THE PITWALL TIMES
The empire stumbles
Season 47, Round 3, Division 1. By Murray Ledger
For two races, Division 1 had one story: Renttu Racing wins, everyone else watches. At a flooded Velocitas, that story changed.
Ross Walrond won for Handbrake RD. Edmund Potts took second place on the last lap. Alvaro José jr. Ferreira de Almeida, used to standing on the top step this season, had to settle for third. And Evelien Pouillie, double winner and championship leader, starting from pole, finished ninth.
Ninth. In a Renttu.
It started with one decision. Qualifying had been dry and Pouillie took pole. Race day was a different world: rain, standing water, a flooded track. Pouillie lined up on intermediates. By the end of the first lap he had dropped from first to 22nd, and for six laps he went backwards, losing fifteen seconds every lap to cars on wet tyres. When he finally pitted for wets, the leaders were two minutes up the road.
Then the champion showed why he is the champion. For fifty laps Pouillie was the fastest man on the track, working his way through the field one car at a time. Rodrígues de Morais, Sinivuori, Van Lancker, Joshi, Farahvash Fashandi, Sayre, Adam Negrete. Twenty-third became tenth. Tenth became ninth. With a normal start, this would have been a race for the win. Instead it was worth two points.
At the front, Walrond led from the start. On lap 32 Almeida passed him, and for ten laps Renttu still seemed to have the race under control. Then, on lap 42, Almeida went off at high speed and ended up in the gravel. The engine almost stalled. Twelve seconds were gone, and with them the lead. Walrond took over and was never seen again. After a retirement in Qatar and fourth in Turkey, Handbrake RD finally got the result its pace had been promising.
The real drama came at the end. For ten laps Potts sat behind Almeida, with Nicholai Bech Napizia right behind him. Potts tried on lap 49 and again on lap 50, and both times had to pull back in. Three cars, barely a second apart, lap after lap. Then, on the final lap, a small mistake from Almeida in sector 2. One second lost. Potts went through. Almeida saved third by 0.620 seconds.
It is not a crisis yet, but for Renttu it is a warning.
Behind them, Napizia was fourth after one of his strongest races of the season, and Daniil Viirok fifth. Ross Lane survived a big spin to finish sixth. Quinten Van Lancker spent more time on the grass than on the track, with four separate off-track moments, and finished thirteenth.
Three cars ran out of fuel, Martti Voldek after only twelve laps. Gustav-Adolf Adam and Josef Høier stopped together on lap 46. That makes nine drivers across the four divisions who ran out of fuel this weekend. Somebody should check what the fuel calculators are doing.
The championship
Seventeen points of lead are down to four. Pouillie has 52, Almeida 48, Potts 42. Walrond and Viirok are level on 37. Two weeks ago the title looked settled. Now five drivers are within fifteen points, and the remaining races suddenly matter.
Renttu still has a large lead in the constructors' championship: 100 points against SGA's 48. The fastest car on track on Sunday was still a Renttu, and the race was lost through a tyre call, not a lack of pace. But the other teams now know Renttu can be beaten.
Sunday 10:14 pm
Div 2.4 Five seconds and a stubborn wheel
THE PITWALL TIMES
Five seconds and a stubborn wheel
Season 47, Round 3, Division 2.4. By Murray Ledger
Guntram Viktor won at Autodromo Internazionale Velocitas by 14.7 seconds and remains unbeaten this season: three races, three wins. Liang-hsi Sun was second for Tycoon R. INC. Remo Tito finished third for Pirate Panda Race, 0.313 seconds behind Sun. For most of the afternoon it was clear that Tito could have fought for the win.
Tito took pole by 0.205 seconds from Oprando Premiani on a wet track. On race day the track was dry, and he left the line slightly too early. The stewards noticed and gave him a five-second penalty, to be served at his first stop. Tito then led every lap of the first stint and was 3.3 seconds clear of Viktor at the end of lap 8, so the penalty alone was not the end of his chances.
Then came the first pit stop on lap 9. The mechanics had to wait the five seconds, and then had trouble with a wheel. In total the stop cost about thirteen seconds more than a normal one. Tito rejoined ninth. By the time the pit cycle had settled on lap 16 he was third, 7.9 seconds behind Viktor rather than 3.3 seconds ahead of him. As the saying goes, bad luck rarely comes alone.
It got worse. After his second stop on lap 22, Tito came out right behind Rochan Satyanarayana, whose Leleux was on a three-stop strategy with heavier fuel and older tyres. He spent eight laps within half a second of him, lapping almost a second slower than his normal pace, and failed to pass on lap 29 before getting through on lap 30. In that phase the gap to Viktor grew from nine to fifteen seconds, and it stayed there to the flag. Thirteen seconds lost at the first stop and about six in traffic, against a 15-second deficit at the finish. Without either, this would have been a straight fight for the win between Tito and Viktor. On Sunday it was not.
There was still second place. Sun went into the gravel on lap 50 and lost six seconds, and Tito, on fresh softs after his last stop, closed in quickly. By lap 53 he was 0.316 seconds behind. He tried to pass on lap 54 and again on lap 56, and both times had to drop back. He finished 0.313 seconds behind.
Alejandro Estrada Ojeda had a weaker weekend. He qualified tenth, 1.163 seconds off his team-mate, and Saturday decided much of Sunday. The race was spent in traffic: Ojeda was stuck behind McIlvenny, Clijsters, Satyanarayana, Lucassen and Lustig at various points, often for several laps. Despite four overtakes on lap 16, a five-stop strategy cost him the positions again each time. His race pace was about a second a lap slower than Tito's. He finished tenth and took the final point, 4.9 seconds behind Sem Lucassen.
Team boss Philip E. was calm about it. "I'm not unhappy," he said. "The pace was good. Alejandro had a bad Saturday, and he knows that. Now we need to improve our qualifying performance a lot, and the race pace, and... well. There are still a few weeks to go. We'll get there."
Behind the leaders, Satyanarayana took fourth for Leleux Racing, ahead of Andreas Clijsters and Henry McIlvenny. Premiani dropped from second on the grid to seventh. Jeton Lustig finished eighth after losing 16 seconds in the gravel on lap 26. Bobbo F1's Leland Bonny ran out of fuel on lap 15 without having stopped. The commentary reported that he threw his steering wheel out of the cockpit. He was the sixth driver across the four divisions to run out of fuel this weekend.
The championship
Viktor now has 75 points, a 33-point lead over Satyanarayana on 42. Sun has 40 and Tito 33, with Pirate Panda Race having missed the first race. In the constructors' championship Zeroforce F1 has 93 points, ahead of Tycoon R. INC. on 68 and Leleux Racing on 55. Pirate Panda Race moves up to fourth with 46 points, ahead of Jaguar Racing Team on 38.
Three questions for Philip E.
Murray Ledger: Thirteen seconds at the first stop, six more behind Satyanarayana. Without that, it would have been a fight for the win. Does that hurt?
Philip E.: There's a German saying: "Hätte, hätte, Fahrradkette." Roughly: "If, if, bicycle chain." Should have, would have, could have. Nobody ever won a race with that. We finished third, and that is the result.
Murray Ledger: But the pace was there.
Philip E.: The pace is a bit better, yes. We were with Viktor for long periods of the race, and that's new. It's not enough yet, but it's going in the right direction.
Murray Ledger: So what's the goal for the next few weeks?
Philip E.: Guntram has spent a lot of this season with Remo in his mirrors. We'd like to change that soon. For a bit of variety, he can look at Remo's diffuser instead.
Sunday 10:09 pm
Div 2.3 Serbian Engineering, again
THE PITWALL TIMES
Serbian Engineering, again
Season 47, Round 3, Division 2.3. By Murray Ledger
Kaupo Villard won at Autodromo Internazionale Velocitas by exactly one minute from team-mate Albrecht Klöb. It was Serbian Engineering's third one-two in three races. Villard took pole by 0.796 seconds on a wet track, led every lap of the dry race and lapped consistently in the 2:15s and 2:16s, with nobody else close. Klöb's own afternoon included two minor errors and an early fight with the Mustangs, but even without them second place was never under threat. A minute was simply the gap between the two cars that afternoon.
The only real story in the division was behind them. Mustang Dark Horse Racing finished third and fourth for the second race running, with Damiano Chiantia ahead of Kenneth Roy Hewitt. Not long ago that would have been unthinkable: in Qatar neither Mustang car scored. Since then the team has scored 54 points from two races, more than anyone except Serbian Engineering.
The two Mustangs ran different strategies. Chiantia ran softs and stopped five times, Hewitt ran mediums and stopped four times. As a result they changed places at almost every pit cycle, and the timing screen showed an overtake between them roughly every ten laps. On the road they were never far apart. At the flag Chiantia was 4.6 seconds ahead. On this evidence the team has found the right car, and a strategy that works without needing to choose between its drivers.
Behind them was a different race. Hari Girsh finished fifth for JVR Phoenix, nearly three minutes behind the Mustangs, after swapping places with Hassan Khechini of Sound of Speed for most of the afternoon in the same pit-cycle pattern. Khechini spun on the final lap and lost six seconds, which made no difference to his sixth place. Jack Jones was seventh for Sound of Speed, and Fucho F1's Evaristo Meireles and Vítor das Dores Oliveira were eighth and ninth on hard tyres. Those were Meireles' first points of the season.
JVR Phoenix had a problem of its own. J. Picknik qualified sixth, then spent the race watching from beside the track because the team never assigned him to a car. Pitwall drivers are many things, but they do not find their own cockpit. Picknik's qualifying time put him alongside Khechini and Girsh. Even sixth place would have meant eight points, and JVR finished the weekend thirteen points behind Sound of Speed.
HHF Race had a weekend to forget. George Mackie and Khemais Al-Fessi were the only drivers to qualify on mediums on a wet track, and finished almost a minute off the pace. In the race, Al-Fessi ran out of fuel on lap 13 without having stopped, and Mackie followed on lap 15 after one stop. With Arrows and RSA Racing also having fuel problems in other divisions, this was not a good weekend for fuel calculations.
The championship
The provisional driver standings show Serbian Engineering in a race of its own. Villard leads with 68 points, seven clear of Klöb on 61. Chiantia and Girsh are level on 30, with Chiantia third on podiums, and Khechini is fifth on 28. In the constructors' championship Serbian Engineering has 129 points. Mustang Dark Horse Racing moves up to second with 54, ahead of Sound of Speed on 49 and JVR Phoenix on 36.
Three rounds in, the title fight in 2.3 is between the two Serbian Engineering drivers. Second place is wide open, and Mustang is the team in form.
Sunday 09:55 pm
Div 2.-2 Fastest car, wrong tyres, short stints
THE PITWALL TIMES
Fastest car, wrong tyres, short stints
Season 47, Round 3, Division 2.2. By Murray Ledger
Afonso Azevedo won at Autodromo Internazionale Velocitas by 27.8 seconds from Willi Wulf, leading every lap from the tenth to the flag except one pit-cycle shuffle. It was RSA Racing's first win since Season 45. Jorge Everardo Pasos finished third for Trackhouse Racing, 0.318 seconds ahead of team-mate Antonio Huhtala, who tried to pass on the last lap and failed. All of that is accurate. None of it is the story. The story is the car that finished eleventh.
