s race.

“From watching on TV last year, it looked like a pretty spectacular track which is super high-speed considering it’s a street circuit. I’m really looking forward to it, I love street circuits and it looks like a challenging one so let’s see. I don’t know it of course, so it will take a few laps to get fully up to grips with it, but I’m looking forward to it.”

Alexander Albon will race at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit for the first time this weekend, with the Thai driver one of only two drivers on the grid not to have raced their previously.

The Williams Racing driver sat out the 2021 season after losing his Red Bull Racing drive but returned to the driving seat last weekend in the Bahrain Grand Prix with his new team, and he brought them a thirteenth-place finish.

Albon believes the FW44 will suit the Saudi Arabian track better than it did at the Bahrain International Circuit, and he hopes for a much more competitive outing this weekend than last.  He also says the more running the team do with the car, the more they will learn and, more important, the better they will be able to make it.

“The Jeddah Corniche Circuit is a new track for me and not an easy one to get up to speed with, so whilst I’m looking forward to that challenge, I know it’s going to be a tough one,” said Albon.

“I think it’ll be a track that is a bit better suited to the characteristics of the FW44; it’s smoother with more medium and high-speed corners, so I’m hoping we go well there.

Andreas Seidl openly admits that his McLaren F1 Team did not start the 2022 Formula 1 season in the way they would have wanted, with neither Daniel Ricciardo nor Lando Norris finding themselves in the battle for the points in last Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

Ricciardo ended fourteenth and Norris just behind in fifteenth, leaving McLaren as one of only four teams not to score points in Bahrain, and they struggled for pace and performance throughout the weekend at the Bahrain International Circuit.

However, McLaren have an immediate chance to turn around their fortunes as Formula 1 moves to the Jeddah Corniche Circuit for the second Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, and Seidl, the Team Principal at the Woking-based squad, says everyone is working extremely hard to fix the problems that have left them floundering towards the back of the pack so far in 2022.

“The Bahrain Grand Prix was not how we wanted to start the season,” said Seidl.  “It’s clear that we have work to do, so we’ll be working hard to bring more performance to the car as quickly as possible.

“The team are analysing our performance from Bahrain so that we can learn and improve, already starting in Jeddah.”

After an exhilarating season opener last weekend at the Bahrain International Circuit, the second round of the championship is already upon us, the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

The Jeddah Corniche Circuit produced one of the most frenetic races in modern Formula 1 history last season, with two red flags, scary collisions and that now famous coming together between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. The British driver went on to win the race last season which took place in December.

It will be the new cars first-time on the circuit, as well as being the first-time that Pirelli’s 18-inch tyres will be used at the venue. Pirelli have opted for their middle range of compounds for this weekend, the C2, C3 and C4. The same combination was used last year, however the tyres used last year were much smaller.

The fastest street circuit on the calendar has undergone some changes since the sports last visit. The main feature drivers will find is that sight lines through corners have been opened up, by moving barriers further back. The final corner has seen a lot of change too, it has been widened by the removal of a grandstand, which could make the lap slightly faster. Verstappen crashed on the exit of the final corner on his final Qualifying lap in 2021, a lap which would’ve secured pole.

The race will be fifty laps long and of course take place during the night under the floodlights for the second Grand Prix in a row, with this in mind Free Practice 2 will be the most beneficial session before the race, with the track temperature being the most similar then.

Lando Norris insists the McLaren F1 Team will go into this weekend’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix with their ‘heads held high’ despite a less than spectacular opening round of the season in Bahrain.

Norris was never a contender for the top ten at the Bahrain International Circuit as McLaren struggled for pace and performance, but he knows a lot was learned about the MCL36 that he hopes will benefit them going forward.

He acknowledges the hard work being put in by everyone at McLaren to try and solve the problems they have had so to improve the car, and he will be giving it his all this weekend in a bid to score points to reward them.

“I’m excited to be back at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit. It’s a cool track and extremely quick for a street circuit,” said Norris.  “It kept us on our toes last year and it will be great to see how the 2022 cars run here. 

“We’re going into this weekend with our heads held high. Bahrain was a tough one, but we’ll keep moving forward as a team and take everything we’ve learned from last weekend to make this one the best we can.

Whilst Oracle Red Bull Racing and Scuderia AlphaTauri are out on the tracks for the opening rounds of the Formula 1 season, Red Bull is also hard at work back in Milton Keynes finishing off its Red Bull Powertrains facility. The new facility will take over from the old Honda one and promises to be a state-of-the-art, purpose-built place for Red Bull to develop and maintain its new powertrains. It’ll be part of the Red Bull Technology campus, right alongside all of Red Bull’s other F1-related activities.

