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October 22, 2022
We got confirmation last week that the W Series, as had been rumoured, has run out of money and will cancel the final three races of the season, one at COTA this weekend and the season ending double-header in Mexico next weekend, while crowning Jamie Chadwick champion for the third time in as many seasons.
And while nothing has been confirmed, and I certainly could be wrong, I think the W Series is dead and buried, and Chadwick will be the series first, last and only champion.
From the beginning the W Series was doomed to fail, it was a flawed concept from the start. If the series' raison d'etre was to develop the next female F1 driver, and yet no driver could even move up to F3, including their 2 time champion, then the series was failing almost from the beginning.
Young drivers, from sixteen to twenty two or twenty three, need to compete against the best and strongest competition possible and the W Series did not provide that. In fact, by limiting the series to women only, it could never provide that.
And while the concept may have been flawed from the outset, the W Series did itself no favours in the way it operated over 4 years, and began burying itself almost from the outset.
The first nail in the W Series coffin was the complete cancellation of the 2020 season, to the best of my recollection the only "major" series to do so. Not a good look for sponsors, investors or potential young drivers to see the series not even attempting to run a few races, while virtually all other series managed at least a partial schedule.
The second nail also came in 2020, and that was 2019 Series champion Jamie Chadwick getting thrashed in the 2020 Formula Regional European Championship (a regional F3 series with cars almost identical to the W Series), while her 3 Prema team mates dominated the series, finishing first, second and third in the championship while winning 16 of 23 races between them. The best Chadwick could manage was a third place finish in the season opener, while finishing 9th in points, behind 2 drivers that each did less than half the season. Rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, this set the bar for the W Series, and it wasn't very high.
The third nail in the W Series coffin was Chadwick winning the series again in 2021. If the 2019 & 2021 series champ can't do better than ninth in a regional F3 series while driving for the championship winning team, F3 team owners have to ask themselves, what does that say about the rest of the W Series field? Again, rightly or wrongly, fair or not, these are the questions FIA F3 teams are going to ask when considering their driver line ups.
F3 teams are very much a business and they need funded drivers to come to their team. In order to attract funded drivers, their advertising is podiums, race wins and championships. Not many drivers want to sign up for teams that finish 5th and 6th all the time, so signing championship caliber drivers is essential for all teams. They aren’t in existence to charitably hand out seats to mid-pack drivers to make us all feel good.
The fourth nail in the W Series coffin was the decision to fly away to several venues as F1 support races this year. Even Formula Two sticks to Europe and the Middle East, never setting foot in North America or the far east. To spend all that money and effort to run single 30 minute races is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen a development series do. Utterly insane. To me, this says, despite claims to the contrary, the W Series really see themselves as an end and not a means to an end. They want to be a WTA or an LPGA, not an FIA Formula 3.
As an example, this season's FIA F3 Championship had 9 Rounds compared to the W Series original schedule of 8. The difference, however, is that the FIA F3 series has 18 races in total, compared to the W Series, which would only do a total of only 10, 8 fewer races than F3. The European Formula Regional Series has 10 rounds and 20 races. I’m really not sure how anyone associated with the W Series ever thought that so few races in a development series was going to produce an F1 driver.
To my mind, the series administration decided they would rather hang around with the beautiful people in Miami and Singapore, than freeze in a deserted Oulton Park or Thruxton and actually develop race car drivers. There is a reason all developmental series have limited travel and race up to 3 times per weekend. Apparently the lessons of dozens of developmental series all around the world somehow don’t apply to the W Series.
I can tell you from experience, there is nothing glamorous about running or participating in development series, but that work has to be put in for young drivers to grow and develop. There is no shortcut.
This year’s grid & schedule in particular proved, at least to me, that the W Series was not interested in being a development series, but wanted to be something bigger.
While the fly away schedule was bad enough, this year’s grid hardly looked like a training ground for up and coming drivers, and more so an end-of-career path for drivers not going any further.
Let's take a look at driver selection. Our own Megan Gilkes, who participated in the first season of the W Series, winning a non-points round, participated in the pre season test in Spain, where she told me she turned top 10 lap times. Megan is 21 years old and should be the kind of driver the W Series is looking for. But Gilkes wasn’t invited to take part in this year's series, and instead competed in the GB4 series, where she scored two wins, with one round still to run at the time of writing. (Personal thought, Megan’s career was much better off running in GB4 than the W Series, so hopefully she can take a positive away from all of this).
