Another great interview from CAR, this time Alfa’s CEO,
CAR’s Luke Wilkinson interviewed Alfa’s upward-moving CEO at the Paris Motor Show. I quite like this chap because he seems to have both saved Alfa from the Marchionne madness (yeah, fight me) and has sensible things to say about the government’s role in the EV transformation.
Car and Driver has a fascinating insight into the manual uptake of the Subaru (Impreza) WRX in the US. A huge number of folks like to change their own gears in the turbo flattie and I for one have renewed my hope for that benighted country. Well, for a moment at least.
The US is very strange on this front – BMW supplied US buyers with manual versions of the E60 M5 but not Europeans. Go figure.
Carsguide’s excellent Tom White has an interview with MG Australia’s COO about the brand’s future in Australia, specifically whether other SAIC sub-brands will come to our shores.
Autocar features a story about one of my favourite cars ever (I have never driven one but love them) – the Audi A2. To celebrate the toddler’s 25th anniversary, Audi has dropped the one-off A2 e-tron.
The A2 was way ahead of its time and ironically the e-tron version makes it instantly contemporary.
Autoblog (still not doing URL previews) has an interesting story about the difference in EV uptake between US states. I find this stuff interesting and goes back to one of my favourite quotes in the Alfa CEO interview..
It has been well over a (busy) week since Tesla’s We, Robot event was held on the Warner Bros movie lot in Los Angeles. The idea of the title apart from being totally on-brand lame in a way only Musk and his companies seem to manage, was to educate us all on Tesla’s pivot to robotics and AI.
Both of these things are current tech buzzwords, less so in automotive. Robotics has long been a part of the automotive world, taking over a lot of dangerous jobs and specifically precise ones. Legacy automakers long ago worked out where humans are better than robots (and where women are better than men, at least at Volvo in Gothenburg) and adjusted their production lines accordingly.
As far as I know almost no legacy automaker has a fully automated line the way Musk originally wanted for the Model 3 and Y. The infamous failure of these fully automated lines should have served as a warning to him but, as always, these things don’t. I would admire his commitment if I didn’t think he already knew it was all codswallop and/or a way to troll his workforce.
Before I go on, a disclaimer. It is entirely possible for a company CEO to be absolutely awful either as a person or at their job (or both) and for a company to still be a success. Tesla is a success. It has completely changed the game in a way few companies can or will achieve but desperately want.
I am not a Tesla fan but I get why people buy them and like them. And it’s a company that continues to hold promise – on the battery and automotive front – but its capricious frontman continues to be a threat to the overall business.
Disclosure: I own a Tesla Powerwall 2 which I obtained privately. Not that Tesla would ever give me or anyone else one.
Tesla makes a lot of money for investors and is hideously, stupidly over-priced because of his capricious nature and total commitment to the con, often announcing products to juice the share price.
Some months ago, Reuters reported that Tesla had abandoned the US$25,000 Model 2 in favour of its pursuit of full self-driving cabs. Musk responded on Twitter (I do not care it is now called something else, I am not interested) by saying, “Reuters is lying again” but did not make any specific rebuttals, so yeah, that car is gone or at least postponed.
Not long after the We, Robot thing was touted to happen in early August but was bumped. Not even going to get into the dodginess of the original date, it’s just too horrifying.
Full Self-Driving is a con
Musk has long peddled the idea of self-driving cars and more specifically self-driving taxis. Waymo is having some success with the idea but the reason they’re not crashing into each other and other things is clear when you see one – the sensors and cameras and LIDAR gear are very prominent. Still not perfect, of course, but the accident rate seems okay if you’re a bit cold-hearted about these things.
Waymo’s LIDAR-equipped Jaguar I-Pace
Musk said in 2019 that LIDAR is “a fool’s errand.” That doesn’t make much logical sense and nor does the company’s sudden but quiet LIDAR spend with Luminar in the past 12 months.
