Russell led from the start and kept Verstappen in check throughout the race until the thing McLaren has surely been dreading all year happened. Thanks to pit strategy, Norris had moved up the running order and was in fifth place, trying to pass Piastri for fourth. After thinking better of it at the hairpin at the far end of the circuit, Norris thought he saw an opportunity going into turn 1. Instead, he misjudged things, and the gap disappeared. His front wing met Piastri’s rear tire, his car’s left side met the concrete wall, and his day was done.
With two such closely matched drivers in equal machinery, a collision on track was bound to occur. As McLaren teammate collisions go, this one lacked the near-hatred of Prost versus Senna and didn’t cost it a win in the process. Now that it’s out of the way, hopefully the kids won’t do it again.
Norris’ crash brought out a safety car, which remained in effect for the final few laps of the race. So little happened during the race that the highlight reel that plays in the green room post-race was over almost before it started.
Lando Norris walks back to the garage after wrecking just past the start-finish line. Credit: Clive Rose/Getty Images
It’s all getting a bit aggro
The off-track action has been far more vicious, with two big stories dominating the buildup to the Grand Prix. The first was Verstappen’s penalty points: Accumulate 12 points in 12 months, and the result is a one-race ban. Verstappen is currently on 11 points following his collision with Russell in Spain, so any slip-up that earns him a penalty point will send Red Bull scrambling to find enough drivers to fill all four of its cars (two Red Bulls, two RBs), should the reigning world champion get benched.
Last year’s data plus plenty of simulation are meant to create a level playing field.
LE MANS, FRANCE – JUNE 10: The #35 Alpine Endurance Team Alpine A424 of Paul-Loup Chatin, Ferdinand Habsburg-Lothringen, and Charles Milesi sits among the 2025 Le Mans entry for a group picture on the main straight at the Circuit de la Sarthe on June 10, 2025 in Le Mans, France. Credit: Ker Robertson/Getty Images
LE MANS, FRANCE – JUNE 10: The #35 Alpine Endurance Team Alpine A424 of Paul-Loup Chatin, Ferdinand Habsburg-Lothringen, and Charles Milesi sits among the 2025 Le Mans entry for a group picture on the main straight at the Circuit de la Sarthe on June 10, 2025 in Le Mans, France. Credit: Ker Robertson/Getty Images
This coming weekend will see the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans take place in France. In total, 62 cars will compete, split into three different classes. At the front of the field are the very fastest hypercars—wickedly fast prototypes that are also all hybrids, with the exception of the V12 Aston Martin Valkyries. In the middle are the pro-am LMP2s, followed by 24 GT3 cars—modified versions of performance cars that include everything from Ford Mustangs to McLaren 720s. It is racing nirvana. But with so many different makes and models of cars in the Hypercar class, some two-wheel drive, others with all-wheel drive, how do they ensure it’s a fair race?
Get ready for some acronyms
Sports car racing can be (needlessly) complicated at times. Take the Hypercar class at Le Mans. The 21 cars that will contest it are actually built to two separate rulebooks.
One, called LMH (for Le Mans Hypercar), was written by the organizers of Le Mans and the World Endurance Championship. These prototypes can be hybrids, with the electric motor on the front axle: Ferrari, Peugeot, and Toyota have all taken this route. But they don’t have to be; the Aston Martin Valkyrie already had to lose a lot of power to meet the rules, so it just relies on its big V12 to do all the work. Most of the cars are purpose-built for the race, but Aston Martin went the other route and converted a road car for racing.
The other is called LMDh (Le Mans Daytona hybrid) and hails from the US, in the rulebook written for the International Motor Sports Association’s GTP category. As the name suggests, these cars must be hybrids, and all must use the same specified motor, battery, and gearbox. LMDh cars also all need to start off using one of four approved carbon-fiber chassis (or spines), onto which automakers can style their own bodies and add their own engines. Alpine, BMW, Cadillac, and Porsche all have LMDh cars entered in this year’s Le Mans.
Convergence
In a parallel universe, the result would be two competing series, neither with many cars on the grid. But the people at IMSA get on pretty well with the organizers of Le Mans (the Automobile Club de l’Ouest or ACO) and the World Endurance Championship (the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, or FIA), and they decided to create a way to allow everyone to play together in the same sandbox.
“2021 [was] the first year with LMH, and at that time, the only big manufacturer involved was Toyota; Glickenhaus was there at the time, but there were not many manufacturers, let’s say, interested in that kind of category,” said Thierry Bouvet, competition director at the ACO.