Of the 19 drivers listed on the W Series website, 8 are 25 years of age or older.
So why does a series that claims to be creating the next female Formula One driver have a 30 year old driver who has never finished better than 6th, while turning away a 21 year old with a win in the series?
A lot of poor decision making by a group of people who, you would think, should have known better.
If there is a W Series in the future, there needs to be great change in the way it operates.
First, they need to create a schedule that is at least 10 rounds, plus regular testing, and all of them should all be local in the UK, with maybe two or three on the continent. Each weekend needs to have at least 2 races, and probably should have 3. Young drivers need to race, not lounge around F1 hospitality suites in exotic locales. Again, developing Formula One drivers is not glamorous work.
I think they also need to have a couple of “guest” cars to be driven by outsiders, so the top runners in the series have a better benchmark to compare themselves with. They should invite top drivers from FIA F3 and FREC to compete each round to create greater competition at the sharp end of the grid. They may not need to be at every race, but at least 2 or 3 rounds each season. If they insist on keeping it women only, then get Christina Neilson or Sophia Flörsch or Taylor Hagler or Samantha Tan into the guest cars.
And for no other reason other than to reiterate just how dumb it was, I’ll say it again, flying off to do a single 30 minute race overseas just so you can say you’re part of the F1 show is probably the dumbest thing I have ever seen a racing series do.
The current driver selection process is also flawed, as evidenced by this year’s driver line up. The top 5 or 6 finishing drivers should have the option of returning for a second season (but only 2 seasons, max, the W Series shouldn’t be a career for any driver). I think having a few experienced drivers in the field each season will create greater competition amongst the top drivers, and only allowing a second season, maximum, will not plug up the advancement process for the younger drivers.
The rest of the places on the grid should be filled by top finishing drivers from select karting or F1600 championships across Europe, North America and Asia. No favoritism, no feeling sorry for drivers, just the fastest young women that are ready to make the move from karts to cars.
The only other serious option for the W Series is scrapping the current concept altogether and creating an Iron Dames type of team. Regardless, if it is to continue, the W Series needs to make massive changes, what we’ve seen so far has been a sporting and commercial failure.
As for the only champion in W Series history, I think Chadwick is a good driver whose career was badly stunted by the W Series. She faced next to no competition and as a result hasn’t progressed to where she should be at this point in her career.
Chadwick has had at least one, and maybe two Indy Lights tests with Andretti (as of writing one test has been completed and a second test is rumoured). I think this is the best route for her to go. It’s incredibly difficult to find the absolute edge of performance again when you’ve gotten used to only needing 8 or 9 tenths to win races. I’d love to see her with Andretti in a 2 season deal for Lights, as season one will be spent learning the cars and the tracks, with season two giving us a much better idea of how competitive she can be.
Only time will tell what the future holds for the W Series.
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June 15 2021
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This will be another abbreviated version this week, as we have our first race outing to get ready for with the VARAC race at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park opening the season.
World Superbike at Misano
Jonathan Rea has looked pretty dominant in the opening rounds of the 2021 World Superbike Championship, but at Misano he looked beatable, taking a pair of 3rd place finishes, while local hero Michael Ruben Rinaldi on his Ducati took the win in race 1, followed by a 2nd place in race 2. That moved Rinaldi up to 5th in the championship points. Meanwhile, Toprak Razgatlioglu did the opposite of Rinaldi by taking 2nd in race 1 and winning race 2. Those results moved Razgatlioglu up to 2nd in the points, just 20 points behind Rea.
NASCAR
All 3 series were in action at Texas for the All-Star race, and I will admit, this is not my favorite event, or my favorite track. I didn't catch much of the Xfinity race, as the red flags caused the Indy Car race to go long, and flipping back and forth wasn't doing much, so I ended up on the Indy Car race, waiting out the red flags. There was another top 20 for Alex Labbe, so another decent finish.
Kyle Larson is proving to be the most dominant driver this season, taking the All-Star win, his third in a row, and the fifth in a row for Hendrick.