Norbert Kudra arrived as championship leader with two wins from two races, and took pole by 0.222 seconds. Then the Arrows Grand Prix International strategy room sent both cars into a dry race on intermediates. "Forgot strategy.. so dumb," team boss Antoine B wrote afterwards. That suggests the cars raced with their qualifying settings unchanged, and the stint lengths support it. Velocitas uses between 5.6 and 5.9 litres a lap, and Arrows never ran more than nine laps between stops, which fits a qualifying fuel load of about 50 litres. If that is right, the problem was fixed before the lights went out.
The timing makes it worse. Last week Arrows sold shares and is now a listed company. Paddock rumour says the sale was needed because fan income had collapsed. If so, the new shareholders have just seen their championship leader start a dry race on intermediates.
The first lap was hard to watch. Kudra dropped from pole to seventeenth, and Henrique De Albreuin went from fifth to eighteenth. Eight cars passed Kudra in sector 2 alone. For six laps the Arrows pair ran 2:28s while the leaders ran 2:13s, losing about fifteen seconds a lap. They pitted together at the end of lap 7, just over two minutes behind the lead.
From there Kudra drove the race of his life. On softs, his first full lap was the fastest of the race, and he lowered it again on laps 9, 10, 11 and 12. His typical lap was a second quicker than the winner's. Some of that came from carrying less fuel than the cars around him, but not all of it: pole position had already shown the car's pace. Whatever was in the tank, it was not enough. Arrows stopped every nine laps, on laps 16, 25, 34, 43 and 52. That is six stops in total, against four for the leaders, at about twenty seconds each. Kudra passed Kusatsu and Profeti on lap 14, Hanson on lap 32, and Kádas and Ashida on lap 41. When Ottó Frey retired, he was up to eleventh.
At the end of lap 51 he was 0.529 seconds behind Gombei Hanada and tenth place. Then he had to make his sixth stop. He came out 18.7 seconds behind the points, and set four more fastest laps in a row, ending with a 2:12.278 on lap 56, the best of the race. That cut the deficit by more than three seconds a lap. He crossed the line 0.731 seconds behind Mariano Schweizer. "Kudra drove like a man possessed at the end there," said Jussi Heikkinen of MacSalaatikko. He did, and it earned him no points.
A rough calculation puts the cost of the error at about 1:50 on intermediates plus about 40 seconds in extra stops. Kudra finished 1:26.7 behind the winner. Traffic and a normal fuel load would have cost him some of that difference, probably not all of it. On pace, Velocitas would most likely have been Kudra's third win from three races.
De Albreuin's race was overshadowed by his team-mate's, but it deserves a mention. Fifth in qualifying, only 0.689 seconds off pole, was a clear step forward. In the race he ran in the low 2:13s, on a par with the winner, made the same six stops and finished fourteenth. It is a result that looks worse than it was.
Østerbø led the first six laps for ATMI Racing before a trip through the gravel on lap 7 handed the lead to Wulf. Østerbø's afternoon then got worse: at least seven separate spins, including a 14-second one on lap 24. ATMI Racing still scored its first points of the season with sixth for Frank Vanoppen and seventh for Østerbø, which shows how fast the car is when it stays on the track. Jean-Charles Brissault finished fifth for Exasperace despite losing six seconds in a spin on lap 46. Owen Howlin's eighth place gave MacSalaatikko its first points of the season, a useful result for Heikkinen in his fifth season with the team. Hanada took ninth and Schweizer the final point in tenth, 0.731 seconds ahead of Kudra.
The old man and the win
Shaun Jooste has been in Pitwall since Season 1. RSA Racing has had no other manager, and in that time the team has had good years and bad ones. Sunday's win was its first in two seasons.
Is it the start of more? The numbers say possibly.
Azevedo's typical lap at Velocitas was around 2:13.8, about four tenths quicker than anyone else running a normal strategy. He did not just inherit the win: on pace, he was the best of the rest by a clear margin. His season reads third, fifth and now first, and he only drops out of the top five when the car fails.
Then there is the other half of the garage. Frey had the most aggressive race of the afternoon, rejoining traffic after every stop and overtaking his way back each time. He passed five cars on lap 10 and four more on lap 22, and was running fourth by lap 46. On lap 49 his car stopped in sector 2. He had made three stops, and the fourth he needed never came. The commentary reported that he threw his steering wheel out of the cockpit. "Can't remember when last I had a fuel calculation error," Jooste wrote. At least one other team in this division could say the same thing this weekend, and theirs was worse. Frey has now failed to finish twice in three races. Those two retirements are the difference between RSA's 62 points and the championship lead.
The honest answer is that RSA now has the second-fastest car in the division, and a manager who knows what that is worth. Whether it becomes the fastest depends less on RSA than on whether Arrows remembers to set a strategy. Repeat wins will need either Arrows to make more mistakes or RSA to find another four tenths. After forty-seven seasons, Jooste knows how rarely a rival makes the same mistake twice.
The championship
The provisional championship shows how much the error cost. Azevedo's win puts him on 50 points, level with Kudra, who stays in front only because he has two wins to Azevedo's one. Huhtala is two points behind on 48, and Wulf has 37. In the constructors' championship, Arrows started the weekend 15 points clear and finished it third: Trackhouse Racing leads with 72 points, RSA Racing has 62 and Arrows 60.
Sunday 09:50 pm
Div 2.1 Fisch lands the catch as Velocitas drowns
THE PITWALL TIMES
Fisch lands the catch as Velocitas drowns
Season 47, Round 3, Division 2.1. By Murray Ledger
Heinz Fisch won a flooded Autodromo Internazionale Velocitas by 26.4 seconds from team-mate Hisaki Shimaoka, giving Slow Car McNoPace its second consecutive one-two, something the team's name continues to deny. Dinger Zoomie Racing took third and fourth with Ernest Theisen and Mathew Geary, a podium for the third race in a row. Nobody else finished within two and a half minutes of the winner. Forza Mutte Racing did not reach lap ten.
Qualifying had been dry. Fisch took pole by 0.336 seconds. Race day brought rain showers and a flooded track from the start. Shimaoka, the championship leader, beat his team-mate off the line and led the first fourteen laps, never by more than a few tenths. Fisch sat in his slipstream and pulled out to pass four times, but never completed the move. The fastest lap of the race came on lap 8: Shimaoka's 2:30.079, three thousandths quicker than Fisch and eleven quicker than Theisen.
The race turned on lap 15. Shimaoka went into the gravel at Turn 4, lost seven seconds, and Fisch went through. Fisch pitted at the end of that lap. Shimaoka stayed out one more lap on worn wets, and when he rejoined he was behind both Fisch and Theisen. He then lost ground through the middle stint, about half a second a lap slower than his team-mate. Shimaoka stopped one lap later than Fisch at every pit cycle, so a heavier fuel load is a plausible part of the deficit. Two more small errors on laps 30 and 31 did not help. The gap was 15 seconds at lap 28 and 26 at the flag. That one trip into the gravel cost him seven points and probably the win.
Theisen's shorter first stint put him 1.7 seconds behind the lead at lap 16, the closest Dinger Zoomie came all afternoon. After that the Luxembourger fell back by half a second to eight tenths a lap. Geary stayed within 3.8 seconds of his team-mate until lap 55, when he spun at high speed in the final sector and lost 15 seconds. It did not cost him a position.
From lap 38 the rain got noticeably heavier. Lap times rose from about 2:31 to over three minutes by lap 48, and the gaps behind the top four grew with them.
Perder Corse GP took fifth and sixth. Ermanno Capuzzi beat Edoardo Marino by eleven seconds after taking fifth from Agoston Ágh on lap 6, when the Hungarian went into the gravel. Capuzzi had three points from two races before this one; he leaves with thirteen. The best fight of the day was between the Moneytron ACS team-mates. Alfonso Pintonello held seventh most of the race, six seconds clear, until he spun on lap 52. Nenko Issajew went through. For six laps Pintonello stayed three to four tenths behind but could not repass, and he finished 0.414 seconds back. Swapping seventh and eighth made no difference to Moneytron's total. Ser Cher Fernandez, Arun Racing Team's only runner this weekend, finished ninth on a four-stop strategy after starting thirteenth, and recovered from his retirement in Turkey. Équipe Renault Elf's Didier Bleneau and Albert Augier fought each other for the whole race. Bleneau finished ahead in tenth and scored his first point of the season. Their wider problem was pace: six to seven seconds a lap off the leaders in steady rain, and more than ten once it got heavier.
Wolf GP had a harder day. Tomas Bernardas Jelinskas started on intermediates on a flooded track and lost five places on the first lap. On lap 10, Ágh pitted from wets onto intermediates. For the next thirty laps both Wolf cars lapped at 2:49 to 2:50 while the leaders ran 2:30 to 2:31. Both switched to wets on lap 40. By the end Ágh was only about a second a lap off the leaders, so the car was not the main problem. A rough calculation puts the cost of the tyre choice at around eight minutes per car, before counting the extra stops from a five-stop strategy. Before his lap 6 excursion Ágh had been running fifth. Points were there to be scored. Instead Wolf GP, fifth and eighth in Qatar, retired both cars in Turkey and now finished last of the classified runners. That makes two races without a point.
Then there was Forza Mutte Racing. Mubarak Ali and Mutsuhito Dupiré qualified sixth and seventh in the dry and started the wet race on slicks. They lapped at 3:17, were 36 seconds down after one lap, and never pitted. On lap 9 both cars ran out of fuel, about twenty seconds apart. Twelfth and thirteenth in Qatar, a double retirement in Turkey and now a double retirement without fuel. Three rounds in, the team still has no points and has finished one race out of three.
The provisional championship tells the story of the season so far. Shimaoka still leads with 61 points, but Fisch, who retired in Qatar, has now won both races he has finished and has 50 points. Theisen is two points further back on 48, with Geary on 39. Marino is the best of the rest on 28, and the Moneytron drivers are level on 20. In the constructors' championship Slow Car McNoPace has 111 points to Dinger Zoomie's 87. Behind them, Capuzzi's fifth place moves Perder Corse GP to 41, one point ahead of Moneytron ACS, and into third place.
Sunday 09:33 pm
Renttu, Who Else? Does Money Win Races, or Just Gearboxes?
Pitwall Times | Division 1, Race 2 of 10: Körfez Otorom
Renttu, Who Else? Does Money Win Races, or Just Gearboxes?
Qualifying at Körfez Otorom was dry. Race day was not. All 24 cars started on wets, and nobody changed compound all afternoon. That made this race a test of patience, pit stop timing and reliability, and Renttu Racing passed all three.
Evelien Pouillie took pole in 1:53.869, just 0.343 seconds ahead of teammate Alvaro José jr. Ferreira de Almeida, and she led every one of the 60 laps. The margin was 6.995 seconds at the flag, and it never looked in danger. Ferreira de Almeida clipped a kerb on lap 26 and bent his suspension, but held second anyway. Renttu's real advantage was in the pit lane: three stops per car, while Andrea Moda's Daniil Viirok needed four. In the wet, each extra stop cost around 20 seconds. Viirok finished third, 27 seconds behind, so that one stop was almost exactly the difference.
