Carbon fiber, aluminum, maybe the odd bit of titanium here or there: These are the materials we usually expect race cars to be made of. Now you can start adding thermoplastics like Ultem to the list. Additive manufacturing has become a real asset in the racer’s toolbox, although the technology has actually been used at the track longer than you might think.
“Some people think that 3D printing was invented last year,” said Fadi Abro, senior global director of automotive and mobility at Stratasys. The company recently became NASCAR’s official 3D printing partner, but it has a relationship with one of the teams—Joe Gibbs Racing—that stretches back two decades.
“Now the teams only have certain things that they can touch in the vehicle, but what that does is it makes it so that every microscopic advantage you can get out of that one tiny detail that you have control over is so meaningful to your team,” Abro said.
Currently, JGR has five printers, which it uses in a variety of applications. Some are common to other industries—additive manufacturing is a good way to quickly develop new prototypes, as well as tooling and fixtures. But the team also prints parts that go straight onto the race car, like housings, ducts, and brackets.
“These are elements that are really integral for the vehicle to be on the track. If there are changes they want to make, they throw it to the printer, it prints overnight, and you have a part that can go on a track that’s specific to that track. So that gives them a competitive advantage,” Abro said.
A2RL admits that this is a hard problem, and that’s refreshing.
A2RL chose the Super Formula chassis to install its autonomous driving tech. Recently, an A2RL car went to Suzuka in Japan to try and race against a human-driven version. Credit: Roberto Baldwin
A2RL chose the Super Formula chassis to install its autonomous driving tech. Recently, an A2RL car went to Suzuka in Japan to try and race against a human-driven version. Credit: Roberto Baldwin
TOKYO—Racing is hard. It’s hard on the teams, it’s hard on the owner’s bank account, it’s hard on the cars, and it’s especially hard on the drivers. Driving at the edge for a few hours in a vehicle cockpit that’s only slightly wider than your frame can take a toll.
The A2RL (Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League) removes one of those elements from its vehicles but, in doing so, creates a whole new list of complexities. Say goodbye to the human driver and hello to 95 kilograms of computers and a whole suite of sensors. That setup was poised to be part of a demonstration “race” against former F1 driver Daniil Kvyat at Suzuka Circuit in Japan during the Super Formula season finale.
But again, racing is hard, and replacing humans doesn’t change that. The people who run and participate in A2RL are aware of this, and while many organizations have made it a sport of overselling AI, A2RL is up-front about the limitations of the current state of the technology. One example of the technology’s current shortcomings: The vehicles can’t swerve back and forth to warm up the tires.
The A2RL team and former F1 racer Daniil Kvyat (center) smile for the media at Suzuka. Credit: Roberto Baldwin
Giovanni Pau, Team Principal of TII Racing, stated during a press briefing regarding the AI system built for racing, “We don’t have human intuition. So basically, that is one of the main challenges to drive this type of car. It’s impossible today to do a correct grip estimation. A thing my friend Daniil (Kvyat) can do in a nanosecond.”
Technology Innovation Institute (TII) develops the hardware and software stack for all the vehicles. Hardware-wise, the eight teams receive the same technology. When it comes to software, the teams need to build out their own system on TII’s software stack to get the vehicles to navigate the tracks.
Not quite learning but not quite not learning
In April, four teams raced on the track in Abu Dhabi. As we’ve noted before, how the vehicles navigate the tracks and world around them isn’t actually AI. It’s programmed responses to an environment; these vehicles are not learning on their own. Frankly, most of what is called “AI” in the real world is also not AI.
Vehicles driven by the systems still need years of research to come close to the effectiveness of a human beyond the wheel. Kvyat has been working with A2RL since the beginning. In that time, the former F1 driver has been helping engineers understand how to bring the vehicle closer to their limit.
The speed continues to increase as the development progresses. Initially, the vehicles were three to five minutes slower than Kvyat around a lap; now, they are about eight seconds behind. That’s a lifetime in a real human-to-human race, but an impressive amount of development for vehicles with 90 kg of computer hardware crammed into the cockpit of a super formula car.
Credit: Roberto Baldwin
Currently, the vehicles are capable of recreating 90–95 percent of the speed of a human driver, according to Pau. Those capabilities are reduced when a human driver is also on the track, particularly for safety reasons. When asked by Ars what his biggest concern was being on the track with a vehicle that doesn’t have a human behind the wheel, Kvyat said he has to “try to follow the car first to see what line it chooses and to understand where it is safe to race it. Some places here [at Suzuka] are quite narrow—on the contrary from the Abu Dhabi track—and there are a lot of long corners. So I really need to be alert and give respect and space to the AI car,” Kvyat said.
Kvyat also noted that the AI car is traveling at a more respectable speed, so he really needs to know what’s going on.
The predictability of a human driver both on a track and in the real world is one of the issues surrounding AI. As we drive, walk, or bike around a city, we rely on eye contact from drivers, and there are certain behavioral expectations. It’s the behavioral outliers that cause issues. Examples include things like running a stop sign, weaving into a lane already occupied by another vehicle, or stopping in the middle of the road for no discernible reason. On the track, an autonomous vehicle might choose to deviate from the racing line around a corner because of a signal input that a human driver would ignore or fold into their driving based on their real-world experience. The context of the rest of a lived life is just as important as what’s learned on the track. Life and racing are hard and chaotic.
