we all know this feeling:
off-season, waiting for the cycle to restart once again, teams try to drum up interest and throw out teaser announcements of alpha livery reveal events, and this is exactly what we have here:
WELL.
I am old enough to remember there already was a credit-card/bank sponsorship deal on an F1 car… Really, just look here:
Well well well 
on-topic tho:
new endurance season starts this weekend with the Rolex 24h,
sophomore season for the GTPs is going to be something really exciting to watch.
posted about this on my IG close friends stories and the best reply was “i think Visa Cash App RB is a beautiful name for a girl”
From the pages of “Fuck it, just win,” comes this little gem.
https://twitter.com/Mattzel89/status/1750642593988231284
MX-5 Cup is just bumper cars
Oh boy has IMSA got you covered:
And that’s just 2023!
Well well well, Daytona24h(almost) in the books, will be interesting to see how the battle between Caddys and Porsche 963 will shape up this year.
In the ‘who has the better fantasy paintjobs?’ department, by virtue of 963es not turning up to the fight, guess it is the Caddy that takes this title:
Kinda terrifying to think about the current AI on the Nordschleife
wondering whether that has to do with number of active users playing are being too low (so they have to bank on ‘if we get ze Nür crowd to plunge down cash, maybe we have a chance to feed this studio a while longer’), because this really feels rushed, i managed to have two sessions for getting to reacquaint myself with Daytona and ze Nordschleife is upon us already?
You have taken my money turn10, so ship out or shut up 
say what you want about Netflix, but they actually put it up over here in yuropp, day 1.
First Episode is the usual good guy, bad guy, what is NASCAR, who’s-who, and Dale Jr. is our storyteller… could be worse.
I need to figure out motorsport coverages. Im almost 40, I can carve out time on the weekends to watch “the big game”. I had sooo much fun watching the 24 hour coverage of Le Mans. I think Peacock screaming (typo stays) might do it for a lot of stuff. Im excited about a nascar show. I’m late to ‘drive to survive’ and have been wary of coming in on season X instead of the beginning.
Well, it depends on what’s up your (gasoline) alley, but there are a lot of things to watch/dip your toes into, and a lot of ways how to consume.
Starting points to figure out what may be your shtick:
How to consume:
gonna long-post when i am home, there’s a lot to say about that!
Long Post incoming now:
re Drive to Survive:
The show is generic enough for you to be able to hop in on any season and you are not missing that much, since it became pretty formulaic early on, and went on to do more of the same (kinda hard not to do so, if you basically have one team dominating from day 1 in a season.
Therefore, season 4 may be the best point to start with, since it wasn’t as clear-cut as the rest.
re NASCAR-shows on Netflix:
Whereas Drive to Survive can bank on the personalities in the sport to keep you somewhat interested, the Netflix-approach is quite different:
Race is a show that focuses on Bubba Wallace and how tough it is for a black driver to thrive in a sport that has an audience that, uh, is sometimes not really known for being openminded when it comes to topics like equality, hence this short series manages to be captivating since it shows how the sport needs to reinvent itself under huge pressure when BLM also manages to wrangle down redneck-infested territory in a series that should have said goodbye to such influences a long, longt time ago (but it’s always easy to say so from the other side of the pond/yuropistan, so what do I know).
The second show (Nascar: Full Speed) is basically Drive to Survive: NASCAR Edition, focussing on the drivers trying to make it to the championship shootout, called The Chase. Comes with a catch though:
compared to drive to survive, it feels almost boring, because it is lacking personality - if Denny Hamlin comes closest to being an antagonist, you know that you lack illustrous personalities to keep the thing interesting. Hence it was more interesting to see how the champ (which I knew about beforehand) makes his way through the chase, and gaining some glimpses into workshops, how team owners interact with their drivers, how girlfriends/wives/parents/beloved ones deal with the media and attention.
If you don’t care as much about whether it has four wheels, what I can recommend (on Ama Prime) is MotoGP Unlimited:
You’d think it is more of the same, and of course the series follows down the well-trodden path of Drive to Survive in a few aspects - however, it takes its time to focus on specific riders, and digs a bit deeper than the other shows, and is less interested in the showbiz antics, which managed to keep me more interested than the Netflix offerings, and I learned a bit more about the MotoGP field (where tbh, I knew Vale Rossi and Marc Marquez beforehand, and that’s it).
So yeah, would recommend going with MotoGP first, then Nascar/Race, then D2Survive.
Depending on that, a series might be better or less interesting when you dig into the archive of races on ytube.