Since 2019 Tesla’s expensive, beta-state Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech has heavily relied on cameras, dubbed Tesla Vision. Ultrasonic sensors were also considered surplus to requirements. Enough time on YouTube will show you how that goes. Even Tesla reasonable fanbois will tell you that Full Self-Driving -itself a misnomer – is not ready and requires a lot of supervision.
Musk goes on, without censure or meaningful legal repercussions, telling people about FSD but Tesla’s corporate folks quietly tell everyone that the cars require supervision and intervention where needed.
The advantage of current Tesla product is that they have pedals and a steering wheel. That means a driver can take control is the dumb-arse FSD tech has come a cropper and tries to mow down some kids on scooters on the footpath.
There isn’t always a thinking human behind those controls but to dismiss that as “typical Tesla driver” is to dismiss the evidence that a huge proportion of drivers are paying no attention to what they’re doing no matter what they’re driving.
This is all important to the We, Robot event.
Musk hates public transport
It’s important to note that Musk is also dead against public transport. The Boring Company was specifically formed to create tunnels for Teslas to get them away from the traffic. So basically he’s reinvented the metro train but for douchebags but also created:
underground traffic
a failure
a way to part his fans’ and their money with dumb merchandise stunts
He later admitted that it was just to run interference against California’s High-Speed Rail project and any broader attempt to lure people from cars and into mass transit.
Adjunct to The Boring Company was Loop. Just read the idiotic benefits of it to truly drink in the searing dumbness of the idea. It’s basically a metro without the actual benefits of a metro. Yeah, you’re on your own in the Loop vehicle but that means a 1:1 ratio of vehicles to people, 2:1 at best. That’s completely idiotic.
I love cars. I love driving. I do not like traffic and I do not enjoy driving in the city. Give me a train or tram any day for a run into the city. A bus if you must but they’re awful, or at least they are in Sydney.
Tesla has never been a car company, really, it has always been a tech company and treated as such by Wall Street. Big Tech, if I may use that terrible phrase, does not care about you. You buy a product with ten working features, some of them requiring a subscription.
A year later, you have four working features because, in the name of shareholder value, some idiot fired the team responsible for the other six. But you still have to pay the subscription. Sucks to be you because one of those things is the thing you have come to rely on for a specific reason.
Modern Silicon Valley is entirely built on that. Netflix is not what it was. Streaming music is hot garbage because you have to own a patchwork of services to get all the music you like.
It’s not new, though. Go back to the birth of the public internet with people like Netscape’s Marc Andreessen and Sun’s Jack Welch-worshipping Scott McNealy kicking around, this is just the end-game of that whole dot-com boom. That’s just two names from an army of misanthropic tech “pioneers” who built their careers on the backs of hard-working engineers and people with real ideas.
Ring any bells? Musk bought into Tesla, made the actual founders footnotes in history and the condition of his buy-in was to be named a founder even though he wasn’t. Those guys had great ideas and wanted to make EVs a reality.
Their naivety in their dealings with Musk are echoed time and again in the Valley with starry-eyed founders being shafted by rapacious growth-at-all-costs morons and the close relatives of the Private Equity Ponytails, the Venture Capitalists.
Must hates public transport and says extremely stupid things about it and his vision for its replacement.
This is all context for next week’s second part where I talk about the event itself, how the products themselves are informed by Musk’s – and to be fair, Silicon Valley’s – total disregard for actual people.
Next week, I’ll cover the glaring, stupendous and probably dangerous flaws in the We, Robot Cybercar concept.
Sorry for the quiet week on The Redline, I’ve been moving house and wouldn’t you know it, there’s not a lot of time for website-ing!
This weekend we have some of the real good stuff. A car almost too wacky to be an Alfa, an American perspective on the original Mini, a young bloke doing silly things in the wrong car and a funny old British wagon.