The “race”
On the Saturday of the race weekend, a demonstration of two A2RL vehicles raced around the circuit. The vehicles were moving quickly down the straight. The corners, though? We were told that they were still a bit tricky for the vehicles to navigate.
Down in the pits, the team watched a bank of monitors. Sensor data came in from the vehicles—zeros and ones representing the track translated into a sea of graphs. To help parse the data quickly, the system shows a green flag when everything is going well and red flags when the values are out of whack with what’s supposed to happen. In addition to how the vehicle is moving, information about fuel consumption, brake wear, and tire temperature is shared with the team.
All of this data lets the team know how hard it is pushing the vehicle. If everything looks good, the team can push the vehicle to go a little quicker, to push a little harder for a better lap time. Humans elsewhere in the pits will soon tell their human drivers the same thing. Push harder, be quicker; the car can handle it. The data coming in predicts what will happen in the next few seconds.
Hopefully.
The individual teams will try to find the optimal line, just like the human team, but it doesn’t always follow what humans have done before on a track. They work to create an optimal line for the autonomous car instead of just copying what humans are doing.
This team has been at Suzuka for weeks ahead of this race. The HD map they bought from a third party was off by meters. In that time the team had to remap the track for the vehicles and teach them how to drive on a circuit that’s narrower than the track at Abu Dhabi.
The car is outfitted with Sony 4K cameras, radars, lidar, high-definition GPS, and other sensors. The electric steering can handle up to five Gs. The hydraulic brakes on each wheel could be triggered individually, but currently, they are not, according to Pau. However, Pau did note that enabling this function would open up new possibilities, especially in cornering.
On the grid at Suzuka. Credit: Roberto Baldwin
Pau took a moment while walking us around the vehicle to point to the laser that measures the external temperature of the tire. That, along with the ability to track the tire’s pressure, are key to ensuring the vehicle stays on the track.
The next morning, the main event was gearing up. Man versus machine. A modern-day John Henry tale without the drama of the song about a steel-driving man. We all knew Kvyat would win. A2RL was very up-front that the system is not nearly as quick as a human. At least not yet. But it had decided to bring the race to Japan, a country known to be on the cutting edge of technology. The “race” was to be held ahead of the season finale of the Super Formula season.
It was cooler that morning than the previous day. The cars were pushed out to the grid. Kvyat was stationed behind the driverless vehicle. The time between leaving the pits and the race starting felt longer than the day before. The tires were cooling off.
The A2RL vehicle took off approximately 22 seconds ahead of Kvyat, but the race ended before the practice lap was completed. Cameras missed the event, but the A2RL car lost traction and ended up tail-first into a wall. A rather anti-climatic end to weeks of work by the team. In the pits, people gathered around the monitors trying to determine exactly what went wrong.
Khurram Hassan, commercial director of A2RL, told Ars that the cold tires on the cold track caused a loss of traction. A press release sent out later in the day noted that one of the rear tires suddenly lost pressure, causing the vehicle to lose traction and slide into the wall.
The cameras missed the spin, but caught the aftermath. Roberto Baldwin
Hassan reminded us that the vehicle does not know how to swerve back and forth yet to warm up its tires. But more importantly, he said that the gap between simulation and the real world is very real. “You could do things on a computer screen, but this is so important. Because you have to be on the track,” Hassan said.
The reality is that reality is chaos and always changing. When a company notes that it’s doing millions of miles of simulated testing, it’s vital to remember that a computer-generated world does not equal the one we inhabit.
Reality and intelligence
A2RL doesn’t want to replace human-to-human racing. It understands the emotional attachment humans have to watching other humans compete. It also realizes that as these vehicles improve, what the teams learn will not be directly pulled from the track and put on self-driving cars. But by pushing these vehicles to the limit and letting AI determine the best course of action to keep from slamming into a wall or other vehicle, that information could be used in the future as a safety feature in vehicles—a way to keep a collision from happening used in conjunction with other safety features.
The day before the human versus AI race, Super Formula had its penultimate race of the season. During that race, two cars left the pits only to have one of their rear wheels come off. Also, another two cars collided with each another. Racing is hard, and accidents happen.
For A2RL, failure is always an option. It may break the hearts of everyone in the pits that have prepped for weeks for an event, but it’s important to remember that it’s a controlled environment. A2RL seems to understand and talks about the complications of aiming for an AI-powered vehicle. It would be nice if those companies testing on our streets did the same.
Enlarge/ The Cadillac V-Series.R is one of General Motors’ factory-backed racing programs.
James Moy Photography/Getty Images
It is hard to escape the feeling that a few too many businesses are jumping on the AI hype train because it’s hype-y, rather than because AI offers an underlying benefit to their operation. So I will admit to a little inherent skepticism, and perhaps a touch of morbid curiosity, when General Motors got in touch wanting to show off some of the new AI/machine learning tools it has been using to win more races in NASCAR, sportscar racing, and IndyCar. As it turns out, that skepticism was misplaced.
GM has fingers in a lot of motorsport pies, but there are four top-level programs it really, really cares about. Number one for an American automaker is NASCAR—still the king of motorsport here—where Chevrolet supplies engines to six Cup teams. IndyCar, which could once boast of being America’s favorite racing, is home to another six Chevy-powered teams. And then there’s sportscar racing; right now, Cadillac is competing in IMSA’s GTP class and the World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class, plus a factory Corvette Racing effort in IMSA.