IMSA
It was a great day for Roman DeAngelis and the Heart of Racing Aston Martin team in the GTD class. The team originally finished second, but was moved to first after the winning Audi was penalized for a pit lane violation. IMSA for some reason has yet to update the GTD point standings, but the Heart of Racing Team went into Detroit in second place, trailing the Bill Auberlen/Robby Foley BMW by 7 points, and with the new IMSA scoring system, there is 385 points on offer between the race and qualifying. With the BMW qualifying in fourth, one place behind the Aston Martin, and finishing eighth in the race, if my math is correct then De Angelis and team mate Ross Gunn should leave Detroit with a 115 point lead over the BMW. On a quick glance of the finishing orders, I'm also assuming that the BMW stays in second place, but I'm not doing all the GTD math to figure it out. Hopefully IMSA will update the points at some point in the near future.
Mikael Grenier was the only other Canadian running at the finish in the SunEnergy 1 Racing Mercedes coming home in seventh.
It was a tough day for the other two Canadians in the race, Jeff Kingsley in the Compass Racing McLaren and Daniel Morad in the Alegra Motorsports Mercedes, were both out early, due to contact, finishing ninth and tenth respectively.
The two corvettes showed up for what was really an exhibition run on home soil, since there were no other GTLM cars in the field. The class originally wasn't scheduled to race this weekend, they were supposed to be in France for Le Mans, but with that race put off until later in the summer, IMSA decided to extend the invitation to all GTLM cars, and only Corvette took them up on it. For the record, the #4 Corvette of Tommy Milner and Nick Tandy took the class win over the #3 of Antonia Garcia and Jordan Taylor.
Overall, the Ganassi Racing Cadillac DPi took the win, with Kevin Magnussen scoring his first win in almost a decade, along with team mate Renger van der Zande. Felipe Nasr & Pipo Derani took second in another Cadillac, with Ricky Taylor & Filipe Albuquerque rounding out the podium in the #10 Acura.
Indy Car Double Header At Detroit
First, we'll start off with the Indy Lights races which, being televised on RevTV we were actually able to see. It was a tough weekend for Devlin DeFrancesco, crashing early in the first qualifying put him on the back foot on a track he's never raced at. The weekend was mostly damage control, managing to make up places early in both races, finishing seventh in the opening race and fifth in the second race on Sunday. Currently DeFrancesco sits in fifth place, with 130 points, 61 behind championship leader Linus Lundqvist. Next up for the Lights is Road America.
As always, Indy Lights coverage will be available on REV TV with race one on Saturday at 4:05pm and race two Sunday at 9:50am
And now for Indy Car...
Race one on Saturday started out very disappointingly, with NBC cutting to the race late because of overtime in the field lacrosse game, meaning we missed the start.
The race itself wasn't bad for a street race, with Marcus Ericsson taking his first win, after heart break for Will Power, leading the race, and seemingly in control with 5 laps to go, when the red flag came out. Power's car was unable to restart, after we heard radio from Power begging for cooling fans brought to his car.
According to an interview with Power after the race (which we didn't get to see, so thank you Twitter...) Indy Car said they couldn't use any cooling fans until all cars were stopped in pit lane. As it turns out, the cooling fans, or lack there of, weren't the problem. Penske released a statement today saying there was a shut down/start up issue with the car that put the ECU into “boot mode” and needed a Chevy tech to plug into the engine in to reboot the start up process, so in the end, the heat and fans played no part in the failure to re-start. A good article from Racer.com here give an explanation.
As for race 2, I don't know, and I don't care anything about it. First, NBC decided tennis was more important that Indy Car, so the race got shunted from the regular NBC stations to CNBC, which we don't get here in Canada, at least not the version of CNBC that carried the race. I no longer get CNBC, but did check either last year or the year before (I've lost all sense of time since “retirement” and the lockdowns) when the race was moved to CNBC and the version we got was not carrying the race, so if this has changed, someone can let me know.
Then of course, Rogers had to outdo themselves by moving the race to Sportsnet World, without any notice. When I put the Tune-In Alerts together on Friday, it was listed as being on Sportsnet 360 at noon, but when I re-checked the guide at noon on Sunday, the programming had been changed. And of course, Sportsnet had a hockey game on all 4 channels from 1987 for the majority of the race, and more wrestling on SN360.