Renttu wins again, and that's not news. What's interesting is who is chasing them. Andrea Moda are only a year out of Division 2 and already on the podium, at least with one of their two drivers. Viirok drove the kind of race you'd normally expect from a veteran: calm, error-free, always in the right window, and never out of the top three. Anyone who has watched him for a few seasons is reminded of a certain two-time Spanish world champion who always got more from his car than it really had. The difference is that Viirok is 25 and should only get better. Negrete in the second Andrea Moda finished twelfth, two minutes back, so for now the team is really running one car. But that car is hungry.
Behind them, Ross Walrond was fourth for Handbrake RD, Comin Farahvash Fashandi fifth for Paolonio and Nicholai Bech Napizia sixth for Silver Cosmos. Edmund Potts started fourth and dropped to seventh for SGA after running unusually long stints on his first set of wets.
Then there's Fenninger Racing. Linwood Jelley's gearbox failed on lap 19. Eulalio Nava Castillo was running eighth when his gearbox failed too, on lap 43. Two cars, two gearboxes, zero points. Longtime readers will remember that Fenninger once lost three cars in a single race. The details change each time, but the result is always the same.
This week, documents on Division 1 driver pay reached the Pitwall Times. They don't cover the whole grid, but they cover enough to spoil a few teams' weekend.
The best-paid driver in the documents is Eulalio Nava Castillo, at more than two million a week. His contract also includes a championship bonus of over ten million, about three times the next-highest title bonus we have seen. At Körfez he took the most expensive gearbox failure of the season out of the race on lap 43.
The winner makes the contrast even sharper. Evelien Pouillie reportedly earns less than a million a week, around a third less than Ferreira de Almeida, the teammate she beat by seven seconds. Renttu's two drivers together cost about as much as Nava Castillo on his own, and they finished one-two.
Comin Farahvash Fashandi is reportedly paid close to two million a week, putting him among the top earners. His bonuses are so small, less than a hundred thousand for a podium, that it hardly matters where he finishes. Today he was fifth, and his pay for the week was about the same as it would have been for last.
Andrea Moda are not saving money either. Viirok is paid in the same bracket as Farahvash Fashandi, but his contract rewards results: a win is worth almost as much again as his weekly salary. His teammate Negrete earns under half a million a week. At least on that point, the finishing order matched the pay.
The biggest gap is at SGA. Edmund Potts reportedly earns around 1.7 million a week, and his teammate Quinten Van Lancker almost ten times less. Potts finished seventh and Van Lancker ninth. For the extra money, SGA got two places.
Then there's Ross Lane of Arun Roughneck, on less than 400,000 a week, with a points bonus that is worth more than his weekly salary. He finished eighth, ahead of Van Lancker and not far behind Potts. Pound for pound, he may be the best-value driver on the grid.
So does money win races? It helps. Renttu shows that a well-funded team with sensible contracts can dominate for seasons. But Renttu pays well, not recklessly, and at Körfez the most expensive signing in the field was worth nothing when his gearbox failed. Money buys drivers. It doesn't buy reliability, and it doesn't buy strategy.
Renttu leave Turkey with a 1-2 and the usual confidence. Andrea Moda leave with a podium and a driver everyone will be watching. Fenninger leave with two broken gearboxes and presumably a very expensive repair bill.
Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
September 27, 2026 07:49 pm
Div 2.4 Pirate Panda Back from the Dead: Tito on Fire, Viktor Holds On, Leleux Steals the Podium on the Last Lap
Pitwall Times | Division 2.4, Race 2 of 10: Körfez Otorom
Pirate Panda Back from the Dead: Tito on Fire, Viktor Holds On, Leleux Steals the Podium on the Last Lap
A week ago Pirate Panda Race left the season opener with two retirements and nothing to show for it. At Körfez Otorom the team was back with two familiar faces in the cars, and it immediately looked like a team that knows what it is doing.
Remo Tito took pole in 1:55.114, just 0.038 seconds ahead of Guntram Viktor, with Alejandro Estrada Ojeda fourth. Viktor got the better start and led from the first lap, but he never escaped. Tito stayed within a second through the opening laps and within two seconds after the first stop cycle, and when Viktor's crew fumbled a wheel on lap 41, costing him 8.5 seconds in the pits, the gap dropped from 8.5 to 6.3 seconds. That was as close as it got. Both ran five stops on the same rhythm, mediums in stints of about eleven laps and softs for the final run from lap 53, and Viktor took the flag 6.866 seconds ahead. Only two cars were really racing today, and the rest of the field was more than a minute back.
Viktor won, and he deserved it. But anyone watching his mirrors all afternoon would not call this dominance. Zeroforce have the fastest car in the division for now, and Pirate Panda have a driver who can match it for 60 laps. That makes for an interesting season.
The strategy of the day belonged to Leleux Racing. Rochan Satyanarayana spent the race on mediums, with three long stints and stops on laps 14, 28 and 42, but he had not yet used a second compound. Rather than burn a stop on hards, Leleux waited until lap 56 and fitted softs with a 3.45-second splash. That dropped him to fifth behind Jeton Lustig and Estrada Ojeda. On the fresh softs he was two seconds a lap quicker, passed Lustig on lap 57, closed on Estrada Ojeda and went past him in sector 2 of the final lap. Third place, by 1.489 seconds. "I figured I'd gamble on a late soft," Lancil Leleux wrote in the paddock chat afterwards. It was a gamble, and it paid off.
For Estrada Ojeda that was a harsh ending to a strong drive. He ran four stops on mediums only, fought through the midfield pack all afternoon, overtaking Lustig, Clijsters, Sun and Premiani more than once, and held third for most of the closing phase. Fourth is still a solid result after last week's double retirement, but the podium was his until the last lap.
Behind them, Jaguar's Lustig finished fifth, ahead of Tycoon's Clijsters and Zeroforce's Oprando Premiani. Leland Bonny and Sem Lucassen collided on the first lap, which ruined both their races. CJ Motorsport's Ignacio Alegre Arrizabalaga had three tyre failures and finished 9:36 behind the winner.
Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
Pitwall Times Interview: Philip E., Team Principal, Pirate Panda Race
Murray Ledger: Last week two retirements, this week second and fourth. What changed?
Philip E.: The drivers. Remo and Alejandro know this car, they know the team, and they know how we work. You saw the result. Tito was on it from qualifying, missed pole by nothing, and then chased Viktor for sixty laps without a single silly mistake apart from one small moment. That's what he can do when everything around him works.
ML: Tito was the story of the day.
Philip E.: He was. Zeroforce have the quicker car right now, no question. But six seconds after sixty laps, with the same strategy and a slow stop for them in the middle, is not a gap. It's a warning. Viktor won the race and I congratulate him. He won't enjoy looking in his mirrors for the next eight races.
ML: Let's talk about Henrique De Albreuin. He was bought out of his contract, and last weekend at Arrows he finished fifteenth, two seconds a lap slower than his teammate. Was letting him go the right call after all?
Philip E.: I won't kick a driver when he's down. Look at his last two weeks: two team changes in two weeks, which, by the way, the rules shouldn't even allow. New car, new engineers, new setup, and nobody gave him time to settle in. So is it adjustment or is it his level? I honestly don't know yet, and neither does anyone else after one race. What I do know is that today my car was on the podium and the other car was fighting for one. That's the only comparison that matters to me.
ML: Off the track the team has had some unpleasant news.
Philip E.: Unpleasant is a nice word for it. Overnight, fan income was effectively abolished. Last season it came to about 3.2 million a week, roughly a quarter of our commercial income. Now it's under 90,000. That's a cut of 97 percent. There was no announcement, no transition period and no stated target. Across a season that's around 40 million that just isn't there any more.
ML: Can the team cope?
Philip E.: We'll cope. We have reserves and we'll restructure without selling anything. But that's not the point. This is a management game. You're supposed to plan. If someone can change a key figure by a factor of thirty overnight, any planning you did is worthless. I don't object to the direction. I object to the way it was done. If fans are meant to be a certain percentage of income, say what the percentage is, phase it in, and let the teams adjust. That's not too much to ask.
ML: And your message to Zeroforce?
Philip E.: Enjoy it while you can.
Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
September 27, 2026 07:19 pm
Div 2.3 Tyre Carnage in Turkey: Five Finishers, a Team Without a Boss, and Serbian Engineering Out of Reach
Pitwall Times | Division 2.3, Race 2 of 10: Körfez Otorom
Tyre Carnage in Turkey: Five Finishers, a Team Without a Boss, and Serbian Engineering Out of Reach
Twelve cars started at Körfez Otorom and five finished. Five of the seven retirements came from tyre failures, one from an engine and one from an empty fuel tank. As a weekend it was more of a demolition than a race, and only one team came through it unscathed.
Serbian Engineering locked out the front row in qualifying, with Kaupo Villard on pole in 1:56.989 and Albrecht Klöb 0.353 behind, then did the same in the race. Klöb won by 4.357 seconds from Villard, with the Mustang Dark Horse pair more than twenty seconds back. The strategy was simple and flawless: five stops, mediums in stints of about ten laps, and hards for the final run from lap 51. Their tyres never came close to failing, which on Sunday was reason enough to be ahead.
It could have been Villard's win. He led the opening laps comfortably until his first stop on lap 10, when the crew struggled with a wheel and turned a routine seven-second stop into 16.16 seconds. After that he was chasing his teammate, and his own mistakes made it harder: a high-speed spin on lap 35 cost 17 seconds, and after the safety car had bunched the field and put him 0.345 seconds behind Klöb, he went into the gravel on lap 50 and lost another ten. Klöb also had problems, with the onboard camera showing his suspension bending strangely from lap 13, but the car held together. On this form Serbian Engineering's biggest rival is itself.
Mustang Dark Horse Racing took the remaining podium place. Damiano Chiantia finished third after a hard-tyre stint in the first half of the race, just ahead of Kenneth Roy Hewitt, who briefly led during the Serbian stop cycle around lap 20. Neither was ever a real threat to the red cars. Hassan Khechini brought Sound of Speed home fifth and last, 1:22 down after two trips off track. His teammate Jack Jones retired on lap 32 when his engine blew.
The saddest story of the afternoon was HHF Race. For the first race of the season there was still someone at the pit wall. By the second there was nobody left, and on Sunday it showed. Both cars started on softs, and on lap 10 both had tyre failures at exactly the same moment. Both came back out on softs. Khemais Al-Fessi crashed out on lap 27 after another tyre failure, and George Mackie spun twice on lap 31 alone, lost a third tyre and finally crashed on lap 40, bringing out the only safety car of the day. A car with no one at the pit wall does exactly what nobody tells it to, which is nothing sensible.
Fucho F1 did not do much better. Evaristo Meireles and Vítor das Dores Oliveira ran thirteen laps on mediums without stopping, and on lap 14 both tyres failed within six seconds of each other. The race log notes that Oliveira's race "ironically ended in the tyre barrier". At JVR Phoenix, Lasse Bro Ruberg ran out of fuel on lap 13, and Hari Girsh was running fifth on softs until a tyre failure three laps from the end put him into the barrier as well.
