Rolling Motorsport Thread 2024 (F1 etc.) 🏁 🏎 🏍

Sports
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2024, here we go.

There is no off season now. With the rise of the middle east and asia in motorsport as soon as the traditional euro and north American centric championships wrap their seasons in October and November winter series and championship kick-off in the desert sun. If you are into sportscars and endurance racing the dark months of December to February are a goldmine. The Asian Le Mans Series runs five 4hr races, there are 6hr and 24hr races by Creventic, the Bathurst 12hrs, Roar and Daytona 24hrs. Almost every weekend at any time of day or night you can find people racing. Meanwhile Dakar, Rally Monte Carlo and King of the Hammers keep the off road and rally fans occupied whilst F1 silly season does it’s thing like an attention seeking toddler.

So what does 2024 have in store?

MotoGP sees the king trying out a new throne to see if its faster than his old one. Marc Marquez waves goodbye to Honda and says hello to Ducati. The series owners and governing body also face the always tricky task of formulating a new technical rule set over the coming 12 months. Costs need to be contained and performance trimmed back or they run the risk of outgrowing the traditional circuits which produce the best racing. With performance they have a very narrow target to hit if they are to maintain their position over Superbikes at the top of the 2 wheeled pyramid.

World Rally Championship sees Kalle RovanperÀ - its reigning champion and the dominant driver of recent seasons - take a step back to only contesting a partial schedule. When Sebastian Loeb did the same he frequently rocked up, won the rally and made life difficult for the championship protagonists by taking away valuable points.

Indycar got it’s silly season underway very early with an action replay of it’s reigning champion deciding he didn’t want to move to the team he’d signed a contract with for the second year in a row. The where is decided but the legal matters are far from settled. Looking at the wider series, unusually for this time of year only 2 seats remain unassigned and everything appears to be stable (possibly too stable as new ideas and new fans are needed).

IMSA and WEC are both enjoying boom times in top level prototype competition. IMSA seems to have got the impossible balance between technological development and costs spot on, but as more manufacturers arrive things will be further stress tested. WECs boom has been fuelled by the centenary running of Le Mans last year and will try to ride the wave for a decade all the way to the 100th running.

For those who like their racing without corners and powered by nitro the big story for 2024 is Tony Stewart becoming a full time Top Fuel racer in the NHRA championship. The former NASCAR, Indycar and USAC champion and all-round racing superstar steps into the car vacated by his wife in the team they own. It will be interesting to see how many new fans and eyeballs he is able to bring to the races.

Elsewhere the former All-Star Sprint Car Series previously owned by Tony and now renamed as the ‘High Limits Sprint Car Series’ has come out swinging. They have announcing a 60 race calendar backed by big prize money and have attracted some big name racers from the rival ‘World of Outlaws Spring Car Series’. Whether this serious challenge to the Outlaw series position as the pinnacle for sprint car racing is a healthy thing or not in the long run will be interesting to watch.

Finally F1 will in 2024 make it’s third attempt to run a mind bogglingly brutal 24 race global season.

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To say that the grid has been locked for ages the amount of shenanigans going on behind the scenes has been excellent. My favourite the Singapore corruption allegations

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Oh good. Another street circuit. :roll_eyes:

Hahahahahaha. :poop:

Oh good. Another street circuit. :face_with_spiral_eyes: Ditching Suzuka would be the silly icing on an already very daft cake.

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That rebrand is horrendous, looking forward to the mistakes and disdain it’ll get from the likes of Ted and Crofty.

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The Visa Alphatauri Toro Rosso not not Red Bull Racing App

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nowhere else for him to go really, can’t see Merc or RB or McLaren taking him when they all have strong lead drivers

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Wasn’t he rumoured for Mercedes during the summer break or was it Hamilton going to Ferrari?

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I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the Italian sporting media had linked Leclerc with a move to at least 9 other F1 teams. They do love a good panicky headline and a chance to report that the sky is falling in at Ferrari.

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Feel like pure shit just want Steiner back

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Bring back the Birmingham Super Prix!

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WRC could be interesting with Rovanpera only doing a part season. I’d like to see Elfyn win it, or even Neuville, who’s always been nearly, but not quite, there. Reckon Tanak is most likely of the three, though.