“In all the series we race we either have key partners or specific teams that run our cars. And part of the technical support that they get from us are the capabilities of my team,” said Jonathan Bolenbaugh, motorsports analytics leader at GM, based at GM’s Charlotte Technical Center in North Carolina.
Unlike generative AI that’s being developed to displace humans from creative activities, GM sees the role of AI and ML as supporting human subject-matter experts so they can make the cars go faster. And it’s using these tools in a variety of applications.
Enlarge/ One of GM’s command centers at its Charlotte Technical Center in North Carolina.
General Motors
Each team in each of those various series (obviously) has people on the ground at each race, and invariably more engineers and strategists helping them from Indianapolis, Charlotte, or wherever it is that the particular race team has its home base. But they’ll also be tied in with a team from GM Motorsport, working from one of a number of command centers at its Charlotte Technical Center.
What did they say?
Connecting all three are streams and streams of data from the cars themselves (in series that allow car-to-pit telemetry) but also voice comms, text-based messaging, timing and scoring data from officials, trackside photographs, and more. And one thing Bolenbaugh’s team and their suite of tools can do is help make sense of that data quickly enough for it to be actionable.
“In a series like F1, a lot of teams will have students who are potentially newer members of the team literally listening to the radio and typing out what is happening, then saying, ‘hey, this is about pitting. This is about track conditions,'” Bolenbaugh said.
Instead of giving that to the internship kids, GM built a real time audio transcription tool to do that job. After trying out a commercial off-the-shelf solution, it decided to build its own, “a combination of open source and some of our proprietary code,” Bolenbaugh said. As anyone who has ever been to a race track can attest, it’s a loud environment, so GM had to train models with all the background noise present.
“We’ve been able to really improve our accuracy and usability of the tool to the point where some of the manual support for that capability is now dwindling,” he said, with the benefit that it frees up the humans, who would otherwise be transcribing, to apply their brains in more useful ways.
Take a look at this
Another tool developed by Bolenbaugh and his team was built to quickly analyze images taken by trackside photographers working for the teams and OEMs. While some of the footage they shoot might be for marketing or PR, a lot of it is for the engineers.
Two years ago, getting those photos from the photographer’s camera to the team was the work of two to three minutes. Now, “from shutter click at the racetrack in a NASCAR event to AI-tagged into an application for us to get information out of those photos is seven seconds,” Bolenbaugh said.
Enlarge/ Sometimes you don’t need a ML tool to analyze a photo to tell you the car is damaged.
Jeffrey Vest/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
“Time is everything, and the shortest lap time that we run—the Coliseum would be an outlier, but maybe like 18 seconds is probably a short lap time. So we need to be faster than from when they pass that pit lane entry to when they come back again,” he said.
At the rollout of this particular tool at a NASCAR race last year, one of GM’s partner teams was able to avoid a cautionary pitstop after its driver scraped the wall, when the young engineer who developed the tool was able to show them a seconds-old photo of the right side of the car that showed it had escaped any damage.
“They didn’t have to wait for a spotter to look, they didn’t have to wait for the driver’s opinion. They knew that didn’t have damage. That team made the playoffs in that series by four points, so in the event that they would have pitted, there’s a likelihood where they didn’t make it,” he said. In cases where a car is damaged, the image analysis tool can automatically flag that and make that known quickly through an alert.
Not all of the images are used for snap decisions like that—engineers can glean a lot about their rivals from photos, too.
“We would be very interested in things related to the geometry of the car for the setup settings—wicker settings, wing angles… ride heights of the car, how close the car is to the ground—those are all things that would be great to know from an engineering standpoint, and those would be objectives that we would have in doing image analysis,” said Patrick Canupp, director of motorsports competition engineering at GM.
Enlarge/ Many of the photographers you see working trackside will be shooting on behalf of teams or manufacturers.
Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
“It’s not straightforward to take a set of still images and determine a lot of engineering information from those. And so we’re working on that actively to help with all the photos that come in to us on a race weekend—there’s thousands of them. And so it’s a lot of information that we have at our access, that we want to try to maximize the engineering information that we glean from all of that data. It’s kind of a big data problem that AI is really geared for,” Canupp said.
The computer says we should pit now
Remember that transcribed audio feed from earlier? “If a bunch of drivers are starting to talk about something similar in the race like the track condition, we can start inferring, based on… the occurrence of certain words, that the track is changing,” said Bolenbaugh. “It might not just be your car… if drivers are talking about something on track, the likelihood of a caution, which is a part of our strategy model, might be going up.”
That feeds into a strategy tool that also takes lap times from timing and scoring, as well as fuel efficiency data in racing series that provide it for all cars, or a predictive model to do the same in series like NASCAR and IndyCar where teams don’t get to see that kind of data from their competitors, as well as models of tire wear.
“One of the biggest things that we need to manage is tires, fuel, and lap time. Everything is a trade-off between trying to execute the race the fastest,” Bolenbaugh said.
Obviously races are dynamic situations, and so “multiple times a lap as the scenario changes, we’re updating our recommendation. So, with tire fall off [as the tire wears and loses grip], you’re following up in real time, predicting where it’s going to be. We are constantly evolving during the race and doing transfer learning so we go into the weekend, as the race unfolds, continuing to train models in real time,” Bolenbaugh said.
Enlarge/ F1 has a few more months before it has to finalize the technical regulations for 2026.