Körfez Otorom did not produce a winner so much as a list of teams that made mistakes. Serbian Engineering was the only team that made none. If the rest of Division 2.3 does not start working out tyre wear, the championship will be settled well before race ten.
Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
September 27, 2026 07:07 pm
Div 2.2 From Seventeenth to Fifty Seconds Clear: Kudra's Afternoon, De Albreuin's Nightmare
Pitwall Times | Division 2.2, Race 2 of 10: Körfez Otorom
From Seventeenth to Fifty Seconds Clear: Kudra's Afternoon, De Albreuin's Nightmare
Arrows Grand Prix International went into qualifying on a wet track with slicks fitted, while the rest of the field ran intermediates or wets. The outcome surprised nobody: 17th and 18th on the grid, with Norbert Kudra 13.5 seconds off pole and Henrique De Albreuin 15.5 seconds off. Two hours later one Arrows car had won by 49.7 seconds, and the other was fifteenth, more than two minutes behind.
The race ran dry, and Kudra gained nine places on the opening lap. He was third by lap 5, passed Ottó Frey for second on lap 7, and on lap 11 went past polesitter Willi Wulf, who was just leaving the pits. Nobody saw the front of Kudra's car again. His strategy was five stops: two short soft stints, including a 4.2-second splash on lap 8, then three medium stints of about twelve laps each, and fresh softs from lap 53 to the flag. On those he lapped in the 1:56s while the rest of the podium was running 1:58s and 1:59s. It was the drive of the season so far, and it came from a grid slot his own team had thrown away.
Antonio Huhtala came from eleventh on the grid to second for Trackhouse. Wulf held on for third after qualifying on pole, but his teammate Brissault went from second on the grid to tenth, and Exasperace spent another afternoon stuck in the "Pasos pain train", as their team principal put it in the paddock chat. Deise finished almost eight minutes down, and nobody was surprised.
On the other side of the Arrows garage the numbers look very different. De Albreuin had the same starting position as Kudra, the same number of stops and the same compounds, and he finished 2:21.8 behind. On equivalent tyres he was two to two and a half seconds per lap slower than his teammate, and he lost that time in every sector. That was not one bad corner or one mistake. It was every lap, all afternoon.
His tyres also wore faster. Kudra's lap times rose by about four tenths over a medium stint; De Albreuin's rose by a full second. His second set of mediums lasted just eight laps before a tyre burst on lap 29, while Kudra ran twelve laps on the same compound without trouble. The blowout cost another twenty seconds on top of everything else. His full stops also took around 7.0 to 7.3 seconds, compared with 6.5 for Kudra, which suggests more fuel and a heavier car on every lap.
The team will point to the car, and there are plenty of reasons to. A driver who loses time everywhere, wears tyres faster and carries more weight is not getting the best out of a car that won the race by fifty seconds in his teammate's hands. It is only fair to note that on lap 30, on fresh softs after the blowout, De Albreuin was within two tenths of Kudra. So the pace is in there. He just couldn't find it for more than a lap.
That leaves the question nobody at Arrows will want to hear: is Henrique De Albreuin fit for Division 2? One race is not enough to decide, and whatever setup problems there were need resolving before anyone draws conclusions. But a two-second-per-lap deficit to the teammate in the same car is not a setup detail. If it happens again at the next round, the question will answer itself.
Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
September 27, 2026 07:00 pm
Div 2.1 Tyres Decide Everything in Turkey, and Slow Car Collect What Race 1 Took Away
Pitwall Times | Division 2.1, Race 2 of 10: Körfez Otorom
Tyres Decide Everything in Turkey, and Slow Car Collect What Race 1 Took Away
Körfez Otorom rated "normal" on every characteristic this season. The tyres rated it differently. Sixteen cars started, ten finished, and there were thirteen tyre failures, four of them for one driver. This race was about who knew how long a set of tyres would last, and most of the grid didn't.
The front: Slow Car do the arithmetic
Heinz Fisch took pole with 1:56.618 and turned it into the most controlled race of the afternoon. Slow Car McNoPace ran both cars on the same plan: mediums in stints of about twelve laps, four stops, and softs for the final run from laps 49 and 50. Nothing exploded, nobody spun and nothing in the strategy was left to chance. Fisch only lost the lead during his own stop cycle around lap 14. By lap 20 he had it back, and he won by 38.977 seconds.
Dinger Zoomie Racing came closest in pace and lost where it hurt most. Ernest Theisen started on softs and pitted early on lap 8. He then ran mediums through to the flag and held second for most of the second half. Going into the last lap he was 2.3 seconds clear of Hisaki Shimaoka, who was on fresh softs. In sector 3 he made a mistake and posted 35.309 against his usual 32-point-something. He lost second place by 0.025 seconds after 60 laps. Mathew Geary finished fourth on the same four-stop pattern, 1:18 down and not a factor.
The midfield: stops, and more stops
Moneytron ACS mixed compounds (M, M, H, M, M, M) and made five stops per car. That brought fifth for Pintonello and seventh for Issajew, both more than three and a half minutes behind. Perder Corse went the other way with three stops and long hard-tyre stints. Marino finished sixth ahead of the whole Moneytron-Arun group. Capuzzi was ninth, with spins and an engine sound the team will not have enjoyed. Ramalingam Ahad scored eighth for Arun on five stops. His teammate Ser Cher Fernandez was out on lap 11 when his steering wheel broke in two. The race log calls it "amateurish", and it isn't wrong.
The casualties: how not to do it
Wolf GP started fourth and sixth and ran softs only. Agoston Ágh made eight stops, burst tyres three times and crashed out on lap 48. Tomas Bernardas Jelinskas went off track more often than any other driver and was retired by a tyre explosion on lap 39. Wolf left with two cars in the barriers and nothing else.
Équipe Renault Elf started both cars on hards. Both tyres burst on the same lap, lap 19. Didier Bleneau then had no suitable tyres left and retired in the pits on lap 38. Albert Augier finished tenth, 9:27 down, after five stops and four blowouts. Tenth sounds like a points finish; he was last, and ten cars were classified.
Forza Mutte Racing ran the shortest race of the day. Both cars had blowouts on lap 24, both came into the pits, and there were no tyres of the right type left for either of them. Two cars retired within three seconds of each other because the tyres ran out.
The championship
In race 1, Fisch retired with a gearbox failure. At Körfez Otorom, Slow Car McNoPace took a one-two while the direct rivals lost cars, positions or both. With eight races left there's a long way to go, but this was the kind of weekend that settles a season.
Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
September 27, 2026 06:48 pm
New season, old winner: Pouillie beats the faster Potts as Andrea Moda shine on Division 1 debut
Evelien Pouillie took the Season 47 opener for Renttu Racing, but SGA Racing's Edmund Potts had the quickest car, and lost only because he needed a fourth pit stop. Behind them, Andrea Moda Formula made a strong start to life in the top division, while JP Suave Racing were left far adrift.
By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
The name on top of the timesheet at Al-Zubarah is a familiar one. Evelien Pouillie won Division 1's Season 47 opener for Renttu Racing by 9.4 seconds, with team mate Alvaro José jr. Ferreira de Almeida third. But the race data says the winner was not the fastest driver on the day.
Potts had the pace
That was Edmund Potts. He took pole with a 1:47.663 in dry qualifying, set the fastest lap of the race on lap 2 with a 1:48.799, and over the distance was the quickest man in the field. His average lap, excluding in and out laps, was about 1:49.85, against 1:49.99 for Pouillie. That is around 0.14 seconds a lap, or roughly 7.5 seconds over the 54 laps.
It was not enough to cover the pit stops. Potts stopped on laps 10, 21, 32 and 43, an 11-lap rhythm, and each stop cost around 20 seconds from pit entry to pit exit. Pouillie and Ferreira de Almeida ran three stops. A slow 12.9 second stop for Ferreira de Almeida on lap 41, with a wheel problem, let Potts through both Renttu cars, and on lap 42 he led Pouillie by 5.4 seconds. His fourth stop a lap later dropped him to 15.3 seconds behind. He closed to 9.4 by the flag, but ran out of laps.
The message for Renttu is that they won on strategy against a faster car. For SGA it is the opposite: this looks like a car that can win the division, if the stop count works out.
Andrea Moda make their mark
The best story of the day may be Andrea Moda Formula. Daniil Viirok qualified fifth and ran as high as second on lap 10 while the leaders cycled through their stops. He passed Potts on lap 21 and finished fourth, 34.7 seconds behind the winner, on three stops. His average race pace was the fifth quickest in the field, roughly 0.6 seconds a lap slower than Pouillie and ahead of both Fenninger Racing cars. He beat Fenninger's Eulalio Nava Castillo by 9.7 seconds.
The second car of Benito Adam Negrete started 16th and finished 12th, 2:03.5 behind the winner. Pace-wise he was mid-field, and he lost about four seconds to a spin on lap 32. Both cars finished, one in the points and one on the right side of the field.
JP Suave far from the pack
At the other end, JP Suave Racing had a difficult day. The team has a works deal with MecTec, with Honda Civic engines, and it showed. Gergely Babály and Glenn Cassuto qualified 22nd and 23rd, 3.5 and 3.7 seconds off pole, and finished 21st and 22nd, more than four minutes behind the winner (4:03.0 and 4:23.7).
Their race pace was between 4.3 and 4.7 seconds a lap slower than Potts, and about a second a lap slower than the next slowest car, Arun Roughneck Racing's Oleksa Lukashenko. Cassuto's stop on lap 26 took 9.1 seconds, compared with 5.2 to 5.5 for the front runners. The chat had made the joke on Saturday. Patrick Price wrote: "Honda Civiv engine, lol".
Elsewhere
Ross Walrond (Handbrake RD) ran fourth-quickest over his 25 laps before tyre trouble ended his race on lap 26, and ElMayoGPTeam's Sriram Joshi ran dry on lap 44. Nava Castillo was fifth, Slade Aitchinson (Fenninger) sixth and Nicholai Bech Napizia (Silver Cosmos) seventh. Twenty-two of 24 cars were classified.
September 20, 2026 11:00 pm
Divisions 2.1 to 2.4 Al-Zubarah
Pitwall Times, Season 47 opening round, Divisions 2.1 to 2.4. By Murray Ledger
Qualifying was wet in three of the four divisions, the race was dry everywhere, and the grids barely survived the first lap. Across Divisions 2.2 to 2.4, eight cars ran out of fuel, so the plans on paper mattered as much as the pace on track.
Division 2.1: Shimaoka wins, Fisch's gearbox does not
Hisaki Shimaoka won for Slow Car McNoPace by 35.7 seconds from Ernest Theisen, but only after his team mate Heinz Fisch retired from the lead on lap 45 with gearbox failure. Fisch had set the fastest lap of the race and was 21 seconds clear at the time. Theisen started eighth and finished second, and his Dinger Zoomie team mate Mathew Geary took third. Ágh (Wolf GP) lost about 25 seconds to spins from second on the grid, and Edoardo Marino passed him for fourth on the final lap. His team boss summed it up in the chat: "drat pipped at the end".