Sporstnet is a joke right now, and if Indy Car doesn't sort this situation out with the next contract, then Indy Car may be lost in Canada, and, sadly, the Honda Indy Toronto maybe lost along with it. I'm not going into much more here, I will have a rant about the whole Sportsnet situation later this week.
Pirelli Reports On Tire Failures
Pirelli has released the results of their investigation into the tire failures of Red Bull Racing and Aston Martin, and the Twitter army of sim racers won't be happy. In a strangely worded release, Pirelli said, essentially, there was an inner sidewall failure of the tires that was not a result of a manufacturing defect. Red Bull Racing promptly released a statement that said “We did everything Pirelli told us to”
The best article I've read on this so far is from RaceFans and you should check it out here. Read between the lines, and you will see exactly what Pirelli thinks Red Bull and Aston Martin were doing with their tires.
I don't claim to be at the level of any of the technical specialists in F1, but I have raced for a few years, and my entire working life has been in the automotive industry, including a lot of years diagnosing tire “failures” for warranty claims, and from the beginning I have thought there was ZERO chance that this was defective tires. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when first talking about this, that only 2 tires failing, and only during the race, and both being the lesser loaded of the tires to blow just doesn't add up to defective tires to me. And we all know that F1 teams would never try to bend the rules (cough, cough flexible rear wings cough, cough) and figure out how to get around the FIA's inspections to gain an advantage. It's also interesting that the blowouts happened to the 2 teams that, arguably, had the biggest increase in performance from the previous race.
The good news for us is we will be at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park this weekend for some in-person racing. We will be creating some content for our Rising Star Jonathan Woolridge for his first Toyo Tires F1600 race, and of course with our luck, Kyle Steckly is also out for his first race at Flamboro this weekend as well. Good luck to both drivers, we'll update you on their race weekends next week.
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June 1 2021
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Memorial Day weekend in the US is always one of the biggest and most anticipated racing weekends of the year, but this year things got off to a tragic start when 19 year old Swiss Moto 3 rider Jason Dupasquier succumbed to his injuries early Sunday morning (Toronto time) from a terrible accident he suffered the day before at the MotoGP Italian Grand Prix.
And the conversation that happens after all race track fatalities was sparked again when MotoGP rider Frencesco Bagnaia, according to an article in Motorsport.com here, said he feels the race shouldn't have gone on. “We have lost a 19-year-old rider, so this is very difficult to accept and very difficult to accept the decision of someone to let us race” he's quoted in Motorsport.com as saying.
In the same article Valentino Rossi notes that not racing does nothing to change what happened, and this is the side of the argument I come down on.
While I didn't race anything as big or fast as these guys, I did race and instruct for almost 10 years and I have got to know hundreds of race car drivers over the years, and can't recall a single driver, on the rare occasion we talked about this kind of thing, ever saying he wanted a race to be cancelled if anything happened to them on the track, myself included. Perhaps that's an attitude that may be changing.
I'm not sure what stopping races do, as Rossi noted, it can't change anything that has happened, and, for me, I wanted my friends and competitors, who I know have worked hard and spent a lot of money to get to the track to go out show just how great motorsports can be, put the darkness behind us and go out and put on the best damn show they can.
For another, well written, well thought out view on this, check out Max Oxley's column here.
One thing seems certain, there is no consensus on this matter, and races run under these circumstances will continue to be controversial.
In the race itself, Fabio Quartararo took an impressive win on his Monster Energy Yamaha and leaves Mugello with the points lead, 105 to 81 over the Pramac Ducati of Johann Zarco. Francesco Bagnaia slips to 3rd in the championship with 79 points after crashing on the second lap.
Staying on two wheels, the World Superbike Championship ran round two of the 2021 season at Esstorill and it looked like it might be a bump in the road in Jonathan Ray's quest for his 7th championship title.
Ray took his 100th career win in the round 1 Saturday opener in Spain, while Scott Redding took victory in the Sunday race, then repeated the victory in the round 2 Saturday race in Esstorill, putting him solidly in the title hunt. Redding led early in the Sunday race, but crashed out shortly after losing the lead to Ray, dropping him to 3rd in the championship hunt, behind Ray and Toprak Razgatlioglu.