“So together with IMSA, while the world was [isolating] during the pandemic, we basically wrote a set of technical regulations, LMDh which was, on paper, a little bit of a different car [with] more focus on avoiding cost escalation. After a couple of years of writing those regulations, we had an interesting process of convergence, we call it, to be able to have the LMH and LMDh racing together,” he said.
It’s not the first time that different cars have competed against each other at Le Mans. Before Hypercar, the top category was called LMP1h (Le Mans Prototype 1 hybrids), which burned brightly for a few short years but collapsed under the weight of F1-level budgets that proved too much for both Audi and Porsche, leaving just Toyota and some privateers. LMP1h used a complicated “Equivalence of Technology,” but now the approach, first perfected with the slower GT3 cars, is called Balance of Performance, or BoP.
The race starts at 10 am ET on Saturday, June 14. Credit: Ker Robertson/Getty Images
Obviously, none of the automakers behind the LMDh teams would have entered the race if they thought only LMH cars had a chance of winning overall.
“So it went through a couple of long and very interesting—in terms of technique, technically speaking—simulation working groups, where we involved all the manufacturers from both categories, and we believe we achieved… a nice working point in the middle, which allows both cars to be competitive, through the different restrictions, through BoP and so on. Now we feel that we’ve got a really fair and equitable working point,” Bouvet said. As evidence, he pointed to the fact that last year Toyota took the World Endurance Championship for constructors, but Porsche’s drivers cemented the WEC driver’s title, with Ferrari winning Le Mans.
Imma hit you with the BoP gun
The rules limit both the amount of downforce and the amount of drag that the cars can generate from their bodywork, which have to be in the ratio of 4:1; this prevents any one manufacturer from having a massive advantage in terms of cornering grip or fuel efficiency. From there, the BoP gets more granular, setting maximum weight and power outputs (above and below 250 km/h), the maximum amount of energy allowed to be sent to the wheels between pit stops, as well as any extra time added to pit stops.
Weighing cars is easy, and timing them in pit stops is old hat, too. But the advance here is the torque sensors at each axle that feed back data to the race officials, letting them know exactly how much power each car is deploying to its wheels.
“We had to think of something which will work independently, whether it’s hybrid power or internal combustion engine power. Should we think about fuel only? That will only be concerning, obviously, the internal combustion engine and not do the job for the hybrid system. So, power at the wheel is a nice and elegant solution,” he said.
The Aston Martin Valkyrie is the only road-going hypercar to be entered into the Hypercar category at Le Mans. Credit: ames Moy Photography/Getty Images
For the World Endurance Championship, BoP is calculated on a rolling average of the last three races, with some OEMs getting a little more weight or a little less power if necessary. While the 24 Hours of Le Mans counts as a round of the WEC, it’s open to other entrants as well, and BoP works a bit differently. Instead, Bouvet and his team based this year’s BoP on data from last year’s 24-hour race, plus the simulations he mentioned. This is done to prevent teams from sandbagging in the races that lead up to their most important race of the year
As the newest and least competitive car, the Valkyrie gets the biggest break, with a minimum weight of just 2,271 lbs (1,030 kg) and a maximum power of 697 hp (520 kW). The Toyota GR010—which won the race in 2021 and 2022—can also deploy 697 hp but at a minimum weight of 2,321 lbs (1,052 kg), more than any other car in the class.
No process is perfect, and there is little that racing fans like to complain about more than BoP, which some feel makes racing too artificial, or even fixed. You’re unlikely to hear complaints about it from competitors at Le Mans, though—criticizing BoP is not allowed in WEC, although both Porsche and Toyota have recently expressed their feelings about BoP within those strictures.
The first qualifying session for this weekend’s race took place earlier today, sorting out the 15 fastest Hypercars that will compete later this week to see who leads the pack to the start line on Saturday.
Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.
The governing body for world motorsport met in Macau yesterday. Among the jobs for the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile was to sign off on various calendars for next season, which is why there’s now a clash between the F1 Monaco Grand Prix and the 24 Hours of Le Mans and also between the Indy 500 and F1’s annual visit to Canada. The Formula E calendar was also announced, although with a pair of blank TBCs in the middle, I’ll hold off calling it finalized.