Division 2.2: Kudra from 14th
Norbert Kudra (Arrows Grand Prix International) started 14th and won by 24.8 seconds. Pole sitter Ottó Frey led the early laps, then crashed out on lap 22, which brought out the safety car until lap 25. Kudra pitted under it, took the lead by lap 29 and never lost it for long. Antonio Huhtala came from sixth to second on three stops, 0.27 seconds ahead of Afonso Azevedo, who took third on five stops after a tyre exploded on lap 5. Three cars ran dry, two from ATMI Racing and one from MacSalaatikko. RSA Racing's Shaun Jooste took the loss of Frey well: "What can you do hey."
Division 2.3: Serbian Engineering in a race of their own
Kaupo Villard led every lap for Serbian Engineering and won by 19.0 seconds from Albrecht Klöb, who had started tenth. The pair were around six seconds a lap quicker than everyone else, and Jack Jones was third, more than four minutes behind. Both Mustang Dark Horse R cars ran out of fuel by lap 11. Hassan Khechini spun on lap 1 and still took fifth with a final-lap pass on Khemais Al-Fessi. Fucho F1 had tyre bursts in both cars.
Division 2.4: Viktor wins alone
Guntram Viktor led every lap for Zeroforce F1 and won by 45.3 seconds from L. Sun of Tycoon R. INC. He set pole in the wet and never looked in danger. Rochan Satyanarayana of Leleux Racing was third.
Pirate Panda Race qualified Alejandro Estrada Ojeda and Henrique De Albreuin fifth and sixth, and both cars stopped with an empty tank on lap 10, before either had pitted. They finished 13th and 14th.
Team principal Philip commented afterwards: "A lot of things happened this week, so many things that I forgot I am the single point of failure in the entire team. Too bad there is no working standing. We will try next week."
Dan Silver had hoped this paper would give Philip a grilling for the press release. Consider it done.
September 20, 2026 09:20 pm
Season 47 Preview: New Parts, Old Rivals, Possibly Two Ghost Teams
By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
Welcome to Season 47, where the cars are new, the suppliers are (mostly) the same, and at least two entries on the grid may or may not show up at all. Quirk and Jil & Jaques Racing are both rumored to be racing under inactive management, which either means a dramatic mid-season resurrection or two teams quietly farming last place all year without anyone actually at the desk. Either way, plan your podium math for seven contenders, not nine.
Last year's business, unfinished
Start with what actually happened in Season 46, because it explains everything about how this grid lines up. Andrea Moda Formula won the title outright, running a tyre compound nobody else had access to, a genuine hardware advantage rather than a form question. Behind them, though, the real story was a three-way tie that wasn't: Philip E.'s Pirate Panda Race finished on 169 points, comfortably clear of both Joseph Stam's Zeroforce F1 and Matthias Engelmann's Jaguar Racing Team, who ended up level at 125 apiece. Panda Race were the more consistent operation, four podiums and a pole, but zero wins, they scored by showing up every week, not by being the fastest car on Sunday. Zeroforce, for all their lower points total, actually won a race, the only one of the three that did. Jaguar matched Zeroforce on points with a leaner return, two podiums, one pole, no wins, and no real explanation for how they got there other than not making mistakes.
That's the pattern worth watching into this season: Panda Race wins on reliability and consistency, Zeroforce wins on outright pace when it shows up, and Jaguar wins on simply not falling apart while everyone else does. Three different routes to the same points column, and Andrea Moda's tyre advantage is the only reason none of them mattered for the title.
The supplier reset
For the teams actually planning to compete this year, the hardware sheet is almost insultingly uniform. Everyone's on the same engine, everyone's on the same tyre, no repeat of the compound gap that decided last season. The only real split left is fuel, Molop versus Melachro, and brakes, BT-Tech doing the heavy lifting for most of the grid while Timo Kemi's Bobbo F1 and Carlos Américo's CJ Motorsport go their own way on Opuray and Underforce. Whether either choice matters or is just a supplier deal nobody read the fine print on remains to be seen.
Testing, again, told us nothing
Programs differed, stint data is still classified above Frank's pay grade, and the timesheet is about as reliable a form guide as reading the sky. One thing worth flagging anyway: Panda Race ran both drivers within three hundredths of each other across the sessions. Not proof the car is fast, don't let anyone tell you otherwise, but a decent early sign both seats can pull similar weight, which matters more this year than usual given how tightly Panda Race, Zeroforce and Jaguar finished last time out.
Outlook
With Andrea Moda's tyre edge gone from the equation, Season 47 is arguably the first fair fight between the three teams that actually mattered last year. Panda Race enters as the reigning runner-up with the strongest points record of the trio and a stated target of the title. Stam's Zeroforce has the proven race-winning pace to close a 44-point gap if Panda Race slips even slightly. Engelmann's Jaguar has quietly matched Zeroforce on points once already without anyone treating them as a real threat, which might be the most dangerous position of the three. Everyone else, Leleux, Tycoon, Bobbo, CJ, is racing for the scraps unless one of last year's top three has a genuinely bad season.
New season, new parts, same warning as always: nothing you saw in testing means anything. Lights out is the only data anyone should trust.
wichtigster unterschied, der reifenhersteller round ist geschichte - sehr schlechter reifen und teil des erfolgs v mateos team
Untangling how tyre supplier changes affect team performance.
Season 47 Preview: New Parts, Old Rivals, Possibly Two Ghost Teams
By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
Welcome to Season 47, where the cars are new, the suppliers are (mostly) the same, and at least two entries on the grid may or may not show up at all. Quirk and Jil & Jaques Racing are both rumored to be racing under inactive management, which either means a dramatic mid-season resurrection or two teams quietly farming last place all year without anyone actually at the desk. Either way, plan your podium math for seven contenders, not nine.
Last year's business, unfinished
Start with what actually happened in Season 46, because it explains everything about how this grid lines up. Andrea Moda Formula won the title outright, running on Supergrip while nearly the entire field, including everyone still on this grid, was stuck on Round, a tyre bad enough to be a structural handicap rather than a competitive gap. Behind that, the real story was a three-way tie that wasn't: Philip E.'s Pirate Panda Race finished on 169 points, comfortably clear of both Joseph Stam's Zeroforce F1 and Matthias Engelmann's Jaguar Racing Team, who ended up level at 125 apiece. Panda Race were the more consistent operation, four podiums and a pole, but zero wins. Zeroforce, for all their lower points total, actually won a race. Jaguar matched Zeroforce on points with a leaner return, two podiums, one pole, no wins, and no real explanation for how they got there other than not making mistakes.
The supplier reset, and the one that actually matters
Every other supplier column is close to uniform this year, same engine, same fuel split roughly as before, Bobbo and CJ still doing their own thing on brakes. None of that decided anything last season and none of it will this one.
The tyre situation is different, and it's the whole story. Round is gone. Everyone on this grid is now on Halftrack, the same compound Andrea Moda used to beat the field with. That's not a minor supplier update, that's the removal of the exact mechanism that made Season 46 a one-team race. Panda Race, Zeroforce, and Jaguar were all fighting each other for best of the rest last year while running a tyre a full tier below the champion's. Take that gap away and the 44-point margin between Panda Race and the two teams tied for second means considerably less than it looks like on paper.
Testing, again, told us nothing
Programs differed, stint data is still classified above Frank's pay grade, and the timesheet is about as reliable a form guide as reading the sky. One thing worth flagging anyway: Panda Race ran both drivers within three hundredths of each other across the sessions. Not proof the car is fast, but a decent sign both seats can pull similar weight, which matters more now that the tyre excuse is off the table for everyone.
Outlook
This is arguably the first genuinely fair season Division 2.4 has had in a while. Panda Race enters with the strongest points record of last year's chasing pack and a stated title target. Zeroforce has proven race-winning pace and, with the compound disadvantage erased, a real case for closing the gap. Jaguar quietly matched Zeroforce on points once already without being taken seriously as a threat, which might be exactly the position from which titles get stolen. Everyone else, Leleux, Tycoon, Bobbo, CJ, is racing for the scraps unless one of last year's top three has a genuinely bad season, and for the first time in a while, nobody has a tyre to blame if they do.
September 13, 2026 11:20 pm
Testing, Division 2.4: Panda Race Tops a Sheet That Says Even Less Than Usual
By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
Division 2.4 has completed the first of three scheduled test sessions this season, week 1 of a 13-week calendar built around 10 races. A second test week follows immediately in week 2, with a third slotted into week 8, mid-season. Pirate Panda Race sit atop the timesheet, having run confirmed qualifying-sim laps. What anyone else ran is unclear, and this week, that uncertainty runs deeper than usual.
Team principal Philip explained why.
Ledger: Panda Race tops the test sheet. What does that mean?
Philip: Nothing. Same as test times usually mean, just less than usual this week.
Ledger: Why less than usual?
Philip: Since the latest patch, stint length and lap times for other drivers no longer show up in the data. Before, you could at least see who ran how long, even though tire type, degradation and fuel figures were never visible to begin with. Now even that's gone.
Ledger: Intentional or a bug?
Philip: Officially there's a fix that closes a data leak: a driver could still see detailed data at his former team after switching. That's documented. Whether that same fix also removed general visibility of stint length and lap times for other drivers entirely isn't stated anywhere. Could be collateral damage, could be deliberate, nobody's said either way.
Ledger: What does that mean for reading your time?
Philip: That it means nothing beyond our own garage. We know we ran qualifying-sim laps. What everyone else ran, longrun, setup test, qualifying-sim, we don't know. Before, you could at least guess from stint length. Not anymore.
Ledger: So P1 on the sheet amounts to?
Philip: Tires are better. That's it. Nice to be on top of a list that says nothing, and this week the list says even less than usual.
September 7, 2026 12:25 am
Pirate Panda Race: Season 46 in Review
A season that shows where this team is headed.
THE RUBBER FACTOR
To understand Season 46 in Division 2.4, you have to start with tyres. Almost the entire field spent the season on the "Round" compound, with only two teams given access to the superior "Supergrip" compound: Andrea Moda Formula and CJ Motorsport. Pirate Panda Race was part of the Round majority, going up against a rival that dominated the season entirely on Supergrip. A good part of the gap to Andrea Moda this year comes down to that material difference, not a shortfall in driving or strategy. Running toe to toe with a team that has structurally better rubber under its cars, and still fighting consistently for podiums, is a sign this team is doing something right.
CONSISTENCY AT THE FRONT: REMO TITO
Remo Tito was the rock of this season. Podium finishes, clean races, a driving style that stays composed under pressure. From pole position at Circuit des Laurentides to a gripping fight for the top three at the season finale at Circuit du Rocher, Tito showed he has the pace to run with the best in the division, and did it on tyres that put him at a structural disadvantage against the competition.