Remember you can catch all the MotoGP and World Superbike action in Canada live on Rev TV.
Stateside, the two biggest races of the year are memorial day weekend staples, the Indy 500 and the Coca Cola 600, or the World 600 to those of us of a particular vintage.
This was maybe the best Indy 500 in a decade, culminating in an improbable win by 46 year old Helio Castroneves, in a one-off ride with Meyer Shank Racing. And good on Michael Shank for this win. While I don't know Shank, I know several people who do, and he's one of those guys that nobody can say a bad word about. And seeing a 46 year old win one of the biggest races of the year has inspired me, I think it's time to come out of retirement, maybe the dream isn't dead after all...
One interesting thing from this years 500 I'll be following up on was all the cars spinning on pit road, all seemingly having no brake pedal. It will be interesting to see if there are any connections between the incidents and the teams involved.
The night cap, the Coca-Cola 600, was a fairly typical NASCAR race, minus the big one. The Hendrick cars running up at the front as usual, with some Kyle Busch thrown in to make things interesting. In fact, Kyle Larson's incredibly dominant performance made the race a bit of a bore, and somewhat anticlimactic. Larson was never really challenged over the last hundred miles and now has to be among the favourites, if not the favourite, for the Cup championship this year.
In the Xfinity race on Saturday, Alex Labbe had a pretty good night, running in the top 10 as the final green flag fell, eventually finishing 14th , while in the Truck race Friday night, Stewart Friesen had a great run, finishing 4th.
It's a bit depressing sitting here in Toronto, seeing the Indy 500 with 135,000 fans and a full crowd at Charlotte, while watching race after race in Canada get cancelled, knowing we've been failed by every politician, of every political stripe at every level all across Canada. I don't think a more complete and utter failure could be possible if it was planned.
And on the Canadian racing front, there has been a mix of good and bad news coming this past week.
The bad, though we hoped against hope, was finally announced as official, the NASCAR Truck series will not be coming north of the border to Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, although the track did say they are working on a spectator event for the Labour Day weekend.
An all-Canadian weekend that would include the NASCAR Pinty's Series, the new FEL Sports car and Radical series, Canadian Touring Car Championship, Nissan Sentra Cup and Toyo Tires F1600 could make for a pretty nice event. Shades of the late 80's and early 90's where a Canadian national weekend included F1600 and F2000, Rothmans Porsche, Players GM, Firestone Firehawk and Honda/Michelin.
Some good Canadian Tire Motorsport Park news, the Motomaster Ron Fellows Karting Championship announced their 2021 schedule, getting under way on July 17 & 18, and wrapping up a four round, eight race championship on September 25 & 26. The Motomaster Karting Nationals will take place August 19 to 22.
It also looks like the VARAC Vintage Grand Prix is going ahead, albeit without fans, so good news for the drivers, unfortunately the fans will have to wait a little longer.
The APC Late Model series also announced their return to racing calendar this past week, opening Friday July 2 at Delaware. The entire schedule consists of eight races and will close out the season where it opened, at Delaware Saturday September 25.
Early Sunday evening, Merrittville Speedway confirmed their re-opening schedule, with a test, tune & inspection taking place on Saturday June 19th, and opening the Bobcat Equipment of Hamilton weekly racing series on Saturday June 26. Karting at Merritville will have 2 weeks of practice starting June 22.
While there isn't much racing going on in Canada yet, there are a few Canadians racing in the US and further abroad.
Thomas Nepveu has moved up from karting to the Road To Indy US F2000 championship this season, and this past weekend Nepveu got his first taste of oval track racing at Lucas Oil Raceway. Nepveu started his Cape Motorsports machine in 16th place, and moved up a couple of places during the race to come home in 14th spot. You can read his race report here. Nepveu's next race will be June 19-20 at Road America.
