The final fortnight of Formula 1 is upon us, but there’s no time to relax for Red Bull Racing with a couple of important achievements still in sight.
RBR has turned a shaky start to the year into a season for the ages, and while the team and Max Verstappen have already set some new benchmarks for domination, there’s still more to achieve.
Verstappen took the overall record for most wins in a season with his 14th victory last time out in Mexico City.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSThe 2022 championship fight has been straightforward in every way its predecessor season wasn’t, with the racing on track largely uncontroversial and the aggro of 2021 almost entirely absent, with only the cost cap fracas briefly disturbing the peace.
But that only rings true if you look exclusively at the battle up front.
Just behind the frontrunning pack, the battle for fourth is anything but quiet.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSIt hasn’t taken long for Max Verstappen’s place in the pantheon of driving greats to be weighed up.
His second championship has put him in rare air. He’s now won more titles than 17 of F1’s most iconic legends and is tied with legends like Fernando Alonso, Mika Häkkinen, Emerson Fittipaldi, Jim Clark, Graham Hill and Alberto Ascari.
Only 10 drivers have won more than two championships.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSReigning champion Shane van Gisbergen says he’ll wait to see what the Gen3 era of Supercars looks like before deciding on how long he’ll continue racing in the category.
The freshly minted 2022 champion has dominated the season on the way to his third title, winning an unprecedented 21 races so far.
It’s an especially impressive record given the 15-season veteran has been increasingly experimental off track. This year he made debut entries in the 24 Hours of Le Mans (fifth in class), the Australian Rally Championship (second place) and the World Rally Championship (third in class, ninth overall) as well finishing third at the Bathurst 12 Hour.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSFrancesco Bagnaia and Fabio Quartararo started the season as the two championship favourites, but if you’d attempted to plot out the campaign during pre-season testing, there’s no way you’d have come close to predicting the year we ended up getting.
Far from a titanic duel from the outset, both started the year way off the pace and downcast about their chances. They then took it on turns dominating the field in long stints until we got our three-race shootout to end the season.
But really campaigns can’t be segmented as neatly as that. They may have started the final stanza almost level on points, but the momentum that had waxed and waned between them had already set up an almost inevitable conclusion.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSFew drivers yet to drive a modern Formula 1 car have had their movements as heavily scrutinised as Oscar Piastri, whose sensational disruption to this year’s driver market as one of the biggest stories of the season.
The Melburnian will move to McLaren next season as Daniel Ricciardo’s replacement, but the timing of his switch from Alpine has been the subject of much speculation given the needle between the two teams and the controversy around his intended split.
But a French magazine has spotted Piastri in a private test for McLaren — albeit with some notable differences to tests set up for other drivers.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTS‘Greatest spectacle in the world’: Vegas F1 tickets sell out in minutes despite insane price tag
The Las Vegas Grand Prix won’t be like any other race.
Formula 1 is perpetually in the business of walking the line between spectacle and sport, and its third concurrent race in the United States will be the biggest test of its resolve.
Next November F1 cars will zip past the city’s New World wonders — the Bellagio fountain, the Venetian hotel with its replica Venice landmarks, the pretend Eiffel Tower — turn left about a block north of the USA’s eighth busiest airport, snake back north past a giant spherical concert venue and then south of the obligatory golf course before rejoining the Strip.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSDoes anyone still watch free-to-air television, and if so, why?
The odds were heavily stacked in his favour, but rather than them lightening his load, Bagnaia felt their full weight for three days at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo.
There wasn’t a single moment of the Valencia Grand Prix weekend at which the presumptive world champion looked truly comfortable. He did his best to maintain an air of calm, but his on-track performance was a glimpse of the roiling turmoil beneath the surface.
He only just scraped through free practice 0.059 ahead of the Q2 cut-off time.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSLewis Hamilton has a long and deep history with Brazil. Now it’s been formalised with citizenship.
The Briton has long identified Ayrton Senna as his racing hero and driving force, and it was a dream come true to win his first championship in Sao Paulo in 2008.
In that race he was the villain, defeating home hero Felipe Massa, but his passion was undimmed, and it’s a testament to his affinity for the country that he’s since won over the enthusiastic local crowd to the point that he’s now welcomed back to the circuit as a local favourite.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSFabio Quartararo has praised title leader Francesco Bagnaia for closing the 91-point gap between them despite lamenting his Yamaha’s lack of pace leaving him fighting with one hand behind his back.
Quartararo starts the title-deciding Valencia Grand Prix this weekend with a 23-point deficit and an extremely narrow path to a second world championship.
The Frenchman has been vociferous about Yamaha’s shortcomings this year despite a bright start to the season that propelled him to an early points lead.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSIt all comes down to this.
After 19 races, four changes to the championship lead and an unprecedented fightback, just Francesco Bagnaia and Fabio Quartararo remain in contention for the 2022 MotoGP title with one race remaining.
Either winner will write an improbable chapter in motorcycling history.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSFrancesco Bagnaia was so close to the MotoGP championship trophy that he could have seen his own reflection in the solid silver plaques bearing the names of the riders he hopes to emulate at this weekend’s Valencia Grand Prix.
He had been placed alongside the glittering prize in a photo shoot with title rival Fabio Quartararo, who he leads in the standings by an almost unassailable 23 points.
But despite being closer to the trophy than he’s ever been before, he refused to touch it.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSLewis Hamilton says he wants to continue in Formula 1 until at least the end of 2025 as he prepares for contract negotiations to extend his stay at Mercedes.
Hamilton is out of contract at the end of next season, when he’ll be 38 years old. Another two-year deal would take him past his 40th birthday.
But the seven-time champion has showed no signs of slowing down in his 16th season despite the downturn in Mercedes’s competitiveness that’s left him facing the first winless campaign of his career.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSFrancesco Bagnaia is on the cusp of doing the unthinkable.
Just nine rounds ago the man christened as Bologna’s best hope was watching his bike slide through the gravel at the Sachsenring as reigning champion Fabio Quartararo powered up the road and to eventual victory.
His fourth crash of the year put him a staggering 91 points off the title lead. No rider has ever come back from such a margin.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSAussie rising star Jack Doohan has his sights firmly set on Formula 1 after getting his first taste of a grand prix weekend in Mexico City.
Doohan took part in first practice at the Mexico City Grand Prix as the most senior member of Alpine’s junior driver academy, standing in for Esteban Ocon.
It was the culmination of his junior program with the team that has so far featured three private tests in last year’s car as well as 100 kilometres in the current Alpine for a filming day.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSFabio Quartararo has been cursed by his own pre-season prophecy of non-competitiveness on his outgunned Yamaha M1.
Only a brief spell of success in the middle of the year threatened to disprove his prediction from way back during pre-season testing. Since the midseason he’s been forced to helplessly watch on as other riders chipped away at the points lead he’d toiled so hard for.
This weekend comes his final reckoning.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSTamara Molinaro is as determined a racer as you’ll ever meet. Born into a motorsport family, her passion for rallying was sealed when she got into her first rally car on ice — and with a couple of pillows on the seat — at just 11 years old.
Then there was no turning back. European Rally Championship, WRC, rallycross, Italian Gravel Rally Championship — she’s done it all and has the trophies to prove it. And this year she added an Extreme E podium trophy to the collection — not bad considering she started 2022 without a drive.
But it hasn’t always been easy for Tamara, who rose through the ranks so quickly she had to learn to be an adult on the course and behind the wheel.
She sat down with Off Track to talk through her rapid progression, her love for Extreme E and — yes — that tattoo she got with Timo Scheider.