THE NEW SIGNING: ALEJANDRO ESTRADA OJEDA
When Bilal Hallikäär was poached mid-season by record champions Renttu Racing, a compliment to the development work done in this team, 22-year-old Alejandro Estrada Ojeda stepped into the second seat. His debut at Loniari in Italy was rewarded with points immediately, a strong first outing for a young driver thrown into a new environment mid-season. Over the rest of the year, Ojeda showed a clear upward trajectory: a blistering recovery drive from P18 to P8 at Circuit des Laurentides, a podium finish in the penultimate race week. As with any young talent, there was a dip in form along the way, part of the learning curve, but the trend across the season points clearly upward.
SEASON HIGHLIGHTS
P3 for Tito at Parc de Rivemaure following a smart in-team strategy split. Debut points for Estrada Ojeda at Loniari, Italy. P18 to P8 recovery drive by Ojeda at Circuit des Laurentides. Podium for Ojeda in the second-to-last race week, as the team secured a commanding second place in the division standings. Hard-fought season finale at Circuit du Rocher, with both cars in podium contention until the final lap.
THE STANDINGS
Pirate Panda Race closes out the season in a solid second place in Division 2.4, with a comfortable gap to third and trailing only Supergrip-shod Andrea Moda Formula, who leave the division as deserved champions and promotees.
LOOKING AHEAD
With a settled lineup, a talented young driver on the rise, and a clear target of winning Division 2.4 in Season 47 and reaching Division 1 by Season 48, Pirate Panda Race heads into next season with confidence. This year's tyre disadvantage doesn't have to repeat itself, and when it doesn't, we'll find out what this team is really capable of.
August 31, 2026 09:41 am
Division 1 POTTS NEW CHAMPION OF DIV 1 AS RENTTU'S TITLE HOPES BLOW UP INSIDE SEVEN LAPS
**PITWALL TIMES**
*Murray Ledger | Season 46, Week 13 | Division 1 | Circuit du Rocher*
**POTTS NEW CHAMPION OF DIV 1 AS RENTTU'S TITLE HOPES BLOW UP INSIDE SEVEN LAPS**
Some championships get decided by brilliance. This one got decided by three laps of mystery and four more laps of certainty, both costing Renttu Racing, both costing the two drivers who'd spent the entire season fighting each other for a title that was, by Friday lunchtime, still separated by three points.
Renttu had already wrapped up the constructors' championship weeks ago, a formality by the time the field arrived at Circuit du Rocher. The drivers' title was the actual contest, and on Friday, Henri Kuivanen filed what will now be remembered as one of the more unfortunately timed forecasts of the season: "Driver's Championship is still open with 3p gap between Almeida and Potts. Dramatic mistake for Potts!" The dramatic mistake, as it turned out, belonged to nobody named Potts.
There were warning signs before a wheel even turned. Kuivanen spent Wednesday posting what read like increasingly alarmed thermodynamics homework — "From 63° to 2° in 11 lap stint," followed by a request for a 61-degree rise that would apparently turn "all to negative development" — the kind of message that makes complete sense to precisely one person in the room and terrifies everyone else by implication. Jussi Heikkinen, translating for the rest of us, guessed the track had quietly become a Monte Carlo rally stage. Tim Prince, more usefully, predicted that ten laps on hards would be enough to start causing problems and that the race would resemble Mario Kart. He was, if anything, being conservative.
By Sunday, the tyre situation had graduated from theory to full-blown crisis. Stop counts across the top ten ranged from six to nine. Josef Høier had the misfortune of needing a front wing repair mid-race, which — thanks to a well-documented quirk in how forced pit stops interact with strategy — sent him back out on the same worn tyres he'd gone in on, silently converting his planned seven-stop race into an eight-stopper he never signed up for. Dan Silver's verdict from the pit wall, "time for the head strategist to be sacked," was, in fairness to strategists everywhere, aimed at a piece of software rather than a human being; the wing swap itself did its job and kept Høier's race alive, which is more than can be said for several others.
Fenninger Racing's afternoon deserves its own paragraph of misery, and in fairness to them, "aggressive" undersells just how brutal the tyre wear was all weekend. Both Eulalio Nava Castillo and Slade Aitchinson had already stopped five times by lap sixty-five — and given what everyone else on this grid was dealing with, even six stops for the full distance would have counted as optimistic planning. Worth remembering: Pirate Panda Race, in a separate race entirely, found out the hard way that eleven laps on a single set was already one lap too many under a merely "normal" driver setting. Whatever Fenninger's stint lengths were built around, the tyres at Circuit du Rocher this week weren't playing along with anyone's assumptions. Then, on lap seventy-eight — the very last lap of the entire race — both Fenninger cars picked up blisters that finally let go at the same moment. The retirement message didn't mince words: "Because there are no remaining tyres of the requested type." Not a missing reserve set of one compound, the way Pirate Panda got lucky with scrubbed softs a few weeks back. Fenninger had simply burned through their entire tyre allocation keeping up with a punishing wear rate, and had nothing left to bolt on when the last blowout hit. Two cars, same team, same lap, both retiring in the pit lane with the chequered flag in sight and literally no rubber left in the garage.
Patrick Hanson provided the afternoon's most baffling strategic choice, opting for softs for reasons nobody in the chat could reconstruct, and was rewarded with a tyre explosion on the exact lap he'd scheduled his pit stop for — a finish 5:35 behind the winner and a lap time in the 1:51 range that will haunt his engineers for a while yet. "This must be what using Michelin tyres at Indianapolis feels like," offered Tim Prince, not wrongly.
None of which compares to what happened to Renttu. Evelien Pouillie's race lasted three laps before something went wrong at the back of the car — the team's own message afterward admitted they weren't entirely sure what, beyond an apparent suspension problem, only that it was enough to end her afternoon outright. Prince's dry aside that it "counts as a zero-stopper" doing most of the necessary eulogy work. Four laps later, Alvaro José Ferreira de Almeida, the man defending a three-point championship lead, had a tyre let go and joined his teammate in the garage, no ambiguity required this time. Heikkinen's response arrived within minutes: "Renttu Racing goes off to celebrate their titles on their yachts on the seventh lap of the race." Dan Silver's one-word reply, "Blimey," was honestly doing a lot of restrained work.
With both Renttu title challengers gone before a quarter of the race had elapsed, the championship effectively decided itself on track. Edmund Potts, the man on the wrong end of Friday's forecast, went out and won the race outright, converting a three-point deficit into what is now a Division 1 championship of his own. Nicholai Bech Napizia completed a strong day for Silver Cosmos in second, and Ross Walrond rounded out the podium for Handbrake RD having somehow made nine pit stops along the way — Dan Silver's closing verdict on the whole afternoon, "9 stops and a podium," summing up a race that had long since stopped making conventional sense.
Silver's sign-off after the chequered flag captured the mood better than any classification sheet could: "Well, that was manic. Glad not every week is like that." Congratulations went round to the season's new champion, and a rather more pointed good luck to MacSalaatikko and Slow Car McNoPace, both relegated out of the division and both, per Silver, warmly encouraged to fight their way straight back.
As for the drivers' championship — three points and a season's worth of tension, resolved in the time it took one mystery failure and one very clear one. Somewhere, Henri Kuivanen is rereading his own Friday post and wondering exactly which driver he meant. Edmund Potts, for what it's worth, isn't asking.
August 30, 2026 09:59 pm
Division 2.4 ANDREA MODA LOCK OUT THE FRONT ROW, THEN SPEND NINETY MINUTES TRYING TO GIVE IT AWAY
PITWALL TIMES
Murray Ledger | Season 46, Week 13 | Division 2.4 | Circuit du Rocher
ANDREA MODA LOCK OUT THE FRONT ROW, THEN SPEND NINETY MINUTES TRYING TO GIVE IT AWAY
Some races are decided in qualifying and confirmed on lap one. This was not one of those races. Andrea Moda took pole and second on the grid separated by nine thousandths of a second, the kind of margin that makes stopwatches look embarrassed, with Pirate Panda's Alejandro Estrada Ojeda and Remo Tito lining up third and fourth, a couple of tenths further back. On raw pace, the story of the afternoon was written before a wheel had turned. What nobody could have predicted was how hard Andrea Moda would work to hand that story away.
The middle of the race read like a highlight reel nobody asked for. Benito Adam Negrete found the outer limit of Circuit du Rocher at speed and very nearly introduced himself to the tyre barrier, shedding eleven seconds for his troubles. Both Pirate Panda cars had their own separate flirtations with the scenery earlier on, tyres reportedly "damaged a bit" on each occasion, the sort of understatement that covers a multitude of near-disasters. Then, with the race apparently won, Daniil Viirok lost the rear of his own car at speed and coughed up fourteen seconds, gift-wrapping Tito a genuine shot at a lead that had no business being within reach on pace alone.
Underneath all of that, a quieter arithmetic was playing out. Andrea Moda needed eight pit stops to Pirate Panda's seven for most of the afternoon, and every time one of the Italian cars ducked into the pits, the gap would shrink, only for their superior straight-line speed to eat it straight back up again a few laps later. Watching it unfold was a bit like watching a faster runner who keeps stopping to tie his shoes: mildly encouraging if you're behind him, ultimately beside the point.
Then came the final stint, and this is where it got genuinely stupid. Tito's crew sent him out on a tyre plan built for eleven laps, one lap too many as it turned out, and the car told everybody exactly how it felt about that decision. Condition dropped from a healthy ninety-two percent to single digits inside the last four laps, lap times ballooning from the low 1:13s to the mid 1:15s as the compound simply gave up trying. He was still running third on pure track position when the tyre let go completely at Start/Finish on the final lap, the sort of failure that doesn't ask permission. What followed was a slow, undignified crawl back to the pits while Andreas Clijsters and his own teammate Estrada Ojeda swept past in the space of a few corners, one podium finish evaporating into fifth place in about fifteen seconds of real time.
Add to that a game engine that, upon detecting a tyre failure with four hundred metres left in the entire race, decided the correct response was to send Tito through a full, formal pit stop rather than let him limp home with what little tyre he had left — a quirk of the sim reportedly older than some of the drivers on the grid — and you have a finish that looked considerably messier on the results sheet than it needed to.
Estrada Ojeda, for his part, had his own late drama, spending the closing laps in a straight fight with Clijsters for what briefly looked like a podium of his own, the margin between them eventually settling at 0.074 seconds. Not enough. Third went to Tycoon, fourth to Pirate Panda, fifth to Tito's wounded car, and the two Andrea Modas cruised home first and second, considerably more shaken than the timing sheet suggests.
Team boss Philip E. was characteristically blunt about the closing stages.
"Andrea Moda were quicker than us all day, no point pretending otherwise. What happened at the end is our whole season in one lap, really — close enough to touch it, and then it gets taken away by something we didn't even see coming. Eleven laps on that tyre was one too many, that's on us, not the driver. Remo was running third with laps to go. Third. And then the tyre just ends the conversation. Fourth and fifth is a good result out of a race we had no business being this close in, I know that. Doesn't make the last lap sting any less."
Andrea Moda leave Circuit du Rocher with a one-two that flattered a far messier afternoon than the final gaps suggest. Pirate Panda leave with two more cars in the points and a tyre strategy meeting that's going to run long this week.
