Autobayng News Team
Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of the RaceFans round-up.
Comment of the day
Formula 1’s official tyre supplier deserves criticism after admitting again it will have to enforce stint limits upon drivers at the Qatar Grand Prix:
I am often sympathetic towards Pirelli due to the amount of stick they get for either producing tyres that degraded too fast or not by enough however on this issue specifically i’m not not happy at all. This will be F1’s fourth grand prix so there’s no excuse for Pirelli not getting their tyres right for this track.
Perhaps some tyre testing during pre-season earlier in the season at this track or at Mugello (which is a similar profile of track to Lusail) may have been prudent and sensible. Perhaps it would be have been smart move to have one of the 2026 pre-season tests at the Lusail Circuit instead of the track in Sakhir as the Lusail circuit of those two circuits seems to be the one Pirelli struggles with far more. Lusail is becoming a real bogey circuit for Pirelli in the same way the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course was for Michelin in the mid-2000s.
Stephen Taylor
Social media and links
Brown interview: Horner is arrogant and Verstappen is a bruiser (The Telegraph)
‘Brown insists it will never be a ‘one-driver team’ like Red Bull, where Verstappen is the priority. ‘It’s the McLaren way. Remember Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.” Having two duelling team mates is, he adds, the best way to win the constructors’ championship and the drivers’ championship.”
F1 feels at home ahead of third annual Las Vegas Grand Prix (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
‘Tickets, we have already exceeded where we ended last year, which is positive. We will not be lowering ticket prices, because everything has been yielding up. We started with a lower base price this year instead of dropping them at the end. We actually raised prices, so people who bought early were incentivised to do so.’
McLaren Racing expands commitment to supporting the next generation of female motorsport talent (McLaren)
‘As part of the expansion to the McLaren Racing Driver Development Programme, current F1 Academy driver Ella Lloyd will be joined by Ella Stevens and Ella Hakkinen.’
End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled (Financial Times)
‘In a valley between two mountain ranges, levelling work is evident for the airport and its runways. ‘In true (McLaren sponsor) Neom fashion, there’s a mountain at the end of the runway that had to be blown up,’ said the senior architect. Construction work has now stopped on both the spine and the airport. No new target for the airport has been set. Concrete infrastructure under construction in a dry, rocky cut, showing a long trench, scaffolding, large pipes and a few workers. The foundations for The Line’s first modules — perhaps the largest piles ever laid by man — are also visible, waiting to support the world’s largest occupied building, if it ever arrives. The village of Qayal, which was a few kilometres from the ‘hidden marina’, has been razed. Fifteen members of the Huwaitat tribe who protested against their eviction were sent to prison, some for up to 50 years, and three others were sentenced to death, according to human rights observers.’
2026 Audi F1 car development already stopped, ‘now focused on 2027 and 2028’ (The Drive)
‘Dreyer did not divulge a number for the investment made in Neuburg, though he laughed and said he ‘did not want to think about the number.’ That said, later that evening, when I asked the same question to Audi AG’s finance boss, the answer was ‘a three-digit-million amount.”
Formula 1 tech used to rev-up train wi-fi speeds in new pilot (BBC)
He added that by using technology originally developed for F1 cars, trains should be able to switch between ground and space-based networks such as LEO satellites to ‘reliably connect’ without drop outs.
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