Christian Horner, who acts as the CEO of Red Bull Powertrains as well as the Team Principal of Oracle Red Bull Racing, said on Thursday that the construction of the new building is “very much on target” and that the first employees will start moving into the new building “within the next 8 weeks“. Horner also said that the new facility will have all the equipment required for “a state-of-the-art power unit facility“, including “state-of-the-art dynos” that are currently going through the commissioning process.

Horner also expressed the importance of having the chassis and engine development on the same campus, something which is now a possibility due to the new powertrains facility. “That’s a huge benefit,” he said. “…the synergies that that allows between chassis and engine and the incorporation of that all under one roof on one campus… other than Ferrari we’re the only team in Formula 1 to have that.“

This news that the Red Bull Powertrains facility is on schedule and almost ready to go is probably very welcome to the team, after the powertrain-related mishaps that cost Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez 2nd and 4th place finishes respectively at the Bahrain Grand Prix last weekend. “A vacuum in the fuel supply system caused the engine to run out of fuel,” Helmut Marko said to f1-insider.com about what happened in Bahrain. “I think we can solve the problem in Saudi Arabia over the weekend. Without giving numbers, there was still enough petrol in the tanks of both cars.“

Jamie Chadwick will remain as a Development Driver as part of Williams Racing’s Driver Academy in 2022, and she feels she has benefitted from the teams support since she joined the programme in 2019.

Chadwick will remain in W Series to defend her title this year with Jenner Racing having missed out on the chance of advancing into the FIA Formula 3 Championship due to a lack of finances.  The twenty-three-year-old has won both W Series championships since its inception, and she will be looking to make it a hat trick this year and add to her fifteen Superlicence points.

But the twenty-three-year-old is happy to remain as part of the Williams set-up for a fourth year, and she feels she will continue to benefit from their support throughout 2022.

“I’m delighted to continue working with the Williams team,” said Chadwick.  “I’ve had a lot of support from everyone there throughout the last three years and the simulator work I’ve done has been hugely valuable for my race preparation.

“I’m looking forward to continuing my programme throughout the 2022 season and I know that the team will be cheering me on during my upcoming 2022 W Series campaign; I’m really proud to continue representing the Williams name on the grid.”

It has been a difficult start to the 2022 NASCAR Xfinity Series season for Jimmy Means Racing as the team is zero-for-two in qualifying for races. JMR hopes to turn its luck around at Circuit of the Americas, and will do so with a driver making his NASCAR début. On Wednesday, the team confirmed Gar Robinson will be in the #52 Chevrolet Camaro for Saturday’s Pit Boss 250.

Robinson competes in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship for Riley Motorsports. In 2021, his second full season for the team, he won the LMP3 championship with a four-win campaign that included winning his class at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona. He repeated the latter in January’s Rolex 24 alongside driver and TCF columnist Kay van Berlo, Michael Cooper, and Felipe Fraga.

Prior to becoming an IMSA regular, he won the 2015 and 2017 Trans-Am Series TA2 championships. The TA2 class is often used by NASCAR drivers to gain road racing experience. After his second TA2 title, he moved to the Pirelli World Challenge, where he spent a season in the SprintX GT Pro Am class and another in GTS Sprint for his family-run team.

The team tweeted, “Jimmy Means Racing is excited to have @GarRobinson74 behind the wheel of our #52 NXS Car @COTA this weekend!”

Despite being a full-time Xfinity operation until 2021, funding issues have prompted Means to scale back to a limited slate. The team failed to qualify at Daytona and Atlanta with Harrison Rhodes, while a lack of sponsorship forced the team to skip the West Coast races. With the team too low in owner points to guarantee a spot in the COTA race, Robinson will have to make it with a strong qualifying time.

In contrast to his near-full season of NASCAR Xfinity Series experience before becoming a regular in the Cup Series, Alex Bowman‘s Camping World Truck Series résumé is fairly limited with just one start each in 2015 and 2017. Five years since his last race, he is back in the series as he will run Saturday’s XPEL 225 at Circuit of the Americas, driving the #7 Chevrolet Silverado RST for Spire Motorsports. HendrickCars.com will sponsor the effort.

Five races into the 2022 Cup season, Bowman is ninth in points with a win at Las Vegas. Although he finished eighth in his COTA début in 2021, he intends to use the Truck start to grow more familiar with the Austin track. In nineteen career Cup road course starts, he has eight top tens, two top fives, and a best run of second at the Charlotte Roval in 2019.