PITWALL TIMES — SPECIAL REPORT Murray Ledger, live from Pirate Panda Race's strategy centre | Circuit du Rocher
THE GAMBLE
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a strategy room when everyone already knows how a race is going to go. Twelve laps in at Circuit du Rocher, that quiet has already arrived. Andrea Moda are gone up the road, both cars, comfortable, and the gap counter on the main screen is doing the thing gap counters do when nobody wants to look at it directly.
Philip E. is watching it anyway. I ask him the obvious question, the one everyone in the room is thinking and nobody's said out loud yet.
"Are we racing for the win here?"
He doesn't take his eyes off the screen. "No. We're racing for third and fourth today, realistically. With a look at second if the race breaks our way. The win's not on the table on pace. Let's not pretend it is."
It's not resignation. It's arithmetic. And for the next hour and a half, that arithmetic is going to bend further in Pirate Panda's favour than anyone in this room has any right to expect.
THE BREAKS
Lap twenty-four. Benito Adam Negrete finds the outer limit of the circuit at speed, nearly kisses the tyre wall, and gives back eleven seconds for the privilege. There's a small, collective lean-forward around the monitors — the kind of movement a room makes when it doesn't quite believe its own luck yet.
"That help you?" I ask.
"It helps the podium math," Philip E. says. "Doesn't change the plan."
He's not wrong to be cautious. Andrea Moda's raw pace has been eating margins like this all afternoon and spitting the deficit straight back out a few laps later. But something's shifting in the room's energy, even if nobody wants to say it yet.
Lap fifty-five brings a smaller, quieter decision that nobody in the room treats as significant at the time. An engineer suggests loading an extra litre and a half of fuel at the upcoming stop, purely as insurance. Philip E. waves it through without much debate.
"That's a lot of fuss over ninety seconds of extra weight," I say.
"It's insurance for now," he tells me. "Ask me later if it turns into something else."
I write the line down and think nothing more of it. I should have thought more of it.
Lap fifty-eight, the moment that changes the whole shape of the afternoon: Daniil Viirok, leading comfortably, loses the rear of his own car at high speed and hands back fourteen seconds for nothing at all. This time the room doesn't lean forward quietly. Someone's on their feet. Someone else is already recalculating the gap out loud before the replay's finished.
"Well?" I say, louder than I mean to.
Philip E. allows himself something close to satisfaction. "That's the race breaking our way. Told you it wasn't a fantasy."
THE PLAN THAT LOOKS LIKE A PLAN
By lap sixty-eight, the strategic picture has genuinely shifted. Andrea Moda are burning through pit stops faster than Pirate Panda — eight to seven — and every visit to the pit lane costs them ground that their raw speed only partially claws back. Remo Tito, on track, is fast. Genuinely fast. Fast enough that when the final pit stop conversation happens, it isn't about survival anymore. It's about opportunity.
Someone points out there's still fuel sitting in the tank from that quiet decision back on lap fifty-five — the insurance nobody thought much about. With it, they could stretch Tito's final stint from ten laps to eleven, and lean on the engine mode a little harder while they're at it.
"Comfortable with eleven?" I ask Philip E.
He considers it for a beat longer than he has all afternoon. "It's the last stint of the race. Remo's on for third right now. If we can squeeze another lap out of the tyre and hold that pace, that's the podium we came here for. I don't love it. But I don't hate it either."
The call is made. Nobody in the room argues hard against it. Why would they? Tito is third on track. The gap to Viirok is shrinking lap after lap. By lap seventy-two, there's an actual current of belief running through the strategy centre, the kind that's dangerous precisely because it feels earned.
"You're smiling," I tell Philip E.
"I'm not smiling," he says, smiling. "This is what a plan working looks like on my face. Don't get used to it."
THE CLIFF
I should have written down, right there, that nothing in racing rewards a room for believing too early. Nobody did. Why would they? The numbers still looked fine.
Then, lap seventy-six, they stop looking fine. Lap times that had been sitting comfortably in the low 1:13s start climbing — 1:13.7, then 1:14.3, then 1:14.8 — and one of the engineers at the far monitor goes quiet in a very specific way. Not confused. Certain.
"Is that the tyre?" I ask.
"That's the tyre," Philip E. says. "That's us asking for one lap too many."
It's the first time all race he's said something like that before it happens rather than after, and something about the tone tells me he already knows exactly how this ends.
Lap seventy-eight. Start/Finish. The tyre lets go completely, right at the beginning of the final lap of the entire race, with Tito running third on the road. On the in-room feed it's barely more than a flicker of red text, but the reaction around me isn't a groan and it isn't relief — it's the specific, deflating silence of a room doing the maths on exactly what this costs, in real time, while it's still happening. Andreas Clijsters goes through. Moments later, Alejandro Estrada Ojeda's own late charge for the final podium spot follows him through as well. A genuine, earned third place becomes a crawl back to the pits and a face-saving fifth, in the space of perhaps fifteen seconds.
There's a smaller indignity layered on top, one that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the age of this particular piece of software: with under half a lap of the entire race remaining, the sim insists on routing Tito through a full, formal pit stop rather than simply letting him limp home on a dead tyre — a quirk, I'm told, that's been logged and ignored for the better part of two decades. It changes nothing about the result. It just makes the whole thing look, and feel, considerably worse than it needed to.
THE RECKONING
Philip E. doesn't say anything printable in the first few seconds. What comes after is more useful.
"Talk to me," I say.
"That's the podium gone," he says. "That's not the tyre being unlucky. That's us pushing a car that had nothing left to give. I told the room I didn't love eleven laps, and I let it happen anyway because the upside looked too good to pass on."
"Would you take the call back if you could?"
"Knowing what I know now? Yes. In the moment, with Remo running third and the fuel just sitting there unused — I'd probably make the same mistake again. That's the honest answer. Not the good one."
There's a scramble for a spare set of tyres for the crawl home — scrubbed softs, not fresh ones, a small piece of foresight in the middle of an otherwise unforced error — and by the time Tito's rejoined the track for his final, undignified lap toward the flag, the room has gone from tense to simply flat. The kind of flat that doesn't come from losing. It comes from knowing you gave something away with your own hands.
"Last word?" I ask, on my way out.
"We had third and fourth here today. Genuinely. And we turned it into fourth and fifth because we wanted more than the car had left to give. That's on the strategy call. Not the driver, not the tyre. I'll say that on the record."
I let myself out quietly. Nobody notices. Feels about right for how the whole afternoon went — a team fast enough to get exactly what it came for, undone in the final mile by asking for one lap too many.
August 30, 2026 07:34 pm
Division 2.3 ROSS LANE WRAPS UP THE TITLE IN A RACE THAT ONLY TWO CARS ACTUALLY FINISHED
**PITWALL TIMES**
*Murray Ledger | Season 46, Week 13 | Division 2.3 | Circuit du Rocher*
**ROSS LANE WRAPS UP THE TITLE IN A RACE THAT ONLY TWO CARS ACTUALLY FINISHED**
Ross Lane didn't just win at Circuit du Rocher, he claimed the drivers' championship doing it, and Arun Roughneck Racing Team collected the constructors' title alongside him for good measure. Both results were thoroughly deserved. Whether either man will remember much about the race itself beyond "I finished it" is a different question, because this was a Division 2.3 special in the truest sense — a nine-car grid that spent the afternoon quietly disintegrating around them.
Lane converted pole into a comfortable, largely untroubled win, his 1:14.621 final lap a picture of composure compared to what was happening behind him. Eloi Meireles brought the sole surviving Fucho F1 home in second, seven minutes and seven seconds adrift, having inherited the position the honest way — by simply still being on track when it mattered. Everyone else on the timesheet is listed by lap count rather than a finishing time, which tells its own story: Lukashenko's Arun Roughneck teammate got as far as lap sixty-seven before tyres ended his afternoon; Bimont made it to forty-one; Butts to thirty-eight; and from there it only gets shorter, down to Klöb and das Dores Oliveira parking it inside the first ten laps.
Nine cars started. Two finished under their own power on the lead lap. If that sounds like a low bar for a championship-deciding weekend, that's Division 2.3 for you this season — the racing has too often been a footnote to the attrition rate, and a grid this thin doesn't leave much room to absorb it.
There's at least a structural reason to expect that to change. One team is being relegated down from Division 1 next season, with four promoted up from Division 3 to take their place and, hopefully, some others alongside them. Given what turned up at Circuit du Rocher this weekend — a field that lost seven of nine cars before the flag — a fresh injection of teams who actually show up on race day might do more for the standard of racing here than anything happening at the sharp end of the championship.
Congratulations to Ross Lane and Arun Roughneck Racing Team all the same. A title won against a field this fragile is still a title won, and somebody had to be the one still standing at the end. The hope for next season is simply that there are more people left standing alongside them.
August 30, 2026 07:32 pm
Division 2.2 EQUIPEFLANDRE SEAL BOTH TITLES WITH A ONE-TWO THAT FIZZLES OUT BEHIND THE SAFETY CAR
**PITWALL TIMES**
*Murray Ledger | Season 46, Week 13 | Division 2.2 | Circuit du Rocher*
**EQUIPEFLANDRE SEAL BOTH TITLES WITH A ONE-TWO THAT FIZZLES OUT BEHIND THE SAFETY CAR**
Hasan Adami arrived at Circuit du Rocher already the champion in all but arithmetic, and EquipeFlandre with a constructors' title that needed only the formality of confirmation. Neither man treated it as a formality on Sunday. Martti Voldek took pole by 0.171 seconds over his teammate, the pair comfortably clear of Willi Wulf's Exasperace in third, and from there the two EquipeFlandre cars simply drove off into their own race, never seriously threatened by anyone else on the grid.
It should have been a tidy afternoon of green-flag domination. Instead, the race spent its final act crawling home behind the safety car, denying what had been a genuinely dominant performance the finish it deserved.
The trouble started building well before that. Andreas Anderhub wrote his car off in a heavy crash on lap sixteen — he walked away, the chassis did not — and two laps later Guido Dokkum joined him in the gravel after a tyre let go under him. The ATMI Racing pairing of Tore Morten Østerbø and Oscar Acerbi then suffered near-simultaneous gearbox failures on lap twenty-nine, a double retirement that will have made for an uncomfortable debrief in that garage. Willi Wulf, meanwhile, endured the worst kind of afternoon: a blistering tyre finally gave up on lap sixty-nine, and having recovered from that, his engine simply ran dry three laps later — out of fuel, on what looked for most of the race like a genuine podium drive.
Then, with two laps to go and the result long since decided at the front, Ottó Frey crashed heavily enough to bring out the safety car, and the lights never went back off before the chequered flag. The final two laps were run at a crawl, Voldek eventually crossing the line in 1:45.659 for what should have been a routine victory lap, Adami 0.546 seconds behind to complete the one-two and, with it, both championships for EquipeFlandre in the same afternoon.
Behind them, Antonio Huhtala brought Trackhouse Racing home third, comfortably clear of Norbert Kudra in fourth for Arrows Grand Prix, with Alpár Kádas and Jorge Everardo Pasos rounding out the point-scorers in a race that, for most of the midfield, was really about surviving the attrition further up the order rather than fighting for position.