Number 27 is not always a channel I watch but sometimes something irresistible pops up in the feed. The Alfa SZ is the kind of car that only the Past Times could have produced. Completely wacky looking, super-sounding and one of my favourite cars of all time that I know I’ll never drive.
This one took a while to appear in the feed, a great video about the original Mini. It’s from a North American perspective which makes the video all the more interesting to me because I think it’s interesting to get these different views of cars.
This is a really long one. Basically, it’s the story of a boy and his drift car traversing the Continental United States. Nate Z Great is an interesting chap to say the least and I of course think drifting on public roads is completely bonkers, but it’s just one of those videos that breaks through my reservations. And it’s a long one, too.
Idriveaclassic’s Steph tells about a now-obscure little wagon (sorry, estate), the Hillman Avenger Estate. I love the way Steph goes about her business and this video is as charming as you might expect.
And that’s Weekend Watches for the week. Normal service just might resume next week with what I think will be a magnificently angry column about a recent vehicle launch.
Another new car brand launches in Australia, BYD’s head of European Operations has some things to say, new Prelude and Celica coming, Alpine A390 going Stateside and a Renault 5 review.
Chinese brand Deepal is coming to Australia through Subaru and Peugeot importer Inchcape. Predictably it’s all about SUVs, launching with the S07 mid-sizer.
CAR gets some great interviews and this time they’ve got Stella Li. Li is the company’s head of European Operations which is interesting because of the tariff situation. Li also talks about the brand’s wild names and forthcoming battery tech, including solid-state.
I recommend reading this while listening to Feist’s Sealion, just because it’s funny and every time I hear the Sea Lion mentioned that’s what I hear.
Speaking of the Prelude and Celica, CarThrottle’s Mike Bartholomew has news of the forthcoming Celica (to live alongside another Supra, apparently!). Toyota appears to be doubling down on sports cars so hopefully this wee beastie will make it to market.
Autoweek thinks that the Alpine A390 could launch in America. I mean, it seems rude to deny a place with unaffordable health care and a bin fire of a political system…
Another week has flashed by and I’ve dug up some primo weekend content to watch during the ads on the Bathurst 1000 if you’re too cheap to have Kayo or Foxtel (like me).
Scotty’s Corvette video looks pretty good, we’ve got an exotica junkyard in the US and a mangatastic video from Donut.
To go with his excellent written review of the Corvette Z06 and E-Ray, Scott Newman has published a video to his Youtube channel Addicted to Sliding. He doesn’t really need an introduction so…I won’t.
Don’t forget to subscribe while you’re there.
YouTuber Magnus Walker has done a spectacular-looking video of the Rudi Klein junkyard. It’s so beautiful to look at, so wonderfully put together and I reckon even if you didn’t much like cars, you’d still enjoy this.
Thanks again to regular co-pilot Mark Dewar for this spot.
The team at Donut has lashed together another ripper video idea, this time driving every car featured in Initial D. For the uninitiated, Initial D is a Japanese street racing manga series. To say it has achieved cult status is the kind of mild understatement for which I am categorically not known.
The AE86 thumbnail should give you a good idea of what you’re in for. And again, even if Initial D isn’t your thing, I reckon this high-energy video is worth a look.
I reckon these should keep you going. Have a great weekend and don’t forget to sign up below if you haven’t already.
Car companies are slurping your data (who knew?), me on the radio talking about that and making people mad, hot hatch rivals shake hands on track, a new VW camper is out, more utes going PHEV and a gorgeous new French electric hatchback
Just over a year after the Mozilla Foundation’s landmark report into catastrophic data privacy issues in the automotive sector, Australia’s Choice magazine had a bit of a look and a prod to see what car companies are doing with your personal data.
Toyota’s Gazoo Racing and Hyundai’s N will hold a combined event in South Korea. That sounds like a lot of fun and kind of makes perverse sense. Toyota is not at all big on the peninsula so why not show folks how the Japanese do things.