To maybe explain more what i mean by that:
Let’s take the IMSA championship as an example:
One main difference that influences how the races pan out is the way how they treat caution periods:
A wave-by of lapped cars ensures that if you are a few laps down, with a little luck you can work your way up into contention again, whereas in a race like Le Mans or the Spa 24h, due to way how the reglement works (in LM you must make it to the pits under your own steam, or you’re out, and in Spa 24h you have the GT3 as top-class, which means that due to bop’ing, you will almost never catch up to the front when there’s a problem).
Each series has its own quirks, like the IMSA championship mixes two series (endurance and sprint series), has a few races where only GT-classes are egligible, and has the first two crown jewel-races in Daytona and Sebring at the start of the season, with the grande finale at Petit Le Mans more than half a year later.
If you dig GT-racing but enjoy yourself some oddball outlier teams or cars, SuperGT is the way to go - albeit there might be only OV (without dubs) races available if you don’t subscribe (literally) to the Motorsport.com behemoth. The cars are unique enough that it is worth it though, and I have been watching the last two seasons with japanese dub, and thanks to a great UI, you can follow along without understanding much of the commentary (and after a while, you start to notice patterns/understand what they are saying/shouting based on the names of the quite iconic teams/cars.
If tech race is your thing, the FIA WEC might be up your alley, especially in the mid 2010s they had a wonderful three-horse arms race between Toyota, Porsche, Audi with extravaganza spending that spiralled way out of control and saw Toyota as last-man-standing until last year, when just in time for the centenary LM 24h race, all the big names crawled out of the shadows to duel once again:
Ferrari, Peugeot, Porsche, Toyota, Cadillac, this year joined by Lambo, Alpine and BMW - it is a golden era!
… with the only catch being that due to the fact that the FIA WEC lacks, Le Mans aside, a real treasure trove of epic tracks to keep you interested, Spa aside there isn’t much that stands out as being as iconic as Sebring, Laguna Seca or Road Atlanta. Monza is nice, but on-off the calender, Portimao produces good racing but draws seemingly no audience, COTA is quite good but again seems to be no audience magnet…
and to add insult to injury, this season’s FIA WEC opener takes place in dubai or qatar? - couldn’t care less, Daytona I’ve seen almost half of it already, Sebring is the spiritual next big race to kick off the season proper … but that’s just my pet peeve with the boring FIA-tracks, obviously ymmv if you don’t care about the tracks/challenges the drivers have to manage.
anyway, before I totally digress, maybe a few things I’ve noticed:
If you watch IMSA races, quite an interesting aspect is looking up the results of the races beforehand, and checking during the re-live broadcasts how some cars made it up to the top (again) - at least once during the last five years in Daytona, the winning car had to overcome a defecit of three laps during the race! it is fascinating to see some really close calls there for the winning car, and how a near miss gone wrong could have kicked them out of the race (without them knowing that they would end up winning the thing, obv they were in “well, nothing to loose anyway”-mode then and there).
Mixed classes produced some good racing, or rather-incident-prone crash-fests until the lower classes sorted themselves out by crashing or drive time goals being met (and the pro’s taking over for the rest of the race).
Le Mans obv always rocks, due to its quirky regs
Nürburgring 24h often has some weird weather throwing a spanner in the works, be it fog stopping the race for a few hours, hail and rain causing cars to grind to a halt on an uphill slope they couldn’t climb with slicks, or there being a crashfest among the top teams that eliminated almost a third of the top cars in the first 8ish hours or so. Also rooting for the oddball Dacia Logan or crappy econobox thrown in amongst the top teams can be fun, ymmv.
Spa 24h is somewhat more relaxed in that it has basically one class (GT3 cars) and only the quality of the lineup makes the difference, and due to mandatory pit stop lengths with a few catches (if you pit in the last half an hour, and depending on the length of your stint, you had to remain parked in the pits for a tiny bit less than if you refueld earlier, but somehow the times canceled them out and nobody could explain that on air?) it felt less exiting than the other “big ones”, so if this isn’t up your alley, would rather stick to the other series.
WHAT.
Why’s it so purdy tho?!?
Need to get my own copy of Forza 5 so I can keep tooling around in the Abarth 131.
‘[tires] jointly developed with the supplier for Formula E’
I thought formula E tires were supposed to be like road car tires???
“The purple car pictured (which we highly doubt will be able to achieve such a drift angle beyond Photoshop)”
Ive seen some footage of a stock ford Mach-E doing some slides and it seems reasonably good at it. (I think it was Chelsea DeNofa, he drifts 80s brick mustangs and other fords) As long as the software doesn’t flip out, the maximum wheel speed is constrained and the chassis dynamics are good it should be fine for sliding.
In other news (re software updates for cars):
JLR has got a fix coming for you…
Nice to see the tree doing so well