Darren Heath/Getty Images
F1 is set to undergo another of its periodic technical rule changes in 2026, undertaken every few years in an effort to keep the racing safe and at least somewhat relevant. The sport is adopting carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and switching to a simplified, if far more powerful, hybrid system, powering cars with much less drag. But early simulation tests have been alarming, with cars that were at times “undriveable,” according to a report in Motorsport.
The FIA, which is in charge of F1’s rules and regulations, wants cars that can race each other closely and entertain an audience, so expect the 2026 cars to generate less aerodynamic downforce, since that is often conducive to processional racing.
Reducing drag is a bigger priority for the FIA, especially since the new hybrid system, which still regenerates energy under braking but no longer also from the engine’s turbocharger, won’t have the energy sufficient to aid the car’s combustion engine throughout the entire lap.
The solution is to evolve the feature currently known as the Drag Reduction System, which has been required on cars since 2011. DRS lowers an element of the rear wing on command, cutting drag to the car. But instead of using it to make overtaking a bit easier, as is the case now, the idea is for the cars to have a low-drag configuration along the straights, then switch into a high downforce configuration for cornering.
But according to Motorsport, when the cars are in their lowest-drag configuration, they become “almost undriveable—with multiple examples of drivers spinning on straights under acceleration or being unable to take the smallest of curves without the rear stepping out.”
The culprit is a huge shift in the car’s center of pressure, which the FIA says is as much as three times greater than the current change in balance when a driver deploys their DRS. There is a solution, though—active front wings to go with the active rear wings, which move in concert to maintain the same balance on the car even as it switches from high downforce to low drag.
Some of you may be asking why, if F1 is supposedly the pinnacle of motorsport, it hasn’t had active front wings all along. But the sport has had a long-held prohibition on active aerodynamic devices—which it even extended to mass dampers—since 1969 (other than when specified by the rules, like DRS, obviously), following a series of crashes shortly after F1 discovered downforce.
Enlarge/ Red Bull Racing team boss Christian Horner faced the media at an F1 press conference earlier today in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Bryn Lennon/Getty Images
Formula 1 has been embroiled in a scandal as its 2024 season gets underway. As Ars detailed on Monday, the team principal for Red Bull Racing, Christian Horner, was investigated by his organization for what was described as “controlling and inappropriate behavior” toward a female member of his staff. Now, we’ve learned that the staff member has been suspended with pay by the F1 team.
A spokesperson for the team told The Guardian that Red Bull was unable to comment on an internal matter.
Last week, Red Bull issued a statement about the dismissal of the grievance, stating that the complainant has a right of appeal but that it “is confident that the investigation has been fair, rigorous, and impartial.”
“The investigation report is confidential and contains the private information of the parties and third parties who assisted in the investigation, and therefore we will not be commenting further out of respect for all concerned,” the statement said. “Red Bull will continue striving to meet the highest workplace standards.”
Today, Horner faced the F1 media in a press conference for F1 team bosses at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, which takes place this Saturday. “It has been of great interest in different elements of the media for different reasons,” Horner said, adding, “I think it’s time to draw a line under it. And to focus on what is going on on track.”
Regarding the investigation, Horner said, “We are all bound by the same restrictions. Even if I’d like to talk about it, I can’t. This has been trying in many respects.”
Although Horner was cleared by Red Bull’s internal investigation, an anonymous source leaked WhatsApp screenshots, allegedly between Horner and the now-suspended employee—to hundreds of people in the F1 paddock. That was followed by Jos Verstappen, father of F1 world champion Max Verstappen, telling the media that Horner’s position was untenable.
Verstappen Sr. has denied being behind the leak, which is largely believed to be part of an internal Red Bull power struggle following the death of co-owner Dietrich Mateschitz. Horner has the backing of the Thai family that owns 51 percent of the company, but not the Austrian management of Red Bull GmbH, which has the backing of Mateschitz’s son, who owns the remaining 49 percent.
Others in the paddock have been pressed on their views of the situation. Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton told journalists that “it’s a really, really important time for the sport to show and stick to its values, hold ourselves accountable for our actions, and it’s a really, really pivotal moment for the sport in terms of what we project to the world and how it’s handled.”
“And it’s not been handled very well to this point, and I think transparency is really key,” Hamilton continued. “It highlights some of the issues that we also have within the sport, when we’re talking about diversity and inclusion, that inclusion, making people feel comfortable in this environment, it’s clearly not the case.”
Speaking to Bloomberg, James Vowles, team principal for Williams Racing, said, “I can only control what happens within Williams, and what I can do within that environment is open everyone’s eyes to ‘this is how we have to be,’ because the best ideas don’t come from being a closed group of individuals. It comes from diversity.
“These allegations are allegations,” Vowles said. “I’m afraid I don’t have any understanding of what is behind them and the significance of what has happened. All I can say is that should this ever happen in our regard, we’ll be entirely supportive in terms of fixing it and making sure we have a culture that is accepting of everyone.”
But not every voice from the paddock has been as supportive. RB driver Daniel Ricciardo, who has become a fan favorite as a result of Netflix’s Drive to Survive, told the media he hoped the situation would just go away. “You want things to be smoother than they are, of course,” Ricciardo said. “Right now, there is a lot of noise and distraction, no doubt. Look, the way they performed last week… for them to be able to still focus on business on track, that is also a big strength of theirs. Hopefully, these things start to slowly go away, and they could just focus on being a racing team.”