The US round will now take place in late January, and it’s moving venues yet again. No longer will you need to drive an hour south of Miami; instead, the northern outskirts of the city will suffice. The infield at Homestead is no more, and the sport has negotiated a race at the Hard Rock Stadium, albeit on a different layout than the one used by F1. It seems that Formula E’s recent “Evo Sessions” race between influencers, which was held at the stadium, proved convincing.
The really interesting Formula E news from Macau won’t take effect until the 2026–2027 season, and that’s the arrival of the Gen4 car.
The current machine is no slouch, not since they took some constraints off the Gen3 car this season. The addition of part-time all-wheel drive has improved what was already a very racey series, but for now, it’s only available for the final part of qualifying, the start of the race, and when using the mandatory Attack Mode that has added some interesting new strategy to the sport.
New tires, more aero, and way more power
From the start of the 2026–2027 season, all-wheel drive will finally be permanent for the single-seater EVs. It is long past time, given that virtually every high-performance EV on the road powers both its axles, and it marks the first time the FIA has approved a permanent AWD single-seater since the technology was outlawed from F1 decades ago.
The principality of Monaco is perhaps the least suitable place on the Formula 1 calendar to hold a Grand Prix. A pirate cove turned tax haven nestled between France and Italy at the foot of the Alps-Maritimes, it has also been home to Grand Prix racing since 1929, predating the actual Formula 1 world championship by two decades. The track is short, tight, and perhaps best described as riding a bicycle around your living room. It doesn’t even race well, for the barrier-lined streets are too narrow for the too-big, too-heavy cars of the 21st century. And yet, it’s F1’s crown jewel.
Despite the location’s many drawbacks, there’s something magical about racing in Monaco that almost defies explanation. The real magic happens on Saturday, when the drivers compete against each other to set the fastest lap. With overtaking as difficult as it is here, qualifying is everything, determining the order everyone lines up in, and more than likely, finishes.
Coverage of the Monaco Grand Prix is now filmed in vivid 4k, and it has never looked better. I’m a real fan of the static top-down camera that’s like a real-time Apple TV screensaver.
The cars need special steering racks to be able to negotiate what’s now called the Fairmont hairpin. Credit: Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Although native-Monegasque Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc tried to temper expectations for the weekend, the Ferraris were in a good place in Monaco. With no fast corners, the team could run the car low to the ground without risking a penalty, and this year’s car is very good at low-speed corners, of which Monaco has plenty.
A 10th of a second separated comfortably being in Q2 from being relegated to the last couple of rows in the grid, and a very long Sunday. Mercedes’ new teenage protegé, Kimi Antonelli, failed to progress from Q1, spinning in the swimming pool chicane. Unlike Michael Schumacher in 2006, Antonelli didn’t do it on purpose, but he did bring out a red flag. His teammate George Russell similarly brought a halt to Q2 when he coasted a third of the way around the circuit before coming to a stop in the middle of the tunnel, requiring marshals to push him all the way down to turn 10.
Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood and Marcus Ericsson talk to us about the Indy 500.
#28, Marcus Ericsson, Andretti Global Honda prior to the NTT IndyCar Series 109th Running of the Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on May 15, 2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Credit: Brandon Badraoui/Lumen via Getty Images
#28, Marcus Ericsson, Andretti Global Honda prior to the NTT IndyCar Series 109th Running of the Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on May 15, 2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Credit: Brandon Badraoui/Lumen via Getty Images
This coming weekend is a special one for most motorsport fans. There are Formula 1 races in Monaco and NASCAR races in Charlotte. And arguably towering over them both is the Indianapolis 500, being held this year for the 109th time. America’s oldest race is also one of its toughest: The track may have just four turns, but the cars negotiate them going three times faster than you drive on the highway, inches from the wall. For hours. At least at Le Mans, you have more than one driver per car.
This year’s race promises to be an exciting one. The track is sold out for the first time since the centenary race in 2016. A rookie driver and a team new to the series took pole position. Two very fast cars are starting at the back thanks to another conflict-of-interest scandal involving Team Penske, the second in two years for a team whose owner also owns the track and the series. And the cars are trickier to drive than they have been for many years, thanks to a new supercapacitor-based hybrid system that has added more than 100 lbs to the rear of the car, shifting the weight distribution further back.
Ahead of Sunday’s race, I spoke with a couple of IndyCar drivers and some engineers to get a better sense of how they prepare and what to expect.