I love the VW Transporter and its variants more than is absolutely right and proper. I reviewed a California Beach camper for WhichCar a couple of years back and just didn’t stop grinning.
Now there’s a new one and CarThrottle’s Mike Bartholomew is all over it.
Aaaand to finish off, another iconic French city car is rebooted as an EV, the Renault Twingo. Ginny Buckley of Electrifying takes you through the concept car.
And that’s it for Links We Like for another day. If you spot anything cool, let me know!
Joining us here at The Redline for the first time is the ineffably brilliant Scotty Newman. Also known as Addicted To Sliding on Instagram and YouTube, Scott is an incredibly fast driver and has driven some of the wildest cars on Earth. Many of you will know him from the pages of Motor and more recently Carsales.
We are humbled by his presence and for this fantastic track review of the two new Corvettes.
Words: Scott Newman
The Chevrolet Corvette is just like a bus. You wait ages for one and then two turn up at once. Thankfully, given GMSV (General Motors Special Vehicles) laid on Sandown Raceway for our introduction to the 2025 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray and Z06, that’s where the comparisons end.
If you haven’t been paying attention, the eighth-generation Corvette is radically different to its forebears, actually doing what Chevrolet has been threatening almost since the car’s inception and moving the engine behind the passengers.
The Stingray arrived in early 2022 but since then it’s been tapped feet and drummed fingers while waiting for further promised variants. They’ve now arrived and push the Corvette firmly into supercar territory, the reason the mid-engined move was made in the first place.
In a slight break from tradition, we’ll leave some of the typical The Redline segments such as entertainment and safety for the road review as this was a brief first taste held exclusively on track. So, let’s dig into what the E-Ray and Z06 are and what they’re like to drive really fast.
How much are they and what do I get?
Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray: $275,000 +ORC Chevrolet Corvette Z06: $336,000 +ORC
The 2025 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray and Z06 are as mechanically different as they are visually similar, so let’s deal with each in turn. Despite what the name suggests, the E-Ray isn’t powered by electricity but it does incorporate it.
It takes the familiar mechanicals of the Stingray – a 369kW/637Nm 6.2-litre V8 driving the rear wheels through an eight-speed dual-clutch gearbox – but adds a 119kW/165Nm electric motor on the front axle.
This lifts outputs to 488kW/806Nm and thanks to this being the first Corvette ever with driven front wheels, it’s also the fastest accelerating Corvette ever, at least until the nutty ZR1 enters production.
The 0-100km/h claim is 2.9sec and Chevrolet makes a point of this being from rest, rather than using the traditional one-foot rollout like most American cars. It then storms through the quarter mile in 10.5sec at 209km/h. Fast car is fast.
You pay for the pace, however, with the E-Ray costing $275,000 plus on-road costs, a hefty $78,000 premium over a Stingray of the equivalent spec. This is offset somewhat by the standard fitment of giant carbon-ceramic brakes behind equally enormous rolling stock made possible by the wider bodywork.
Both E-Ray and Z06 are 94mm wider at the rear than the standard Stingray, which allows for a much greater footprint. Whereas the regular car must make do with 245/35 and 305/30 rubber front and rear respectively, its brethren up this to 275/30 and 345/25 along with increasing the wheel size by an inch to 20s front and 21s rear.
It’s here we can deal with the similarities. As standard both cars wear Michelin Pilot Sport 4 S rubber and use double wishbone suspension all ’round with Magnetic Ride Control adaptive dampers, albeit with unique calibrations.
The E-Ray carries a 124kg weight disadvantage, though that’s relatively slight for a hybrid thanks to the tiny 1.9kWh battery (1.1kWh useable) that provides a meagre 4-6km of electric-only range but, perhaps of more importance, the possibility of silent getaways.
Inside the two are similar with plenty of leather and carbon fibre, a decent driving position (though the strange quartic steering wheel would ideally go a little higher) and the unique arc of buttons that separates driver from passenger and takes some familiarisation.