As optics go, these are bad, particularly as the news of the employee’s suspension emerged on International Women’s Day and on the first day of the season for F1 Academy, a series for young women drivers to get their foot on the single-seater racing ladder. French phenom Doriane Pin was fastest in F1 Academy testing, followed by Britain’s Abby Pulling and the American Lia Block, daughter of Ken Block, the late star of the Gymkhana drifting videos.
Enlarge/ While it’s hard to read too much into preseason testing times, it’s also hard to see anyone really challenging Red Bull or Max Verstappen for outright speed.
Mark Thompson/Getty Images
The sixth season of Drive to Survive, Netflix’s blockbuster behind-the-scenes sportumentary, went live today. This isn’t a review of that. Instead, for the past few days my attention has been turned to Formula 1’s preseason testing, which got underway on Wednesday morning at the Bahrain International Circuit in Bahrain.
In the olden days, preseason testing was a thing you’d read about in the specialty press—a reason to buy a copy of Autosport in February, if you will. There was a lot more of it back then, too; up to five official preseason tests, although it was unusual for a team to attend all of them.
In F1’s current era, there isn’t really time for so much testing, even if it weren’t strictly limited by the rules. The first race of what should be a 24-race calendar takes place next Saturday (March 2), with the final round, also in the Middle East, not scheduled until December 8. Contrast that with the early 2000s, when a season might run for 16 or 17 races between early March and mid-October.
Enlarge/ This year the teams get three test days ahead of 24 race weekends.
Mark Thompson/Getty Images
Back then, none of the preseason testing would be broadcast to fans, either. Now, thanks to F1’s streaming platform, there are 24 hours of coverage to keep you occupied, with each eight-hour day covered by an English-language commentary team that combines some of F1’s own (yay, Sam Collins!) with some voices more familiar to Sky’s (and therefore ESPN’s) coverage, like the always-excellent Anthony Davidson.
While I imagine the committed F1 fan will also add in all 10 hours of DtS season six, you’re unlikely to get nearly as good of a technical insight into the new cars or come away with a better understanding of what the drivers are doing in the cars to extract such speed so consistently.
Don’t read much into the times
An important thing to know about preseason testing is that it’s very difficult to read much into any of the lap times. The cars aren’t subject to scrutineering checks the way they are during a race weekend, and some teams aren’t above putting together a so-called glory lap to top the timesheets and maybe attract a sponsor or two.
These days, that’s far less likely than sandbagging—intentionally driving a car slowly at certain points during a lap, perhaps—to hide one’s true pace. Instead, each team has its own run plan designed to satisfy the needs of the engineers.
Rarer still is the team that shows up with something revolutionary that blows everyone else into the weeds. But it does happen—check out Keanu Reeves’ Brawn: The Impossible F1 Story for a 21st-century example of such a sporting fairytale.
What’s changed in the offseason?
There have been no real changes to the technical regulations for this year, but every team has a new car that reflects their better understanding of how the current ruleset needs to be best exploited.
The key to generating useful aerodynamic downforce from a current F1 car’s ground effect is to keep the car as stable as possible under both braking and accelerating, which means controlling dive at the front axle and countering lift at the rear axle. For 2024, some teams have had a fundamental rethink of how they do that.
George and Lewis will push the WhatsApp button to talk to their race engineers.
Kym Illman/Getty Images
Ferrari topped the time sheets on days two and three, and the car looks fast in long runs as well as qualifying simulations.
Mario Renzi – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
Mercedes (and the teams it supplies engines to) have moved to rear pushrod suspension.
Peter Fox – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
Sauber is a good example of a team that’s kept as much of the car bare carbon as possible.
Mark Thompson/Getty Images
Visa Cash App RB is a daft name for a team. And while I’m complaining, should Red Bull really be allowed to own two teams? I can’t think of another sport where someone can own more than one franchise.
Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images
Long-serving Red Bull team boss Christian Horner is looking less secure in his position thanks to an ongoing internal investigation regarding inappropriate behavior towards a subordinate.
Mark Thompson/Getty Images
There’s a new boss at Haas, Ayao Komatsu.
NDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images
Aston Martin’s car looks like it handles well, but might not have the pace of either Ferrari or Mercedes.
Mark Thompson/Getty Images
You’d think two French teammates in a French team might be a recipe for harmony, but Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly don’t really have the best relationship.
Clive Mason/Getty Images
Alex Albon drove last year’s Williams into some points-paying positions when the track suited the car. This year Williams says it has a car with a much wider operating window.
Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images
Kick Sauber and RB (yes, those are real names) are joining Red Bull and McLaren in using pullrods (instead of pushrods) for their front suspension. Meanwhile, Mercedes, Aston Martin, and Williams have switched to rear pushrods, which interfere less with the underbody aerodynamics, leaving just Ferrari and their client Haas sticking with rear pullrods.
The floor might generate more of the downforce now, but that doesn’t mean bodywork isn’t important. Red Bull’s looks significantly different, incorporating ideas tried with varying success at other teams like Ferrari’s “bathtub sidepod” or Mercedes’ “zero sidepod.”
Truthfully, the most immediately noticeable difference from last year has been more teams opting to forgo a full-body paint job, preferring large expanses of bare carbon fiber in the name of saving another kilo or two. And if you’re looking for nerd trivia to bore impress someone with, the Mercedes drivers now have a WhatsApp button on their steering wheel to use to radio back to the pits.