This year, the cars are harder to drive thanks to a hybrid system that has altered the weight balance. Credit: Geoff MIller/Lumen via Getty Images
Concentrate
It all comes “from months of preparation,” said Marcus Ericsson, winner of the race in 2022 and one of Andretti Global’s drivers in this year’s event. “When we get here to the month of May, it’s just such a busy month. So you’ve got to be prepared mentally—and basically before you get to the month of May because if you start doing it now, it’s too late,” he told me.
The drivers spend all month at the track, with a race on the road course earlier this month. Then there’s testing on the historic oval, followed by qualifying last weekend and the race this coming Sunday. “So all those hours you put in in the winter, really, and leading up here to the month of May—it’s what pays off now,” Ericsson said. That work involved multiple sessions of physical training each week, and Ericsson says he also does weekly mental coaching sessions.
“This is a mental challenge,” Ericsson told me. “Doing those speeds with our cars, you can’t really afford to have a split second of loss of concentration because then you might be in the wall and your day is over and you might hurt yourself.”
When drivers get tired or their focus slips, that’s when mistakes happen, and a mistake at Indy often has consequences.
Ericsson is sponsored by the antihistamine Allegra and its anti-drowsy-driving campaign. Fans can scan the QR codes on the back of his pit crew’s shirts for a “gamified experience.” Credit: Andretti Global/Allegra
Simulate
Being mentally and physically prepared is part of it. It also helps if you can roll the race car off the transporter and onto the track with a setup that works rather than spending the month chasing the right combination of dampers, springs, wing angles, and so on. And these days, that means a lot of simulation testing.
The multi-axis driver in the loop simulators might look like just a very expensive video game, but these multimillion-dollar setups aren’t about having fun. “Everything that you are feeling or changing in the sim is ultimately going to reflect directly to what happens on track,” explained Kyle Kirkwood, teammate to Ericsson at Andretti Global and one of only two drivers to have won an Indycar race in 2025.
Andretti, like the other teams using Honda engines, uses the new HRC simulator in Indiana. “And yes, it’s a very expensive asset, but it’s also likely cheaper than going to the track and doing the real thing,” Kirkwood said. “And it’s a much more controlled environment than being at the track because temperature changes or track conditions or wind direction play a huge factor with our car.”
A high degree of correlation between the simulation and the track is what makes it a powerful tool. “We run through a sim, and you only get so many opportunities, especially at a place like Indianapolis, where you go from one day to the next and the temperature swings, or the wind conditions, or whatever might change drastically,” Kirkwood said. “You have to be able to sim it and be confident with the sim that you’re running to go out there and have a similar balance or a similar performance.”
Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood is the only driver other than Álex Palou to have won an IndyCar race in 2025. Credit: Alison Arena/Andretti Global
“So you have to make adjustments, whether it’s a spring rate, whether it’s keel ballast or just overall, maybe center of pressure, something like that,” Kirkwood said. “You have to be able to adjust to it. And that’s where the sim tool comes in play. You move the weight balance back, and you’re like, OK, now what happens with the balance? How do I tune that back in? And you run that all through the sim, and for us, it’s been mirror-perfect going to the track when we do that.”
More impressively, a lot of that work was done months ago. “I would say most of it, we got through it before the start of this season,” Kirkwood said. “Once we get into the season, we only get a select few days because every Honda team has to run on the same simulator. Of course, it’s different with the engineering sim; those are running nonstop.”
Sims are for engineers, too
An IndyCar team is more than just its drivers—”the spacer between the seat and the wheel,” according to Kirkwood—and the engineers rely heavily on sim work now that real-world testing is so highly restricted. And they use a lot more than just driver-in-the-loop (DiL).
“Digital simulation probably goes to a higher level,” explained Scott Graves, engineering manager at Andretti Global. “A lot of the models we develop work in the DiL as well as our other digital tools. We try to develop universal models, whether that’s tire models, engine models, or transmission models.”
“Once you get into to a fully digital model, then I think your optimization process starts kicking in,” Graves said. “You’re not just changing the setting and running a pretend lap with a driver holding a wheel. You’re able to run through numerous settings and optimization routines and step through a massive number of permutations on a car. Obviously, you’re looking for better lap times, but you’re also looking for fuel efficiency and a lot of other parameters that go into crossing the finish line first.”
Parts like this anti-roll bar are simulated thousands of times. Credit: Siemens/Andretti Global
As an example, Graves points to the dampers. “The shock absorber is a perfect example where that’s a highly sophisticated piece of equipment on the car and it’s very open for team development. So our cars have fully customized designs there that are optimized for how we run the car, and they may not be good on another team’s car because we’re so honed in on what we’re doing with the car,” he said.