Now we begin to diverge again. The Z06 climbs the pricing ladder further still, starting at $336,000 plus on-road costs, though that figure is very much just the start for reasons which will become apparent in a moment.
‘Under the hood’ as they say Stateside – quick aside, if a frunk is a front trunk, is a rear hood a reod? – is a unique 5.5-litre naturally-aspirated V8 that spins to 8600rpm thanks to a flat-plane crank and dry-sump lubrication.
It produces a wild 475kW and 595Nm and while the eight-speed dual-clutch gearbox remains, a shorter 5.56:1 final drive improves acceleration, the 3.0sec 0-100km/h claim just 0.1sec slower than the all-wheel drive E-Ray.
However, to really unleash the Z06’s potential you need to take a deep breath and select the $50,000 Z07 package that includes carbon-ceramic brakes, a unique calibration for the adaptive dampers, ultra-focused Michelin Cup 2 R track tyres and a set of carbon fibre wings that more than double the downforce generated at 300km/h to 333kg.
Then there’s the carbon fibre wheels, that are made just the other side of Port Phillip Bay and cost a little more than $1000 ($23,000) per kilogram saved (18.6kg), though the fact it’s unsprung mass is multiplicative.
Happily, the Z06 provided for our use is specced in its ultimate configuration so, what’s it like?
Driving
But before we cover the Z06, let’s deal with the E-Ray as that’s what’s presented first. With the bigger wheels and wider bodywork, it looks so much more aggressive than the somewhat awkward Stingray and has proper supercar presence.
Given the location, it’s straight into Track Mode, which automatically adds weight to the steering (thankfully not too much), firms up the suspension, sharpens up the throttle and backs off the stability control, but another click also selects manual for the gearbox.
The first thing that hits you – literally – is the back of the seat as the electrically-assisted V8 powertrain provides incredible acceleration. The combination of electric motors and natural aspiration is a match made in heaven, the former filling in the gaps until the latter hits its stride.
And the performance? There’s a suspicion the onboard computer incorporates rollout, but then it also displayed a 0-100km/h time of 2.4sec.
Response is instant but beautifully calibrated, the front wheels never misbehaving with torque steer, just helping allocate the power to the point that even under full throttle exiting tight corners the traction control remains dormant.
Surprisingly, the hybrid assistance enhances the sound, a jet-like whine accompanying the traditional V8 growl, though it may be an acquired taste.
Brake feel is a further surprise, with excellent progression despite the perfect storm of electricity regeneration and composite construction as well as incredible stopping power.
The E-Ray may be pitched as the grand tourer of the range but it’s very, very accomplished on track, the only real chink in its armour being the need to replenish the battery every three or four laps. That said, it doesn’t hurt to give the rest of the car a breather and one slow lap is all it takes for charge to build once more.
Into the Z06 and the differences are apparent before reaching turn one for the first time. The engine screams past the E-Ray’s shift point, just beginning to get into its stride, and it has a musicality to its note not always present in flat-plane engines.
It feels lighter on its feet but also less settled. Not in a way that erodes confidence, but there’s the sensation of hyperactivity, of pent-up excitement. It nudges left and right over bumps the E-Ray ignores but the advantage of this is greater agility.
Stopping power is mind-blowing, a full ABS stop having your eyeballs hanging out of your face, grip from the Cup R tyres is absurd and the entire car just goads you into pushing harder and driving faster. It’s intoxicating.
The traction control could be a little more lenient, though applying some progression to your throttle inputs keeps it happy, but as a tool for destroying racetracks the Z06 can hold its head high in some very serious company.
Redline recommendation
As mentioned at the top of this piece, these variants (and those to come) are why the Chevrolet Corvette went mid-engined. To make another front-engined Stingray would’ve been a relatively simple proposition, but to offer hybrid assistance and the level of performance and agility contained in the E-Ray and Z06 in a traditional configuration would’ve been much more difficult, if not impossible.