Enlarge/ Don’t you hate it when an important email ends up here?
Getty Images
Last week, Formula 1 formally rejected a bid by Andretti Cadillac to join the sport as an 11th team and constructor. Among the details in a lengthy justification of its decision, Formula 1 wrote that on December 12, it invited the Andretti team to an in-person meeting, “but the Applicant did not take us up on this offer.” Now, it turns out that the Andretti team never saw the email, which instead got caught by a spam filter.
Not even a follow-up?
“We were not aware that the offer of a meeting had been extended and would not decline a meeting with Formula One Management,” the team said in a statement. “An in-person meeting to discuss commercial matters would be and remains of paramount importance to Andretti Cadillac. We welcome the opportunity to meet with Formula One Management and have written to them confirming our interest.”
F1 apparently never followed up with a phone call or even subsequent email during the six weeks between that initial invitation and its announcement at the end of January. Had the two parties gotten together, it’s likely that Andretti could have cleared up some other things for F1 as well.
You just assumed 2025
As F1 noted in its justification, Formula 1 is about to go through a significant rule change in 2026. The cars will be a little narrower and lighter, and the expensive, complicated hybrid system that recovers waste heat energy (known as the MGU-H) is going away—to compensate, the hybrid system that recovers energy under braking (the MGU-K) will get far more powerful.
Designing a car to enter the 2025 season and then a completely different car to a new set of rules in 2026 would be quite the challenge. No one appears to have understood this more than Andretti, which has instead been concentrating on designing a car to those 2026 rules.
Having realized some time ago that the entire process—which began in February 2023—had dragged on so long that it would be virtually impossible to field an entry for next year, the team said it had “been operating with 2026 as the year of entry for many months now. The technicality of 2025 still being part of the application is a result of the length of this process.”
Hey, I know you!
That in-person meeting would also have allowed F1’s management to say hello to some old faces it knows well; Andretti’s chief designer John McQuilliam, head of aerodynamics Jon Tomlinson, and technical director Nick Chester have all worked under F1 technical director Pat Symonds in the past.
As many have pointed out, F1’s claim that any new team has to be competitive and able to challenge for wins doesn’t hold much water, particularly since a single team took home all but one winner’s trophy last season. But it also remains clear that F1 really doesn’t want to add an 11th team to its roster, despite how advantageous a new American team could be as the sport attempts to grow its presence here in the US.
The entry process was not opened by F1 but by the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile), which writes the rulebook and used to have sole jurisdiction over this kind of thing until the European Union’s antitrust action forced the FIA to give up its commercial interest in the sport in 1999. At first, the commercial rights were owned by Bernie Ecclestone, then the private equity group CVC Capital Partners, and since 2018, Liberty Media. Under the current agreement between the FIA, F1, and the teams, F1 has a veto on any new addition to the sport, even if—as is the case with Andretti Cadillac—an entrant passes the FIA’s due diligence.
Now that the communications breakdown has been revealed, perhaps Andretti and F1 can get back together and have a more civilized discussion about an entry in 2026.
Enlarge/ The current crop of GTP hybrid prototypes look wonderful, thanks to rules that cap the amount of downforce they can generate in favor of more dramatic styling.
Porsche Motorsport
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—Near-summer temperatures greeted a record crowd at the Daytona International Speedway in Florida last weekend. At the end of each January, the track hosts the Rolex 24, an around-the-clock endurance race that’s now as high-profile as it has ever been during the event’s 62-year history.
Between the packed crowd and the 59-car grid, there’s proof that sports car racing is in good shape. Some of that might be attributable to Drive to Survive‘s rising tide lifting a bunch of non-F1 boats, but there’s more to the story than just a resurgent interest in motorsport. The dramatic-looking GTP prototypes have a lot to do with it—powerful hybrid racing cars from Acura, BMW, Cadillac, and Porsche are bringing in the fans and, in some cases, some pretty famous drivers with F1 or IndyCar wins on their resumes.
But IMSA and the Rolex 24 is about more than just the top class of cars; in addition to the GTP hybrids, the field also comprised the very competitive pro-am LMP2 prototype class and a pair of classes (one for professional teams, another for pro-ams) for production-based machines built to a global set of rules, called GT3. (To be slightly confusing, in IMSA, those classes are known as GTD-Pro and GTD. More on sports car racing being needlessly confusing later.)
Enlarge/ The crowd for the 2024 Rolex 24 was larger even than last year. This is the pre-race grid walk, which I chose to watch from afar.
Jonathan Gitlin
There was even a Hollywood megastar in attendance, as the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced, Joseph Kosinski-directed racing movie starring Brad Pitt was at the track filming scenes for the start of that movie.
GTP finds its groove
Last year’s Rolex 24 was the debut of the new GTP cars, and they didn’t have an entirely trouble-free race. These cars are some of the most complicated sports prototypes to turn a wheel due to hybrid systems, and during the 2023 race, two of the entrants required lengthy stops to replace their hybrid batteries. Those teething troubles are a thing of the past, and over the last 12 months, the cars have found an awful lot more speed, with most of the 10-car class breaking Daytona’s lap record during qualifying.