“The more accurate a digital twin is, the more we are able to use that digital twin to predict the performance of the car,” said David Taylor, VP of industry strategy at Siemens DISW, which has partnered with Andretti for some years now. “It will never be as complete and accurate as we want it to be. So it’s a continuous pursuit, and we keep adding technology to our portfolio and acquiring companies to try to provide more and more tools to people like Scott so they can more accurately predict that performance.”
What to expect on Sunday?
Kirkwood was bullish about his chances despite starting relatively deep in the field, qualifying in 23rd place. “We’ve been phenomenal in race trim and qualifying,” he said. “We had a bit of a head-scratcher if I’m being honest—I thought we would definitely be a top-six contender, if not a front row contender, and it just didn’t pan out that way on Saturday qualifying.”
“But we rolled back out on Monday—the car was phenomenal. Once again, we feel very, very racy in traffic, which is a completely different animal than running qualifying,” Kirkwood said. “So I’m happy with it. I think our chances are good. We’re starting deep in the field, but so are a lot of other drivers. So you can expect a handful of us to move forward.”
The more nervous hybrid IndyCars with their more rearward weight bias will probably result in more cautions, according to Ericsson, who will line up sixth for the start of the race on Sunday.
“Whereas in previous years you could have a bit of a moment and it would scare you, you usually get away with it,” he said. “This year, if you have a moment, it usually ends up with you being in the fence. I think that’s why we’ve seen so many crashes this year—because a pendulum effect from the rear of the car that when you start losing it, this is very, very difficult or almost impossible to catch.”
“I think it’s going to mean that the race is going to be quite a few incidents with people making mistakes,” Ericsson said. “In practice, if your car is not behaving well, you bring it to the pit lane, right? You can do adjustments, whereas in the race, you have to just tough it out until the next pit stop and then make some small adjustments. So if you have a bad car at the start a race, it’s going to be a tough one. So I think it’s going to be a very dramatic and entertaining race.”
Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.
The late Richard Parry-Jones, who rose to CTO over at rival Ford, had a similar take: vehicle dynamics matter.
“There are people that think no one can tell the difference, you know, and I’ve always said they absolutely can tell the difference. They don’t know what it is. And the structural feel of the car going down the road, you know, people might explain, ‘It feels like a vault.’ Well, I can tell you exactly what’s going on, physically, from the parts and the tuning, and it’s an outcome that we strive for,” Morris said.
Does it need to be electrified?
The addition of electrified powertrains has certainly been one of the biggest trends in motorsport over the past decade or so. Since F1 made hybrids mandatory in 2014, we’ve also seen hybridization come to IMSA and WEC’s prototypes, and most recently, IndyCar added a supercapacitor-based system. But it hasn’t been a one-way street; this year, both the World Rally Championship and the British Touring Car Championship have abandoned the hybrid systems they adopted just a few years ago.
Win on Sunday, sell on Monday, like concrete tech transfer, is much less of a thing in the early 21st century, but marketing remains a central reason for OEM involvement in the sport. I asked Morris if Cadillac would be endurance racing with the V-Series R if the LMdh ruleset didn’t require a hybrid system.
“I think it’s an interesting discussion because you know, current EVs—the development [needed] where you can really do lapping at the Nürburgring or lapping full laps and not one hot lap, then you’re done, there’s just going to have to be development, development iteration, iteration, and that’s what racing is,” Morris said.
While the mechanical specifications of the hybrid Cadillac (and its rivals) are locked down, software development is unfettered, and Morris is not the first competitor to tell me how important that development path is now. Battery cell chemistries and battery cooling are also very active research areas and will only get more important once Cadillac enters F1. At first, that will be with Ferrari engines in the back, but starting in 2029, the Cadillac team will use a powertrain designed in-house.
After four years of the same technical rules, there’s not much left to find.
Max Verstappen pilots his Red Bull out of the garage during qualifying for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Credit: Alex Pantling/Getty Images
Max Verstappen pilots his Red Bull out of the garage during qualifying for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Credit: Alex Pantling/Getty Images
The Formula 1 race in Saudi Arabia last night was the fifth race in six weeks. The latest venue is a temporary street circuit of a breed with Las Vegas. It’s a nighttime race set against a backdrop of bright-colored lights and sponsor-clad concrete walls lining the track. Except in Jeddah, many of the corners are blind, and most are very fast. As at Suzuka, qualifying was very important here, with just a few milliseconds making the difference.