I’m not sure if Chevrolet would appreciate or agree with the comparison, but think of the Corvette E-Ray and Z06 as the 911 Turbo and GT3 respectively. One is pitched as the all-weather grand tourer, though as we’ve discovered it happens to be perfectly comfortable with hot lapping.
The other is a more extreme machine for those who want to chip away at their lap times. Is it as good as a GT3? That’s a very difficult question to answer without driving the two back-to-back, but certainly it doesn’t seem as there’s a tremendous gulf in ability between the two.
Either way, these two Corvettes definitely earn their place under the General Motors Special Vehicles banner.
Consumer advice is kind of what we do here (kind of?) so we’ll start with a story about the roads in Australia with the most speed cameras. I live within 3km of five of the things, so it’s a story close to my heart.
We’ve also got a new McLaren, the delectable new Renault 5, some amusing Cybertruck news and one of the more unexpected EV restomods.
Tomorrow on the Redline we welcome Scott Newman and his review of the new Corvette Z06 and E-Ray. First thing tomorrow morning!
Zane Dobie at Drive.com.au has the story of the roads with the most cameras in each Australian state and territory. While I live near five (I have precisely zero objection to red light cameras, just so we’re clear), if you live between Hurstville and Strathfield in Sydney, then…wow….
Now that we have consumer advice out of the way, let’s bounce to the other end of the spectrum and send you off to look at a new McLaren hypercar. After the Artura’s diversion into V6 territory, the 4.0-litre V8 in the W1 knows how to rev.
I shouldn’t like it – I’m not really into these super high-end cars because I don’t really see the point – but this one I would actually drive if offered it (hugely unlikely). Having said that, I’d swap a drive in a W1 for a run in a McLaren F1.
Also at CAR Vicky Parrott drives the spectacular-looking Renault 5. I think this car is one of the most important that Renault has ever made, and that’s saying something given its history.
The 5 reboot has been a long time coming and whether it comes to Australia remains debatable given French marques’ inability to get a good price on EVs for us, but I just want it here to look at it.
One of the biggest insurance underwriters in the US has stopped insuring the Cybertruck.
Come for the schadenfreude, stay for the litany of problems that has likely pushed GEICO to this decision. Torquenews’s Tinsay Aregay’s deadpan delivery of that long list is a lot of fun.
Kia has made an EV restomod of one if its early cars. Known overseas as the Pride, the restomod is an 80th birthday gift to itself. The Pride was basically a first-gen Mazda 121 produced under licence in Korea. And the 121 itself was commissioned by Ford to be sold in the US and Australia
It was sold here as the Festiva and it was bloody awful. So this EV restomod may actually be the one Festiva I’d own.
CarThrottle’s Mike Bartholomew runs you through the details.
It barely makes my top ten. There are so many other stupid rules in Formula 1 and they’re fundamentals, not details.
After the Singapore Grand Prix, British motorsport media went into the usual meltdown when one of their brave little boys had something taken away from him. Daniel Ricciardo’s heroics in the VCARB car, which is Red Bull’s second team, saw him secure the fastest lap of the race for what turned out to be his final race.
The lap time was not only the lap record (which will surely stand for a single year barring a downpour in 2025’s race) but it also denied McLaren’s Lando Norris an extra point, allegedly also denying him the World Driver’s Championship in the process. Somehow.
Unsporting! they cried as McLaren Team Principal (or whatever they’re called now) Andrea Stella lost his mind and told the assembled media dark forces were at work in the Red Bull pantheon. Daniel Ricciardo is plotting against little Lando.
Good gracious and mercy me, etc etc.
Formula 1 introduced the fastest lap rule a few years back. The idea was to stop the race turning into a procession (or more of one) after the final pit stops. One point is awarded to the driver with fastest lap.