“I’m eager to get back to COTA this weekend and make as many laps as I can,” Bowman commented. “I had a good run in the Ally Chevrolet Camaro for Hendrick Motorsports last year and being able to race Spire Motorsports’ Chevy Silverado this year will be a great help as we get ready for Sunday.

“The more laps, the better at a place like COTA. Spire Motorsports proved at Daytona they build trucks capable of racing at the front of the field so this weekend will be a great opportunity to get some extra seat time and try and race for the win.”

Bowman’s first Truck start came at the 2015 Michigan race for JR Motorsports, where he finished eleventh. Two years later, he raced at Atlanta for GMS Racing and placed sixth.

It was a magical Scuderia Ferrari 1-2 at the Bahrain Grand Prix, to open up what looks set to be an incredible 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship. A key feature of the opening Grand Prix was the use of Pirelli’s brand-new for 2022, 18-inch tyres!

Charles Leclerc claimed the first win of the new era of the sport, with team-mate Carlos Sainz Jr in second and Seven-Time World Champion Lewis Hamilton rounding off the podium at the Bahrain International Circuit. The big shock of the Grand Prix came in the closing stages, where both Oracle Red Bull Racing cars and the Scuderia AlphaTauri of Pierre Gasly, retired due to sudden reliability issues. Gasly’s retirement came first and triggered a late Safety Car, which saw a flurry of frantic late pit-stops.

A new feature for 2022 is that all drivers can now start the race on new tyres, with this in mind all but the McLaren F1 Team drivers started on the Soft C3 compound, Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo opted for the Medium C2. With the track temperature during the race being slightly higher than it had been during any of the previous two evenings, tyre degradation had a massive effect on the race.

Hamilton made the first stop of 2022 and went onto the C1 Hard compound tyre, the hardest in Pirelli’s range. This proved to be a strategic error by the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team, as Hamilton struggled immensely for grip on his out-lap, to the point where it looked like he was driving on ice! This is something which might become more regularly seen during the season, as one of the new rules for 2022 has seen the temperature of tyre blankets reduced, making the undercut harder as well as timing the pit window correctly.

Overall all three compounds used worked well, the C1 was used by only seven drivers during the race and whilst it was more consistent in performance compared to the other compounds, it did take considerably longer to warm up. Every driver used the C2 and C1 compounds, the tyres worked in-line with Pirelli’s pre-race predictions and both played a key role in the Grand Prix.

Williams Racing endured a highly challenging start to the new Formula 1 season at the Bahrain Grand Prix, with Alex Albon finishing thirteenth and Nicholas Latifi bringing the car home in sixteenth.

It was not the start to the season that Williams had been hoping for, both cars did at times though demonstrate strong pace and were capable of battling with not only the McLaren F1 Team, but also the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One Team. Other than that though it wasn’t the strongest of Grand Prix’s for the British team.

For the majority of the race both Albon and Latifi struggled for pace, Albon to his credit performed much better than his Canadian team-mate, despite it being only his first race for the team. Albon also surprisingly made it to Qualifying 2 unlike Latifi who started last, the Thai driver at least managed to prove that there is some performance to be found in the FW44.

Williams Racing’s Head of Vehicle Performance, Dave Robson, highlighted after the race the positives which could be taken away from the opening round, as well as areas which need working on.

“It has been a tough evening in Bahrain, but we got both cars to the end, and at times showed some reasonable pace. Alex made a good start and made some places early in the race. Unfortunately, today we didn’t have the pace to hold on. However, we were able to race competitively with both the McLarens and the Aston Martins, which was an improvement from what we saw at the test last week.

Ginetta GT Academy Rookie champion Angus Whiteside will be stepping up to the Porsche Carrera Cup GB series with the newest team on the grid, Toro Verde GT.

As many driver do, Whiteside started his racing career in karts, which included a win at Norfolk’s Ellough Park in the snow. For 2021 the 25-year-old move in to Ginetta’s entry-level GT Academy series.

Whiteside had an impressive debut year in the series, talking 12 wins in the Rookie class after finishing second in his first race. He would go on to take 12 wins on his way to the title.

“I won the Rookie championship in Ginetta GTA last year and it was either between Carrera Cup or Ginetta this year, and Porsche offers multiple products, so that’s why we made this choice. It’s the biggest and fastest single-make championship in the UK, so if you’re going to make a name for yourself it’s probably the place to do it,” explained Whiteside.

“I haven’t got any bad habits as its only my second year of car racing, so I am still forming my style, but initially it feels like a bit of a tank! It sings, it’s an absolute riot to drive, and I am slowly getting used to it.