Meanwhile, overseas last weekend, Samantha Tan's ST Racing team was in Hockenheim for round 5 of the 24H Series. Nick Wittmer guided the ST Racing BMW to pole position on Saturday, giving the team a clean sweep in qualifying so far this season. Unfortunately after a huge lead following day one, mechanical issues plagued the team on day two, though they managed to fight back to a second place finish, moving the only Canadian team in the series up to 4th place in the championship standings. You can read the ST Racing Hockenheim race report here.
Next Week
It's road racing week for the NASCAR series, with the Cup cars on the west coast at Sonoma and the Xfinity series at Mid-Ohio (this could be fun...) while the Trucks take the weekend off.
F1 heads to Baku for what I'm sure will be another riveting race. At least the championship is truly up for grabs after the yawner at Monaco last week, so I guess there's that.
Indy Car is off until the 12th when they return to Detroit, reminding us that our street race in Toronto was again cancelled.
MotoGP is back again next week at the Circuit Catalunya for round 7, while the World Superbike Championship returns for round 3 in two weeks at Misano.
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June 8 2021
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This is going to be a bit of an abridged column for this week. Unfortunately we suffered a failure of our main hard drive last night, as I was trying to back it up. All of my notes from the weekend, as well as the 95% of this article that was written, was lost. I have to work this from memory, so my apologies if I get some of the numbers wrong.
Delaware Has New Ownership Group
Delaware Speedway in Ontario has announced a new ownership group. The group has a lot of racing experience, which should bode well for the future of the facility. Among the first upgrades the new owners plan include track resurfacing at the end of this season.
The first race of the 2021 season at Delaware will be the APC Late Model opener on July 2, along with the Quickwick Fire Starter Super Stock Series.
Read the full press release about the announcement here
Azerbaijan Grand Prix – Oh So Sergio
The Azerbaijan Grand Prix showed exactly why Red Bull went with Sergio Perez over Alex Albon in the off season, can anyone see Albon, not only holding off Hamilton all race, but forcing him into a mistake?
And while the votes for Driver of the Day went to Vettel, Perez is my Driver of the Day. I like Vettel and I'm really happy to see the Canadian-owned Aston Martin team score a great result, but Vettel spent a lot of his race by himself, essentially driving to a number. Perez on the other hand was under pressure from Hamilton all race long and didn't put a wheel wrong under all that pressure. Because of Perez and his pressure-packed drive, along with Bottas showing why Mercedes Benz will Albon him at the end of the season, Red Bull was able to leave Baku with a larger lead in the Constructor's Championship, while Verstappen was able to leave with his lead over Hamilton in tact. I can't see any of that happening with Albon in that seat.
Of course, there are two bigger talking points coming out of the race, tires and brakes.
The tire failures of first Stroll, then Verstappen, changed what was a fairly uneventful race into one of the most talked about races of the year. Stroll went out in the biggest way when a tire failed after 29 laps, well within Pirelli's 40 lap recommendation, while Verstappens failure happened at lap 45, on his second set of tires, and still within Pirelli's recommendation. A lot of fingers are being pointed at Pirelli, and we all know, regardless of the outcome, the random sim racers on Twitter will absolutely know better than F1 and Pirelli.
To me, if only 2 tires fail over the course of the weekend I think it's more likely that two drivers ran off-line somewhere, possibly in the same place, and damaged the tire, or went through the same debris. When tires are defective, like F1 at Indy or NASCAR, also at Indy, there isn't a problem with only two tires, there are dozens, and it doesn't only show up in the race, it shows up in practice and qualifying. And those tires weren't defective per se, they were improperly designed and built for the forces the cars were generating at that track. It was like putting a bicycle tire on an F1 car. It will fail, but it's not defective. We'll see what Pirelli says, it's certainly possible there was a defect in the tire, but I will be surprised if that's the case, and not because of some cover-up conspiracy theory, but because two drivers damaging their tires just makes more sense.
The other problem being talked about was Hamilton and his magic brakes. It seems the current Mercedes has a device that will quickly, and exactly, change the brake bias up to the front during warm up laps and safety cars to help keep the front tires hot, and then back again when it's time to race, and from what I've heard at Baku, it was 86.5% front. (normally a race car wants a little more front brake than rear, from 52 to 55%, unless it's raining)
The idea for the increased front bias is to keep the temperature in the front tires by increasing the work the front brakes do, thereby increasing the heat that goes from the brakes, through the wheel rims and from the wheel rims into the tires. It seems Hamilton turned the magic off after the sighting lap before the final restart, but accidentally hit the button on the steering wheel when Perez began moving over on him. So, with 86.5% of the brakes now on the front, and possibly overheated brakes judging by all the smoke on the grid, there was no chance Hamilton was going to make that corner. Hamilton took full responsibility for the mistake, proving that, sometimes, even the best get it wrong.
