Two breakthrough Ford victories at the Gold Coast provided seemingly emphatic evidence that the sport’s latest round of parity changes is doing the job.
Parity has been one of the season’s biggest narratives, with Ford teams unconvinced that the Gen3 Mustang can match the Chevrolet Camaro in a straight fight.
With so much of both cars now effectively bought off the shelf under the regulations introduced this season, the five Ford-backed squads feel they’ve been hamstrung in this year’s championship, resulting in an all-General Motors title battle.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSDaniel Ricciardo was surprisingly plucky for a man who’d finished his previous race stone-cold last.
Just days before arriving in Mexico City, Ricciardo had trundled to 15th at the United States Grand Prix, his first race back from a broken hand ending anonymously a lap down from the leaders.
And yet here he was seemingly brimming with confidence for his second crack behind the wheel.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSMax Verstappen is accumulating Formula 1 records so fast that he’s starting to re-break some of his own.
Verstappen’s 16th win of the season eclipses the previous best of 15 set by — you guessed it — himself last season.
Of course you might argue that numbers like these are historically meaningless with so many races in modern F1.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSFor exciting results, just remove oxygen.
Mexico City always produces interesting and unusual results, with its elevation at 2.2 kilometres above sea level creating a unique set of conditions for Formula 1.
The thin air means there’s less grip. Small changes in track temperature have a huge impact on grip — and the track temperature can vary massively based on minor changes in cloud cover.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSLando Norris opened the Mexico City Grand Prix weekend by declaring that McLaren wouldn’t be very competitive.
As has often been the case this year, the exact opposite of his pessimistic forecast appears to be coming true.
To be fair to Norris, on paper this track shouldn’t suit the MCL60. It’s mostly slow, fiddly corners of the kind the car hates, even after its massive round of mid-year upgrades. The low-grip conditions are also generally not McLaren territory, nor are the long straights.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSMax Verstappen topped a drizzly FP2 to sweep Friday practice at the Mexico City Grand Prix.
Light rain arrived in time for the start of the session and intensified in the last sector in the last 15 minutes, but it was never hard enough to suspend running or force drivers onto wet-weather tires.
The cooler track conditions appeared to bring the field closer together, with seven manufacturers represented in the top eight, which was spread over just 0.391s.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen has pipped Alex Albon to top spot in first practice at the Mexico City Grand Prix.
Verstappen set the benchmark at 1m 19.718s on a sole run on fresh softs, though he subsequently had to cut short his stint on the red-marked tire after reporting something loose in the footwell.
Albon was his closest challenger, the Williams car propelling him to a time just 0.095s further back thanks to a purple first sector.
Continue reading on RACERYou’d have to be brave or crazy to be willing to bet on what the MotoGP championship will look like this Sunday night.
October in the premier class has been nothing short of electric.
Jorge Martin seized control of the championship in the Indonesian sprint, but his grasp lasted barely 24 hours, surely the shortest time spent at the top of the standings in the history of grand prix racing.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSIt’s hard to think of a step change as dramatic as transitioning from the grandeur of Bathurst to the wackiness of the Gold Coast.
Gone is the flowing ascent, the glide over the hill and the twisting run down.
In comes big braking, kerb hopping and wall grinding.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSThere are 20 drivers competing in Formula 1 this season, but Mexico’s energetic crowd has eyes only for Sergio Pérez.
The Mexico City Grand Prix is built on Pérez’s idol-like status in his home country, where he’s held up as one of the nation’s great sporting exports.
It might be easy to see Pérez only through the lens of his struggles this season, but it’s worth remembering the body of work he’s put together over more than a decade in the sport, including six victories — one of which was a superb midfield win with Racing Point — and 28 other podiums.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSFord teams will get a tweaked aero kit for this weekend’s Gold Coast 500 to address ongoing concerns about parity between the Mustang and the Chevrolet Camaro.
Supercars opened its second inquest into parity between the two models immediately after the Bathurst 1000, which was set for an all-Camaro podium before Broc Feeney’s late retirement with a broken gear shifter.
The build-up to the race had been overshadowed by Ford teams lobbying for last-minute aerodynamic changes they said would be crucial to a competitive event.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSMercedes and Ferrari have pinned Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc’s disqualifications from the United States Grand Prix on the sprint weekend format and the bumpy Circuit of the Americas surface.
Hamilton finished the race third and pole-getter Charles Leclerc claimed sixth, but both were excluded from the final classification for running their cars too low.
Ride height is governed by a wooden plank fixed beneath the car. The plank is 1 centimetre thick and can wear by no more than 1 millimetre over the course of the race without falling foul of the rules.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSLewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc are disqualified from the US Grand Prix for breaking an almost 29-year-old rule by as little as 1 millimetre — and both the sprint format and the bumpy Austin track played a part. Daniel Ricciardo’s injury comeback hits a hurdle. Max Verstappen gives short shrift to rumour of a Red Bull rift.
Are sprint races too long? And why are people obsessed with planking again?
Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc were two standout performers at the United States Grand Prix, with Leclerc taking an unlikely pole position on Friday and Hamilton coming close to overhauling Max Verstappen for victory on Sunday.
By Sunday night they were notable for a completely different reason: both were disqualified from the race.
Disqualifications are rare, reserved largely for technical breaches and the most serious sporting breaches relating to the fairness of competition.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSMax Verstappen beats Lewis Hamilton to a surprisingly close victory — before Hamilton is disqualified.
Lewis Hamilton has been stripped of second place at the United States Grand Prix after a post-race technical inspection revealed his Mercedes car was set up to run lower than allowed according to the regulations.
Charles Leclerc has also been disqualified from sixth place after Ferrari was found to have committed the same breach.
A random post-race technical check found both cars suffered excessive wear to their rear titanium skid blocks.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTSMerc’s missed victory chance before DSQ; silver lining to dual Aussie disasters: F1 talking points
The United States Grand Prix was going to be all about Mercedes’s late-season renaissance, with upgrades brought to Austin powering Lewis Hamilton to within a couple of seconds of Max Verstappen and an unlikely victory.
Then Hamilton was disqualified.
Both Hamilton and pole-getter Charles Leclerc were thrown out of the race for failing post-race technical inspections. Neither driver was at fault and the breaches will have had a limited effect on performance, but there’s zero tolerance when it comes to the technical rules.
Continue reading on FOX SPORTS