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Other formula watch:

Formula 2: Theo Pourchaire finally got the big one (of the junior categories), and with that finally in the bag, makes the move to Super Formula, presumably to get some more Super License points ahead of a 2025 seat with whatever name Sauber is entering under (minimum of 35 syllables total, given recent naming rights developments). Prema look like the team to beat, with race winner Oliver Bearman and FRECA champion (and another Ferrari Academy prodigy) Andrea Kimi Antonelli behind the wheel. Other ones to watch include Ritomo Miyata, the reigning Super Formula and Super GT champion (only the fifth person to hold both at the same time) who moves to Rodin (now sans Carlin) alongside Zane Maloney, and the trio of Formula 3 graduates Gabriel Bortoletto, Franco Colapinto and Pepe Marti. Victor Martins will continue to be brilliant and infuriating in equal measure, and Dennis Hauger and Isack Hadjar need to step up.

Formula 3: Colapinto and Marti moving upward with Bortoletto has left plenty of space in the title fight. As always, hard to look past the Prema line-up for a title winner - Beganovic, Mini and Lindblad are fast and can hold their own in terms of actual race craft. The main challengers are likely to come from Hitech, with Luke Browning and 2023 FRECA runner-up Martinius Stenshorne likely to be gracing the top step of the podium this year. Kacper Sztuka (winner of the Winter Series), Mari Boya and Leonardo Fornaroli are also worth keeping an eye on.

FRECA (Formula Regional Championship by Alpine): To describe an average weekend of FRECA, I need to paraphrase; I watched a safety car procession and a race broke out. 30 minutes + 1 lap of kids doing a good job and then they fuck it all up (thanks Mark). That said, Tuukka Taponen looks great in FRMEC (Formula Regional Middle East Championship) at the moment, and he’ll have some decent company on the grid in Ugo Ugochukwu, ThĂ©ophile NaĂ«l, James Wharton and Rafael CĂąmara. Whole series streams on YouTube, and the few ones that go uninterrupted are often great fun.

Formula 4: The Formula 4 part of the pyramid is an unwieldy beast, spread into various regional and continental titles. Keeping up with everything is near-impossible, so focus tends to gravitate to the series held in Europe. Ones to watch over this level include Freddie Slater (full campaign in Italian F4), Keanu Al-Azhari (Spanish F4), Lucas FluxĂĄ (Spanish F4, younger brother of Lorenzo who has a ELMS seat) and Augustin Bernier (former FFSA karting champ and FEED Racing competition winner, French F4).

F1 Academy: W Series’ almost-invisible replacement goes into its second season with a lot to prove. Its debut year was blighted by horrendous coverage from its parent company, but the move to exclusively being on the support bill for Grand Prix weekends might actually get some eyeballs on it. Of the drivers confirmed so far, Doriane Pin (Ferrari Challenge Europe champion for 2022 and last year’s WEC Revelation of the Year Award winner), Abbi Pulling, Bianca Bustamente and Maya Weug (Ferrari’s first female academy driver and, like Pin, part of the Iron Dames) look like the ones you’ll see at the front.

Super Formula: With the stagnancy of the F1 grid keeping him out of the aforementioned Sauber seat, Pourchaire makes the move to Japan’s premier series, and at present is the only overseas driver on the grid. Ayumu Iwasa also makes the jump from Formula 2, joining two-time champion Tomoki Nojiri at the Red Bull-liveried Team Mugen. Sho Tsuboi will likely be in the wins column at some point. Other things of note are the twilight years (in single seaters, at least) of fan favourite Kamui Kobayashi, Juju Noda’s debut in the series and returns for Naoki Yamamoto and Ukyo Sasahara after both had enormous season-ending crashes last year.

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Quite amazing that Sauber branding themselves as a dodgy crypto gambling brand for the next couple of years is somehow not the most embarrassing naming change this winter.

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some great posting in this thread so far, always happy to see that my snooker/darts epics aren’t the only long form preview posts on the Sports board

I thought, that’s a very Italian name, with a former Ferrari driver middle name
 intriguingly he was born 25th August 2006, the OG Kimi was announced as a Ferrari driver after the Italian grand prix that year, which was two weeks later

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Why would you kick Sauber if you are a betting company?

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Andrea Kimi Antonelli is actually a Mercedes Junior not a Ferrari one. Which makes the intra-Prema team battle with Bearman even spicier. But both seem nailed on to make it to F1.

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My mistake, thanks for the detail! Definitely will be fun watching them fight it out on track.

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FOM/Liberty have said no to Andretti which is probably the least surprising headline of the F1 off season.

Let’s see what happens next. There is some big money investment backing Andretti bid and with a billion dollar potential asset up for grabs they might not go down without a fight.

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Got very excited then the blurb says 2025, this is not the summer break.

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Basically sums up to “we just don’t want another team”. By FOM’s logic at least Haas and Red Bull 2 don’t deserve their slots and Sauber don’t really offer any value until 2026 when Audi take over either, but it’s their ball, they’re entitled to insult the Andretti’s if they want to.

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