Most of that new speed has come from the teams’ familiarity with the cars after a season of racing but also from a year of software development. Only Porsche’s 963 has had any mechanical upgrades during the off-season. “You… will not notice anything on the outside shell of the car,” explained Urs Kuratle, Porsche Motorsport’s director of factory racing. “So the aerodynamics, all [those] things, they look the same… Sometimes it’s a material change, where a fitting used to be out of aluminum and due to reliability reasons we change to steel or things like this. There are minor details like this.”
This year, the Wayne Taylor Racing team had not one but two ARX-06s. I expected the cars to be front-runners, but a late BoP change added another 40 kg.
Jonathan Gitlin
The Cadillacs are fan favorites because of their loud, naturally aspirated V8s. I think the car looks better than the other GTP cars, too.
Jonathan Gitlin
Porsche’s 963 is the only GTP car that has had any changes since last year, but they’re all under the bodywork.
Jonathan Gitlin
Porsche is the only manufacturer to start selling customer GTP cars so far. The one on the left is the Proton Competition Mustang Sampling car; the one on the right belongs to JDC-Miller MotorSports.
Jonathan Gitlin
GTP cars aren’t as fast or even as powerful as an F1 single-seater, but the driver workload from inside the cockpit may be even higher. At last year’s season-ending Petit Le Mans, former F1 champion Jenson Button—then making a guest appearance in the privateer-run JDC Miller Motorsport Porsche 963—came away with a newfound respect for how many different systems could be tweaked from the steering wheel.
Enlarge/ Everyone loves a good van, and Supervan 4.2 is a very good van.
Ford
Concorde, NC—On Wednesday, Ford Performance held an official launch event for the 2024 season. The new GT3 version of the Mustang makes its competition debut at next weekend’s Rolex 24 at Daytona, marking the start of a new approach to racing for the Blue Oval, one that involves selling customer race cars as a business line, not just a factory team. While we were there, we also rode in a new electric racing truck demonstrator, but the main reason I got on the short flight down to Charlotte was to check out one of the most delightfully weird race cars of the past few years, the Ford Transit Supervan 4.2.
It’s the latest in a line of wild demonstrator vehicles based on the venerable Transit van, Ford’s commercial workhorse in Europe and, increasingly, the US. Ford started making an electric version of the Transit a couple of years ago, and when we drove that electric van, I might have driven a couple of the engineers and PR people to tears by repeatedly asking them, “So, are you going to make a Supervan version of this, too?”
The first Supervan dates back to 1970 (or maybe 1971), when someone had the bright idea to stick a Transit body shell on a Ford GT40 race car chassis as a way to promote the new van. The 1980s and 1990s saw two new Supervans, this time using Formula 1 engines. Now that EVs are the new hotness, the appeal of an electric Supervan probably seemed obvious.
It’s definitely Transit-shaped.
Ford
Supervan has a new livery compared to its Pikes Peak run.
Jonathan Gitlin
The wings and diffuser create more than 4,400 lbs (2,000 kg) of downforce.
Jonathan Gitlin
OK, you get less cargo volume than in a production Transit, thanks to the aerodynamic styling.
Jonathan Gitlin
Ford worked with an Austrian motorsports company, STARD, to develop Supervan 4, which made its debut at the 2022 Goodwood Festival of Speed. Last year, a heavily revised version, now called Supervan 4.2, was built for the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, one of the more challenging races still held today and an event where EVs excel—unlike internal combustion engines, electric motors and batteries don’t lose any power as they climb into thin air above 14,000 feet (4,270 m).
Like the previous Supervans, this did not start with a production vehicle that got souped up; it’s a custom spaceframe with composite body panels that just happens to look mostly Transit-shaped, albeit with some wild aerodynamic appendages to keep all four wheels pressed to the ground. It does have some cargo capacity behind the two-seat cockpit, though, and a tow hook at the back. Strapped into the passenger seat, I couldn’t help noticing an infotainment screen from a Mustang Mach-E.
Supervan 4.2 is actually a little less powerful than the 2022 version, going from a 1,973-hp (1,471 kW) four-motor arrangement to a 1,408-hp (1,050 kW) three-motor configuration for Pikes Peak. The motors draw energy from a 50 kWh battery pack, complete with a CCS fast charging port capable of up to 350 kW fast charging. (At Charlotte Motor Speedway, the mechanics and engineers used a portable 60 kW fast-charger connected to a 600 kWh storage battery in the paddock to top up Supervan between sessions.)
The air jack (left) and CCS (right) charging port. The native port is CCS2, because Supervan 4.2 was built in Europe, but the crew had an adapter that lets them charge at US CC1 DC charging stations if necessary.
Jonathan Gitlin
I love the production infotainment screen from the Ford Mustang Mach-E, and the fact that it still uses the same user interface, even if the software modes are different.
Jonathan Gitlin
Yes, that’s a tow hitch.
Jonathan Gitlin
Supervan’s tires were probably warmer than the rest of us on a very chilly day in Charlotte.
Jonathan Gitlin
Getting a ride in something cool like Supervan 4.2 is an occupational hazard in this job. What’s less common is being chauffeured for that ride by the company’s CEO. But our driver was indeed Ford CEO Jim Farley, who is rather handy behind the wheel.
“We don’t want to make generic vehicles at Ford anymore,” Farley told us that morning before explaining that the company’s new strategy is for Ford Performance to become a sustainable business and not just a marketing strategy that ebbs and flows depending on whether there are enough motorsport fans in the C-suite. After all, Ford got its start after Henry Ford proved his new creation in competition.
