Voluntold: Red Bull's Horner Criticizes Volunteer Marshal, F1 Claps Back, Public Wonders Why Moneyed Series Relies on Unpaid Workers

We know the eyes of our readers generally glaze over like a Thanksgiving ham at the mere mention of an F1 topic. That’s why we don’t run race reports and the like on our front page. However, a few comments from this weekend’s F1 event – plus a follow-up observation by an astute Twitter user – prompt us to deviate from the norm.

Specifically, someone has asked why an outfit with estimated earnings of $1.38 billion continues to rely on volunteers for some of its most important work.

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Chevy Performance Reveals 10.3-Liter Crate V8 With 1,000 HP

On Wednesday, Chevrolet Performance announced the ZZ632/1000 — a naturally aspirated 632-cubic-inch (10,348 cc) V8 producing 1,004 horsepower and 876 lb-ft of torque on pump gasoline.

While 100 hp per liter may not be an engineering marvel today, delivering a crate motor that’s sized to embarrass every other powertrain installed into a production vehicle is an achievement in itself. This 10.3-liter behemoth makes the 8.4-liter V10 installed in Dodge’s Viper (rest in peace) look like it’s supposed to be fitted to a riding lawnmower. Of course, it’s also huge in comparison to literally every powertrain we’ve seen on a project car that didn’t source its parts from vintage aircraft.

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QOTD: If You Win on Sunday, Will You Sell on Monday?

Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday. That’s been something of a mantra for car companies over the last hundred-odd years, and success in motorsports is considered a worthy enough goal for major automakers the world over to invest tens of millions – heck, hundreds of millions of dollars – to compete, if not to win. But, is it real? Does “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” hold water?

I think the answer is obvious – because, if winning races actually sold cars, Lancia would be the best-selling car brand on Earth.

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Did Helio Castroneves Win Indy Because of TTAC?

I’m not doing a detailed Indy 500 recap this year because the race, while certainly not boring, was a bit bereft of drama. Not totally bereft — Helio Castroneves’ win was thrilling, especially since he spent the final portion of the race in a shootout in order to take the checkered flag — but it was clean and quick, and not a soap opera on wheels. This is a good thing.

Sure, there were pit-road spins and Graham Rahal knows how it feels when the wheels fall off, but the race was mostly crash-free. Eventual winner Castroneves worked his way toward the front and got into a duel with Alex Palou for the win. The win put Castroneves into the four-time winner club. And we can’t help but think we had a small part in his victory.

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2021 Acura TLX Type S Picks Up the Pace This Weekend

The 2021 Acura TLX Type S will pace the field at the Acura Sports Car Challenge at Mid-Ohio in Lexington, Ohio this weekend. The TLX Type S’ debut is one we reported previously, with more details available now than Acura had previously released.

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2021 Bronco Badlands Podiums at Mexican 1000 Rally

A stock 2021 Bronco Badlands finished third in the NORRA Mexican 1000 off-road rally, driven by two Ford engineers. The podium finish came in the Pre-Runner Truck class.

Bronco engineer manager Jamie Groves and Seth Goslawski, another Bronco engineer, drove the majority of the 1,141 mile race across the Baja peninsula. Brad Lovell, a Bronco advisory panel member and prior NORRA winner, helped navigate and drove one stage during the five-day event.

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Mini Pacesetter to Debut at Formula E World Championship

Tasked with building something to serve as the official safety car for the 2021 FIA Formula E World Championship, Mini has delivered a vehicle that bridges the gap between the raucous and rowdy John Cooper Works model and all-electric Mini Electric. While one-offs aren’t usually all that interesting to your average consumer, the Mini Pacesetter seems to be providing the automaker with a space to test some of its theories about how a JCW EV might take shape and will likely foreshadow such a product.

The manufacturer has even acknowledged this, though it’s a little early to expect an electrified version of Mini’s flagship performance model. Despite looking like it’s ready to compete in a series of its own, the Pacesetter uses an unmodified motor lifted from the Mini Electric. That means about 180 horsepower and a smidgen over 200 foot-pounds of torque, which would have been outstanding on the featherweight original. But the last few decades have forced Mini’s products to become comparatively portly, requiring the brand to shave as much weight off the Pacesetter as it could.

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Sabine Schmitz Dies at 51

Sabine Schmitz, often referred to as the Queen of the Nurburgring, has passed away from cancer at the age of 51.

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NASCAR Ready For Circuit of The Americas Races in May

NASCAR’s inaugural run at the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas will take place May 21-23, and Speedway Motorsports, the event organizer, announced their entitlement partners today.

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Mickey Thompson Tests Tire Toughness at King of the Hammers

Only 37 of 84 cars finished the King of the Hammers, proclaimed the planet’s toughest one-day off-road race, on time this year. Tad Dowker and Jordan Pellegrino, two racers on Mickey Thompson Baja Boss X tires, were among the finishers.

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King of the Hammers Nails Kick-Off Race

King of the Hammers returned to Johnson Valley, California for a week of racing, featuring the largest desert racing purse: $270,000. That was doled out to winners in T1, T2, B1, B2, B3, and Class 11 vehicles.

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Rare Rides: The 1998 Chevrolet Corvette Indianapolis 500 Pace Car Replica, Purple and Banana

We’ve featured a Corvette before in this series, as well as two different Indianapolis 500 pace cars, but we’ve never had a single car that combined Corvette and Indy pace car flavors together.

Turns out when that special combination occurred in 1998, it was purp drank and banana colored.

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Rare Rides: The 1997 Renault Sport Spider, Track Car for the Road

Today’s Rare Ride is equally at home on a track or on a road. Lightweight and minimalistic in its approach, the Renault Sport Spider has only the things you need to drive, and nothing else.

Let’s check out this bashful looking sports car.

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Honda Ditching Formula 1, Sticking With IndyCar

Honda has decided to leave Formula 1 at the end of the 2021 season to allegedly focus on electric and fuel-cell development. The company has said F1 hybrid combustion engines didn’t mesh with its plan of realizing “carbon neutrality by 2050” and has opted to leave Red Bull and AlphaTauri in a difficult spot moving forward. They’ll both need to find a replacement engine supplier before the 2022 season while Honda decides where it might make a better environmental impact — settling on IndyCar.

Less than a full weekend after vowing to abandon F1, Honda doubled down on Indy by agreeing to a multi-year extension to continue supplying motors until at least 2023. In fact, Honda Performance Development (HPD) is actively working on a 2.4-liter, twin-turbocharged V6 hybrid unit, aimed at roughly 900 horsepower, for the sport’s next generation of cars. While we’re pleased to see any manufacturer maintaining its commitment to motorsports, the decision seems at odds with Honda’s plan to pull out of Formula 1 — which has likewise acknowledged a desire to become carbon neutral. Like Indy, F1 is also planning on using hybrid combustion engines for the foreseeable future.

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Rare Rides: The 1981 Lotus 87 Formula One Car, in Black Gold

While the Rare Rides series has featured a few Lotus vehicles in past, none of them rose quite to the importance of today’s single-seat example. A one-of-one, it’s the car Lotus used in the 1981 Formula One racing series.

And now you can buy it, and drive it on quick jaunts to Target or Cracker Barrel.

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  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?