But only if they finish in the top ten. Ricciardo was out of the top ten and was allegedly given the opportunity as a sort of parting gift. Fresh rubber, end of race, give it the the beans, son.
VCARB Team Principal Laurent Mekies pretended he didn’t even know if it was Ricciardo’s last race, but it could well have been an internal protest against Helmut Marko’s ongoing Reign of Terror.
Some in the British F1 media went absolutely bonkers and they trotted on down What About Lane and decided that this was all in aid of Verstappen’s title bid. Because Red Bull you see. And McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella said so.
The Race – who I thought would and should know better – put up a YouTube short calling the rule ridiculous and creating “farcical situations.”
This video is offensively stupid and possibly the worst take imaginable from a serious outlet. The rule has been around for years and absolutely nobody has complained about it, at least not to this extent.
The Race thenput a whole video up discussing whether the “incident” was unethical, essentially walking back the diabolical stupidity of the by pointing out the flaw in its idiotic reasoning. To their credit, they left the original (above) in place but probably because it pulled clicks and views.
This second video took a rather more reasoned stance which I guess is some kind of redemption.
Sections of the British media (and countless geese on social media) have decided that by allowing non-points finishers to take the fastest lap away from the big boys up the front, it’s somehow a diabolical scheme.
I’m not much of a fan of the rule myself, it feels gimmicky and there are better ways to ensure the races are full length rather than decided by the pit stop strategy.
And this is where we come to my problems with Formula 1’s dumb rules.
The current rules stipulate a total of four engines and gearboxes that can be used in season. Break either “rule” by having more than the mandated number and the driver gets grid penalties.
Break bits of either and the driver gets grid penalties.
Those individual bits include turbo (4), MGU-H and MGU-K (4), energy store and control electronics (2) and exhaust (8).
While we’re here, only F1 could come up with MGU-H (h for heat) and MGU-K (k for kinetic). And I thought KERS was bad.
The reliability of things that teams build (gearboxes) and mostly external parties build (engines) are relied upon by the driver to support his grid position. Not solely if the driver is the fastest but also whether his gearbox will last so many races and his engines will last so many races.
So what happens in races? The teams demand their drivers go slower to assist with reliability.
Now, I don’t think we should go back to the old days of throwing in quali engines and then bolting in a fresh one for the race. That’s absurdly wasteful and incredibly tiring for pit crews. It is rarely the driver’s fault that an engine blows or a gearbox blows. Why should that have any bearing in the World Driver’s Championship? Punish the teams and the engine manufacturers, not the driver.
Or better still, completely overhaul the limits.
While we’re on the current engines, the reliability rules were enforced early on in this turbo hybrid era when engines blew with alarming regularity. The cost of developing these brand-new engines was colossal and remain vastly more complicated than the V8s they replaced (which had themselves become extremely reliable).
This is a very stupid rule. If you want “farcical” situations, it’s when McLaren had hundreds of grid penalties from its Honda engines exploding all over the place. Like actual hundreds. Even rivals suggested a rule limiting the penalties to prevent embarrassment.
Many rule changes are made in the name of cost-cutting but often end up being absurdly expensive. The FIA hasn’t the faintest idea what cost-cutting actually means and Formula 1 teams do everything they can to avoid cutting costs.
There’s the US$135m cost cap where the actions of another driver or team can affect the fortunes of a driver. If your teammate keeps throwing his car into the wall, your team has less money to spend on improving the car. If another team’s drivers keep running into you, your team has to take money out of the development budget.
This is supposed to help teams at the back push forward towards the front but it hasn’t come anywhere near making that happen. The gaps on the timing sheet might be smaller, but we’re no closer to Haas winning a race than we were before the cost cap.
Things are roughly as they were before the cost cap, with mid- and back-of-the-field teams swapping about, occasionally spending time next to Sergo Perez. There are enough loopholes for the big, well-established teams at the front of the grid to stay there. And then for 2026 the rules change yet again so the poorer teams have to grapple with that huge expense.