Although it’s far from the only autocratic petrostate on the F1 calendar, some people remain uncomfortable with F1 racing in Saudi Arabia, given that country’s record of human rights abuses. I’ve not been, nor do I have any plans to attend a race there, but I had my eyes opened to a broader perspective by a couple of very thoughtful pieces written by motorsport journalist and sometime Ars contributor Hazel Southwell, who has attended several races in the kingdom, including as an independent journalist. Feel free to blast the sport in the comments, but do give Hazel’s pieces a read.
Fireworks, drones, lasers, floodlights, LEDs… you’d think this was compensating for something. Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images
Red Bull really doesn’t want next year’s engine rules
Despite a meeting last week that was meant to put the matter to bed, the ongoing saga of changes to next year’s powertrain rules just won’t go away. From 2026 until 2030, the new powertrains will use a V6 that provides 55 percent of the car’s power and an electric hybrid motor that provides the other 45 percent. So that means an F1 car will only be able to make its full 1,000 hp (750 kW) if there’s charge in the battery. If the pack is depleted or derates, the car will have just 536 hp (400 kW) from its V6 engine.
Getting these new powertrains right is a big challenge, but it’s one that almost all the OEMs and teams are on board with. Despite the introduction of supposedly carbon-neutral fuel next year, hybrid powertrains are why companies like Audi and Cadillac are joining and why Honda is coming back. So the idea to ditch them after a couple of years in favor of throwback V10s got turned down in Bahrain.
The problem is Red Bull, which is currently Honda’s partner. Next year, Red Bull will use a V6 engine of its own making, with hybrid technology supplied by Ford. And for the last couple of years now, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner has been warning that the cars will run out of power halfway down the straights at tracks like Monza or Baku.
No, Alex, I can’t believe they keep talking about changing the rules again, either. Credit: Kym Illman/Getty Images
Yesterday, The Race reported that there’s yet another proposal to change next year’s engine regulations, one that would reduce the amount of energy deployed by the hybrid systems during the race. “What we desperately want to avoid is a situation where drivers are lifting and coasting from halfway down the straight,” Horner told The Race.
“It will be interesting to see” is among the list of banned phrases among the editors at Ars Technica, but between these complaints about the powertrains rules and other concerns about the moveable aerodynamics being introduced in 2026, I think it applies here. Are next year’s rules a big misstep? Will the active aero work or the narrower tires? I can’t wait to find out.
As I noted, qualifying was a game of milliseconds, best illustrated by this ghost car comparison video between Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and McLaren’s Oscar Piastri. According to the stopwatch, there was just a hundredth of a second between them. Less than a second covered the top 10 in qualifying. In Q2, where 15 cars compete for those 10 spots in Q3, there was just 1.1 seconds between first and last. And a second was all the difference between 1st and 18th in Q1.
That is far closer than F1 has ever been—many longtime fans can remember the days when the gap between first and second on the grid might be more than a second. And the reason is also why overtaking has become harder, despite aerodynamic rules meant to make passing easier.
Over the years, F1’s technical rules have become increasingly prescriptive, and the current set is quite rigid in terms of how a car must be designed. Even something like weight balance front-to-rear is tightly controlled, and after four years of the same rulebook, the teams have all gotten a good enough handle on things that the difference comes down to the finest of margins.
Those last few milliseconds are found in clean air, however. Following in someone’s wake isn’t anything like the problem it used to be in terms of losing front downforce, but it’s still worse than it was in 2022 or 2023.
Max got Maxxed, Lando got Lewised
Throughout practice, it looked like McLaren’s car was much faster than anyone else’s, but Piastri only lined up second, and Norris had to start 10th after wrecking early in Q3. At turn 1, Piastri got alongside Verstappen, then made it cleanly to the apex. Rather than concede the place and stay within the track limits, Verstappen chose to run across the painted surface that’s out of bounds, using it to gain a second or more on the orange car behind him.
Piastri made the corner; Verstappen did not. Credit: Clive Rose – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
Although lap 1, turn 1 incidents are treated more leniently by the stewards than the rest of the race, Verstappen’s actions (and his failure to yield the place back to Piastri) earned him a five-second penalty, which all but ensured Piastri the win after the mandatory tire-changing pit stops had cycled through.