In the end, Baku was a pretty good race, with no points for the top 2 in the title fight and Bottas, all the championships tightened up, and the next few races should be good.
There is also some talk, with the recent cancellation of Singapore, and both Mexico and Brazil questionable at this point, that there may be room for Canada to find it's way back on the calendar in late September or early October. As Norris McDonald points out in his column here, the race was cancelled out right, and not simply postponed, so he feels there is zero chance of it returning this year. While that's certainly possible, especially if new promoters Bell Media decide they want a full 12 months to prepare for their first race, at the end of the day, F1 needs to put on 23 races to fulfil all of it's contractual obligations and if squeezing Canada into a hole that has opened up works for all involved, it's still a possibility. I would think if both Mexico and Brazil are cancelled, then teams might want a second North American date to help offset the travel.
NASCAR Cup & Xfinity
Both NASCAR classes were on the road course this weekend, although Cup was on the west coast at Sonoma, while Xfinity was closer to home at Mid-Ohio.
AJ Allmendinger staged a great comeback from a pitlane speeding penalty with 25 laps to go to take the win, while Alex Labbe was running in the top 10 when the final green flag came up, but was pushed off the track shortly after the green, falling out of the top 20. A great drive got Labbe to back to 11th place at the finish, along with points in both stages made for a pretty good day.
In the Cup race, I could almost just cut and paste my thoughts from last race, where Kyle Larson again left little doubt as to who was the fastest out there. It's quickly turning in to the Kyle and Chase show, with another 1-2 finish for the Hendrick drivers.
This was the fourth straight 1-2 finish for Hendrick Motorsports, tying the record of four straight set by the iconic Chrysler 300's of Carl Kiekhaefer set way back in 1956. We'll see if Hendrick can now hunt down Kiekhaefer's record of 16 straight wins.
Canadian Racing
While there still isn't much going on in Canadian racing, an email from Canadian Tire Motorsport Park indicates that the VARAC Grand Prix is a go for June 19/20, although we are still waiting to hear if media will be allowed, fingers crossed, and I would think no spectators still.
On the track, ST Racing's Samantha Tan was in action at VIR where she took her BMW M2 to third place on Sunday in the TCX class, her third podium finish from four TC America starts so far in 2021. You can read the teams race report here.
Sportsnet
Sportsnet was busy doing Sportsnet things again this past weekend. For at least F1 Friday Practice and Saturday Qualifying, the Sportsnet guide had the racing listed as starting an hour later than it actually did, causing many people to miss large amounts of the Friday and Saturday action. This has happened so many times with Sportsnet, showing wrong times or not at all, that I'm getting to the point where I don't believe it's accidental any more.
When you factor in the fact that they are the only major carrier that doesn't carry REV TV and that their own Indy Car coverage has been less than stellar, you have to wonder if some of the people who run sportsnet really don't like racing.
Next Week
F1 is off for a couple of weeks when they roll into France, skipping the Canadian Grand Prix. At least Canadian race fans can comfort themselves with the fact that hockey players can pop back and forth across the border without any issues.
NASCAR has their All-Star race at Texas next weekend, with all 3 national series racing, trucks and Xfinity on Saturday and Cup on Sunday. As usual, Fox Sports Racing has the truck race live on Saturday at 1pm, with TSN carrying the Xfintity race at 4pm. On Sunday, Cup pre-race starts at 5:30, and the racing action at 6pm, also on TSN.
Indy Car rolls into Detroit for their annual double header, and the closest to Canada the series will race this year. And in a surprise to us all, Sportsnet 360 is actually showing both races, at 2pm on Saturday, and noon on Sunday.
Both motorcycle series, MotoGP and World Superbike are off for a couple of weeks.
That's it for this week, hopefully next week I'll have a full set of notes to work from.
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