But Farley explained that he also learned from the late Ken Block that “he taught us… that in this world of enthusiasts, digital content is super-important for customers and brands. And so we continue to commit to doing demonstrators like the Supervan 4 and others that are there for one reason: to have fun. To generate digital content so people can just enjoy having fun in vehicles, and some of them don’t make any sense, like Supervan 4.”
My ride was brutal—1,900 lb-ft (2,576 Nm) has that effect—and rather brief—it took about 90 seconds to leave the pit lane, negotiate the relatively tight infield at Charlotte, then return back to the pits, where Farley brought us to a halt with a nicely executed 180-degree turn.
Come for a short ride with us in Ford’s Supervan 4.2 EV demonstrator.
Supervan 4.2’s next adventure is going to be a trip Down Under—Ford is taking it to Mount Panorama in Australia to put on demonstration runs ahead of this year’s Bathurst 12 Hour race. It won’t be defending its class win at Pikes Peak in June, but Farley told us to expect a different, as-yet unrevealed EV demonstrator for the 2024 event.
Enlarge/ Extreme E travels to remote locations by boat and brings its own energy infrastructure with it. Currently, it makes its own hydrogen on site and uses that to charge EV batteries, but in 2025, the cars will switch to hydrogen fuel cells.
Colin McMaster / LAT Images
ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the most remote locations on Earth, Alejandro Agag is holding court.
“Welcome to the edge of the world,” he laughs, gesturing toward the vast desert around him. A gust of wind kicks a cloud of sand and dust across the table. “It’s amazing, this place.”
The 53-year-old Spanish entrepreneur is taking in the sights and sounds of the season 3 finale of Extreme E, the off-road electric racing series he launched in 2021. Part of the series’ ethos is that it races exclusively in regions of the globe that are heavily impacted by climate change (such as the Atacama Desert—the driest, non-polar region on Earth), typically with no spectators present.
And while the competition during the finale is dramatic—with five of the series’ 10 teams in contention to win the championship—racing has taken a firm backseat this weekend. Conversation instead has centered on Agag’s recent proclamation that Extreme E will rebrand as Extreme H in 2025, becoming the first racing series powered fully by hydrogen.
“We want to be the first to be doing it,” says Agag, holding his hand up to shield his face from the still-swirling sand. “The challenge is there, and we love challenges—the challenge of working with a whole new technology, relevant technology that can have real, huge uses in the economy in general.”
Enlarge/ The races are short heats on off-road courses.
Extreme E
Agag is no stranger to pioneering new racing technology: He is also the founder and chairman of Formula E, which was the first all-electric racing series when it debuted in 2014. To bolster his credibility in establishing Extreme H by 2025, Agag recently announced that the fledgling series would be joining a working group with Formula 1 and the International Automobile Federation (FIA) to further explore the development of hydrogen fuel. Extreme H is also slated to gain FIA World Championship status by 2026.
“My idea, my pitch, for Formula 1 was to say, listen, you don’t know which technology will be the winning one,” Agag explains. “For the moment, you are betting on synthetic fuels… but hydrogen is going to be, maybe, one technology that could be part of the equation. So that’s all that it is, for Formula 1 to keep an eye on what’s going to happen here. And what’s going to happen is we’ll have the first—and, I think for quite a while, the only—pure hydrogen world championship racing.”
In many ways, the working group makes a lot of sense: Five of Extreme E’s existing 10 teams have direct or tangential ties to Formula 1, with the likes of McLaren, Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, and Jenson Button among its team owners. And the use of hydrogen has become an enticing prospect for all of motorsports, partly because it can be used in combustion engines (“They [Formula 1] like noise… and combustion makes noise!” Agag laughs).
Of course, using hydrogen exclusively to fuel a racing series is no small feat, and other hydrogen-based projects have been plagued by setbacks and delays in recent months. Most notably, the Le Mans hydrogen class has already been delayed to 2027, citing safety concerns.
But Extreme E believes its style of racing—short sprints that last approximately 10 minutes—is perfectly suited to showcasing and testing the power of hydrogen fuel cells, and the series’ leadership is confident that after initial testing last month, they will be running their first fully hydrogen race by February 2025.
Enlarge/ At Extreme E’s race site in Atacama Desert, a series of solar panels are set up in the center of the race site.
Gregory Leporati
Getting all the operations up and running in only 13 months certainly won’t be easy, though. “Switching that one letter to H means we have to switch a million other things,” Agag says.
Codemasters, the EA studio behind the DiRT Rally franchise, announced that is next off-road racing title WRC is set to include post-launch VR support for its PC release.
The game is set to land on multiple platforms on November 3rd, including PS 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via the EA App, Epic Store, and Steam, however VR support isn’t planned to be a launch day feature.
It’s not certain when the VR mode is coming to PC, although what is certain: it’s not coming to PSVR 2.
“Exclusive to PC. Feel the pure adrenaline of rally from the driver’s seat. Coming Post-launch.”
The studio also released the game’s initial reveal trailer, showing off some of the ability to design and drive your dream rally car thanks to the inclusion of Builder mode.
Codemasters says WRC also lets you “race and overcome recent events alongside real-world highlights and nostalgic throwbacks in Moments mode, or battle the elements across dirt, snow, and asphalt in the pursuit of the perfect run.”