Do you see where I’m going here? Every major rule change fundamentally entrenches the cars at the front. The only “fairytale” championship win came in 2009, long before hybrids and cost caps when Brawn GP took the double with a car that started the year with no engine supply.
It was certainly very helpful that Honda had thrown hundreds of millions at the team before suddenly pulling out of the sport ahead of the season. So it was hardly underfunded or some scrappy lucky hit – the double diffuser was not some sort of fluke, it was funded by Honda largesse which had included coaxing Ross Brawn to the team that he ended up owning.
Nothing the FIA does makes any sense when it comes to cost caps. It also make no sense when it comes to what fans are going to see. Cars that are lifting and coasting to save fuel to stay under the 100kg limit (and therefore go out into the race with the least amount of fuel possible) are not exciting.
Drivers refusing to overtake each other in the name of not crashing are not exciting. Quiet hybrid engines (relatively speaking) mean absolutely nothing most people watching, so they’re not exciting. If they’d frozen engine development at the end of the V8 era and added KERS to run for ten years, there would be nothing different and the cars wouldn’t be the size of a Mazda CX-9.
In the name of relevance – surely the dumbest concept a bazillion-dollar sport can ever hope to achieve – each car is limited to 100kg of fuel per race. Being Formula 1, the teams don’t ever fill the car to the brim because they want to be as light as possible.
That means actual farcical situations where drivers are entreated to “lift and coast” to save fuel. F1 cars using 100kg or 150kg of fuel is not going to help climate change and nor is the ludicrous globe-crossing schedule that regularly fails to group races in geographic locations.
The China-Miami-Emilia Romagna-Monaco-Canada-Spain sequence is intensely stupid. 2023 had the Saudi Arabia-Australia-Azerbaijan-Miami-Emilia Romagna sequence. Fewer kilos of fuel in the back of 20 F1 cars hasn’t got a hope in hell of covering the carbon cost of a couple of Antonovs shuttling all that gear hither and thither.
So yeah. The racing is never better, the costs are never cut and neither is carbon. The real farce is the Formula 1 is trying to pretend it cares. It may well do, but at some point you have to take a long hard look at yourself and realise there’s only so much punters will take.
The fastest lap rule is way down the list. Probably at the bottom, actually.
Another week in the bag, another bunch of videos to watch. This week we have a drifter-in-training, motorsport cheating, a V10 people mover and the story of Group B rallying.
YouTuber Benny Surge seems keen on binning his car in the Nasho (in-joke for Facebook group purveyors of amusingly crashed cars) so spent a year trying to avoid it.
I have done some drifting on a skid pan (do not drift on the road, it is insanely silly and probably just as dangerous) and can recommend learning it as a skill. This is a fun watch. Thanks to Dan for the spot.
I do like a bit of rallying and I do like stories about naughty cheating in rallying. Or any racing, really. I cut my teeth watching Benetton cheating (allegedly, obviously, never proven…properly…) its way through the 1994 Formula 1 season.
The Revved Up channel has a five of the greatest racing cheats. And I don’t car that he can’t pronounce Peugeot.
Speaking of rallying, a video I’d always wanted to do has been done by DailyFuelUp. Group B rallying was absolutely wild and it didn’t help that fans had the same devil-may-care attitude to their own safety as the teams did to their drivers.
The cars were incredible but monumentally dangerous.
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The spectacular Renault Espace F1 lives rent-free in my mind. DriveTribe has a brilliant video taking you right through the plastic fantastic people mover’s unhinged cousin.
Sadly we don’t get much of the screaming V10, but a detailed walkthrough of a thing from 30 years ago that, as I say, lives in my dreams, is a great way to spend twenty minutes.
And that’s Weekend Watches for another week. A little abbreviated after a busy week but I reckon there are some rippers in here.
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Tom Fraser
Brendan McAleer
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