The Pin is mightier than the sword

Americans overtaking down the immediately is not my problem.

oh, or Lord Toffington-Frippery's driveway, of course, if the circuit has "Park" in its name.

Things which are distracting brain from work today: why do Americans say "road courses" and British say "permanent circuits" when most of the American ones these days are actually purpose-built circuits whereas many European ones are converted from public or airfield roads....

Nael did indeed win Macau, and I maybe should have mentioned it, but it was mostly SC luck. Last year's Macau race was slightly less of a mess than the previous year's but still wasn't really driver skill (at least not in the results - there was enough green running to be clear Slater was fastest).

A Quick Preview of the F3 Season That’s my definition of “quick”, but only partly quantitative….

I was gonna write F2 and F3 preview threads then I realised that I'd got way too much to say for that so I wrote an F3 preview blog instead.

Let's see if I can manage to write the F2 one before F2 actually starts.... motorsportanalytics.blog/2026/03/02/a...

Yes, that's what I meant when I said they'd made it worse (last year's Spirit of Race car didn't have either of those abominations and it was just weird rather than bad).

It's a Ferrari 263 GT3 - a low-built, sleek sports coupé with (visible from this angle) a green and white checkerboard pattern on the hood, green wheel arches and a white door with a Union Jack panel behind it, all delightfully offset by a yellow "Ferrari" banner over the windscreen.

This is the above shot, in which we can see that for some reason we've gone to green-and-gold stripes on the roof an there's a gold band over the rear wheel arches, plus for some reason the rear wing is black and white stripes?

There's already something quite intrinsically Wrong about painting your Ferrari in British Racing Green, so congratulations to Spirit of Race for managing to start from that point and make it worse....

Look, vortex or not, there is simply not room in a superspeedway for even one star, never mind all stars observable down to magnitude 6.0

brb writing a filk of "There Lived a King" from The Gondoliers about NASCAR.

in that case aren't they all the all star race?

Questions I have for NASCAR: if this is the All Star Race, what proportion of the field is stars under normal circumstances?

A Quick Preview of the F3 Season That’s my definition of “quick”, but only partly quantitative….

I was gonna write F2 and F3 preview threads then I realised that I'd got way too much to say for that so I wrote an F3 preview blog instead.

Let's see if I can manage to write the F2 one before F2 actually starts.... motorsportanalytics.blog/2026/03/02/a...

the car. them.

gorgeous.

Particularly given what happened the last time they gave him a vintage Ferrari to drive around the streets of Monaco....

(it wasn't his fault, but still...)

just wait about 20 laps sounds like

The thing about asynchronous communication is that it's either always or never the staircase so you just make the joke anyway.

It's not really difficult to put Qatar in a week or two weeks before Bahrain at the end of the year given the two tracks are...well you could drive from one to the other and back twice and still wouldn't have made it to 1812km. Whether or not Imola is even possible is another matter.

"No, I said we should do a _Gulf_ livery!"

no wait I have a better version of this joke

ZAK BROWN [looking at airfreight prices]: "The Gulf is getting to be a real problem...."
McLAREN ENGINEER [mishearing]: "We've been working on a solution to that, boss...."

So what date do we think the go/no-go is on the WEC Prologue (starting 22nd Mar)? Got to be pretty soon, given the amount of kit that would nominally have to be shipped out to Qatar. Though I guess you can avoid making a decision briefly by cancelling the Prologue and adding a test day to the 1812.

In practice, I don't see McLaren getting a better offer, unless Siegel genuinely looks like he'll miss leaders' circle in which case they might find a way to stick Ilott or somebody in for a few races.

Supposedly he gets dropped at the end of the year if he doesn't manage regular top 10s during it, but this is the McLaren IndyCar team, so that should be read as "he gets dropped whenever a better offer comes along, or else at the end of the year if he doesn't perform".

Y'know, his dad only missed racing in Phoenix by ten races. (I have no idea why F1 thought a Phoenix street circuit was a good idea, though at least by 1991 they'd stopped trying to run it in June).

I think the Australian Grand Prix will be the 20th race I've watched this year. Though tbf four more of those will also be next weekend.

obviously Toyota need to respond to the Ferrari announcement by bringing a TR010 driven by Morizo himself (he's 70 this year it would be a terrible idea but it's not like his judgement is particularly good in other areas either).

I'm fairly certain back when people were saying AsLMS would have 3 Hypercars in it, that wasn't "2 Peugeots and a Ferrari". I'm still worried by how much of this stuff is up in the air - both Peugeot and Ferrari have talked about how the rules will have to be simplified. But it looks promising.

The Peugeot entries were the only car we had confirmed for the series already! sportscar365.com/lemans/asian...

499Ps at Sepang: 😍
499Ps with a Bronze driver at Sepang in a rainstorm: 🫣

Well I did not see _that_ coming. And apparently nor did anyone else as DSC seem well ahead with the scoop here. I feel like Ferrari's presence almost makes AsLMS Hypercar credible by itself in some ways, so possible this news brings additional entries...