The advantage of running in clean air was such that Verstappen would probably have held onto first place had he not been issued the penalty. And those predictions of McLaren’s long-run pace turned out to be off the mark—Verstappen finished less than three seconds behind the McLaren.
There was more overtaking behind those two. Charles Leclerc got his Ferrari past the Mercedes of George Russell in the late stages of the race to snatch third, and McLaren’s Lando Norris recovered from 10th place to 4th at the finish. Norris has lost the lead in the driver’s championship to his younger teammate, though, and while it’s probably too early to be talking about momentum, Piastri is gaining some.
A telling moment came when Norris had to get past Lewis Hamilton, who was having a torrid time in his Ferrari. Overtaking at Jeddah was helped a lot by having three zones for the drag reduction system, but you had to be smart about where you made your move.
The second DRS zone led to the final hairpin (turn 27), but overtaking someone here just gives them the opportunity to use their DRS to overtake you almost immediately, as the third zone runs the length of the start-finish straight, just after that hairpin. We saw this to good effect when Hamilton and Verstappen fought for the title in 2021, but apparently Norris didn’t get the memo. He twice tried to overtake Hamilton going into turn 27 rather than after it, and both times, Hamilton took advantage of his error.
Piastri in victory lane. History warns us that teams with two equal drivers and the best car often lose out on the driver’s championship to an extremely good driver in a slightly lesser car and a less quick teammate. Will 2025 be like 1986 and 2007? Credit: Mark Sutton – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
Those extra laps behind Hamilton could have cost Norris the final spot on the podium, something he may well rue at the end of the season when all the points are added up.
Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.
Honda’s motorsport division must be doing some spring cleaning. Today, the Honda Racing Corporation announced that it’s getting into the memorabilia business, offering up parts and even whole vehicles for fans and collectors. And to kick things off, it’s going to auction some components from the RA100E V10 engines that powered the McLaren Honda MP4/5Bs of Ayrton Senna and Gerhard Berger to both F1 titles in 1990.
“We aim to make this a valuable business that allows fans who love F1, MotoGP and various other races to share in the history of Honda’s challenges in racing since the 1950s,” said Koi Watanabe, president of HRC, “including our fans to own a part of Honda’s racing history is not intended to be a one-time endeavor, but rather a continuous business that we will nurture and grow.”
The bits from Senna’s and Berger’s V10s will go up for auction at Monterey Car Week later this year, and the lots will include some of the parts seen in the photo above: cam covers, camshafts, pistons, and conrods, with a certificate of authenticity and a display case. And HRC is going through its collections to see what else it might part with, including “heritage machines and parts” from IndyCar, and “significant racing motorcycles.”
The new rules have been extremely attractive to carmakers. In addition to causing Honda to reconsider its exit, Ford is also coming back (developing the hybrid system for Red Bull Powertrains), and both Audi and Cadillac are also entering the sport, although the American brand won’t have its own engines ready until 2028.
Audi and Cadillac will both count as new engine suppliers, so they are allowed some extra development resources. However, Honda is counted as an existing manufacturer and doesn’t get any special treatment.
When I asked Watanabe how the work was progressing, he said, “Not so easy. We are struggling. Now we are trying our best to show the result next year,” he said. “Everything is new. [The] motor is new, [developing] 350 kW—it’s a very compact one that we need. And also the lightweight battery is not so easy to develop. Also the small engine with big power. So everything is very difficult, but we try our best.”
Getting it right will be vital—although Aston Martin now has the advantage of legendary designer Adrian Newey among its staff. Newey is on record saying that the 2026 rules have a “big chance” of being an engine formula, where each car’s aerodynamics are far less important, unlike today’s situation.
Trickle-down
OEMs go racing to raise their profile and sell more cars, but they also do it as a way to learn how to make their products better. Honda and HRC are no exception to that. But concrete examples of technology transfer from track to road are rare these days—it’s more about cross-pollination between engineers.
“There is a group within Honda that shares technical information yearly. It’s not just the racing; it’s all across Honda, so I think there’s been some interest in the technology and software we’ve developed,” Fu said. “Whether it trickles down to road cars… it’s a big jump from a race car to road cars, but I think some of the fundamental technical ideas can propagate down there.”
“From the F1 project, we can learn how to improve the hybrid system itself, and of course, we can learn how to create high-efficiency batteries and motors for the future. That’s why we decided to reparticipate in Formula 1,” Watanabe said.
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.