It's a strange way for a championship-winning team to close out the job — not with a chequered flag at racing speed, but with two laps of processional yellow behind a safety car after someone else's shunt. Nobody in the EquipeFlandre garage is likely to mind. A title's a title, however it crosses the line.
August 30, 2026 07:25 pm
Division 2.1 BABÁLY WINS AGAIN AS A THIRD OF THE FIELD LEAVES ITS TYRES ON THE TARMAC
**PITWALL TIMES**
*Murray Ledger | Season 46, Week 13 | Division 2.1 | Circuit du Rocher*
**BABÁLY WINS AGAIN AS A THIRD OF THE FIELD LEAVES ITS TYRES ON THE TARMAC**
JP Suave Racing had already wrapped up both championships before a wheel turned at Circuit du Rocher this weekend, which made the natural question going in whether Sunday would be a coronation lap or an actual contest. It turned out to be both, in the sense that Gusztáv Babály won comfortably from pole, and in the sense that roughly a third of the grid spent the afternoon finding out the hard way what this track does to a tyre that's overstayed its welcome.
Babály set the tone from the moment the lights went out, banking fastest sector times in all three sectors inside the opening two laps and never really looking troubled after that. Behind him, though, the race turned into a rolling demolition. Talat Bilge, Asim Ahidous, and George Mackie were the first of the tyre casualties, all suffering blowouts inside the first thirty laps, with Mackie in particular making a habit of it — he'd go on to retire not once but effectively three times across the afternoon before the sim finally gave up counting and just classified him forty-eight laps down. Jean-Charles Brissault matched him for persistence in reverse, running as high as second early on before a first tyre failure sent him backwards, only to fight his way most of the way back up the order and then blow another one on lap 75 for good measure. By the chequered flag, Bilge, Augier, and a spectacular late crash for Mackie had all ended their races against something solid, and Mubarak Ali and Mutsuhito Dupiré both lost their final positions to tyre failures inside the last two laps.
Through all of it, JP Suave simply got on with business. Vasco Micheli, starting fifth after a slightly scruffy qualifying lap, spent the entire race locked in a running scrap with Žan Lakovič and Ernest Theisen, trading the position back and forth more times than either driver will probably want to remember, and came out the other side of it in third — enough for a 1-3 finish for the already-crowned champions. Lakovič himself drove the pick of the non-Suave performances, converting third on the grid into a comfortable second by the flag for Dinger Zoomie Racing, with Theisen completing that team's solid weekend in fourth.
Further back, survival counted for almost as much as pace. Dave O'Callaghan brought his Arun Racing Team car home fifth having weathered the carnage around him, while Brissault's rollercoaster afternoon — two tyre failures and a fair amount of recovery driving in between — was still worth sixth at the flag. Mubarak Ali and Mutsuhito Dupiré rounded out the point-scorers, both undone at the very end by tyres that had clearly had enough.
Nobody's championship changed hands today, and nobody expected it to. But if you wanted a reminder of why Circuit du Rocher has a reputation for eating rubber, this was it — a race where finishing at all turned out to be an achievement in itself for a good chunk of the field.
August 30, 2026 07:19 pm
Tyre Carnage in Monaco: Div1 U12 Race Ends with no finishers!!
With the number of finishers more familiar in the Barkley Marathons than motorsport, the Circuit du Rocher Div1 U12 race concluded with a staggering zero finishers today.
Every single one of the ten brave youngsters who lined up on the grid fell victim to a catastrophic tyre failure, turning the new track into a graveyard of shredded treads and melted compounds and making the Governing Body question its decision to use the Principality for the season finale.
### The Demolition Derby of Monaco
* **Schuhmann:** Looked untouchable from pole until his front-left tyre decided it had seen enough life choices, exploding into a cloud of black confetti on Lap 10 and sending him looping down an escape road.
* **Stevens:** Inherited the lead briefly before experiencing a rare "sudden aggressive de-inflation" that left his rims chewing sparks off the asphalt. He was last seen getting advice from Enver Bora on how to make tyres last longer than an ipsode of the Simpsons
* **Offenberger:** Survived the early carnage only to suffer a spectacular tread separation that peeled his rear tyre off like a banana skin and damaged his suspension beyond repair on lap 45.
* **Tadeshi:** Went wide after his left-rear tyre simply disintegrated, leaving nothing behind but a naked wheel rim and a cloud of smoke. Inexplicably in this area of the world, he found himself in a gravel trap.
* **Bisikiewicz:** Attempted to limp back to the pits on three functioning wheels, but a terminal puncture on the front-right put an end to that dream.
* **Tsujimoto:** Another retiree from the lead, pirouetting gracefully into the tyre barriers.
* **Bernardas Jelinskas:** Suffered a dramatic blowout on the back straight, made it back to the pits only to be told by his mechanics that they had no tyres left - they'd all be exploded at some point over the weekend - leaving him stranded in the pitlane without a drive
* **Schop:** Casually coasted to a halt after a slow puncture turned into a rapid, total loss of air pressure right at the apex.
* **Talvitie:** Fought valiantly against severe vibrations until his tyre completely separated from the wheel assembly in a flurry of sparks. He too was lacking any replacements - apparently the team mechanics thought 7 pairs would be sufficient. How wrong they were.
* **Appels (P10):** The last survivor trundled around the circuit at a snail's pace for two whole laps, only for his rubber to utterly disintegrate 4 laps short of the checkered flag, completing what is thought to be the first-ever DNF sweep in league history.
The Driver's Union has argued that race control has should declare the event a "No Contest", but it remains to be seen what points will be awarded overnight. Tyre suppliers, meanwhile, are currently huddled in dark rooms weeping over their telemetry data and looking for reasons to blame the ten- and eleven-year olds driving the cars for the shambles that unfolded at the Circuit du Rocher.
August 24, 2026 03:28 pm
Division 1 The Streak Ends: Renttu Racing Lose One at Last
Murray Ledger, Chief Correspondent
The Streak Ends: Renttu Racing Lose One at Last
AUTODROME AL-ZUBARAH — Eight races, eight wins. That was Renttu Racing's season coming into Al-Zubarah, a perfect record with two rounds still to run. It ended here. E. Pouillie took pole as usual, teammate A. Ferreira de Almeida split by Handbrake RD's R. Walrond in third on the grid, and for once the grid slot lied. Walrond made it count, took the lead somewhere in the pit-stop sequence, and brought Handbrake RD home first, 1:41:16.330 after 54 laps. Ferreira de Almeida salvaged second for Renttu, two seconds back. Pouillie, who had converted pole into a win the last eight times running, had to settle for third, nineteen and a half seconds off a race that had looked like his from Friday.
Doesn't cost them anything that matters. Renttu arrived at Al-Zubarah 171 points clear at the top of the table, and one lost race with one round left changes nothing about where the title's going. But eight-for-eight is the kind of number that gets noticed when it stops, and Handbrake RD are the team that gets to say they're the ones who stopped it. Walrond's win paired with A. Sayre bringing the second car home seventh, a genuinely good day for a team third in the standings, not just a spoiler role.
Behind the podium, E. Potts brought SGA Racing home fourth, their second car, D. Camâra, a lonely eleventh. N. Napizia took fifth for Silver Cosmos, the team's other driver, J. Høier, out with a suspension failure on lap 39 after starting sixth. Paolonio Racing had a tidy afternoon, B. Habat sixth, C. Farahvash Fashandi ninth, both in the points without ever threatening the front. A. Rodrígues de Morais brought PYKE home eighth on the only alternate strategy in the top ten, softs instead of the mediums everyone else around them was running.
Further back, ElMayoGPTeam's S. Joshi picked up a place to finish twelfth, teammate S. Aitchinson lost one to finish thirteenth just behind him. P. Hanson's race for MacSalaatikko ended on lap 21, out of fuel after a single pit stop, the shortest day of anyone who didn't actually break something.
The Standings
The title is still Renttu's to lose, and after eight wins from eight they're not going to lose it in the two rounds left. What today changes is smaller but real: Handbrake RD proved the record was beatable, and with a round still to come, they know exactly how it's done.
At the bottom, nothing moved. Places nine through twelve, MacSalaatikko, Slow Car McNoPace, Chaos Pudding Tank and Faulcon deLacy Race, remain the relegation zone, and Faulcon deLacy Race sit twelfth with zero points and nine missed rounds out of nine. Whatever's left of that operation since the ownership dispute pushed its old management out, it hasn't fielded a car all season and isn't starting now.
One round remains.
August 24, 2026 08:47 am
Division 2.4 Zeroforce Breaks the Duck, Ojeda Leads a Lap at Al-Zubarah Before the Podium
# PITWALL TIMES
### Murray Ledger, Chief Correspondent
## Zeroforce Breaks the Duck, Ojeda Leads a Lap at Al-Zubarah Before the Podium
**AUTODROME AL-ZUBARAH** — Guntram Viktor gave Zeroforce F1 their first win of the season, five stops and 1:49:57.320, ten seconds up on Andrea Moda's Benito Adam Negrete. Andrea Moda didn't need it, they've had eight wins already and the title's basically theirs. The story of the weekend was further back anyway. The race started wet, water on track at the green flag, and for the first two-thirds of it Pirate Panda Race looked like a solid but unremarkable points day. Then they switched to inters on lap 35 and Alejandro Estrada Ojeda spent four laps leading the entire race.
The result: Viktor's win for Zeroforce, Negrete second for Andrea Moda, Estrada Ojeda third for Pirate Panda after starting fourth on the grid. Daniil Viirok fourth for Andrea Moda, Remo Tito fifth for Pirate Panda after starting second, seven hundredths behind his own teammate after 54 laps. Jaguar Racing Team's Jeton Lustig and S. Lucassen sixth and seventh, Zeroforce's second car eighth, Bobbo F1's Amadeus Mader ninth, the team's first points of the season.
Tenth and eleventh went to [CJ Motorsport](https://pitwall.org/team/2159/cj-motorsport), Wesley Addams and Alf Alberts, both a lap and more down by the flag, back of the meaningful field rather than anywhere near it. It was still their first points of the year, which is presumably why Gareth Bennett's congratulations in the chat read a little generous next to the actual result. R. Satyanarayana and Henry McIlvenny were twelfth and thirteenth for Leleux Racing. Moneytron ACS's Nenko Issajew and Alfonso Pintonello spent most of the afternoon a lap down after gambling on inters in conditions that didn't reward it, fourteenth and seventeenth around Lane Beaumont's Pablov GP entry and Leland Bonny's Bobbo F1 car. Both Tycoon R. INC. cars, Sessue Shobo and Andreas Clijsters, ran out of fuel on the final lap. Clijsters threw his wheel out of the car in disgust.
That's the sheet. What it doesn't show is the shape of Pirate Panda's race.
### How It Actually Went
Both cars started on wets, as did most of the field, and spent the first 34 laps doing nothing dramatic. Tito ran third to sixth, mostly around fourth and fifth. Ojeda sat third to fifth, rarely far from his teammate. Solid, mid-pack for a team that had qualified second and fourth, no more than that.
Lap 35, both cars came in for inters, and the race changed shape immediately. Ojeda jumped from fifth to second on the spot. Next lap, he was leading. He held it for four laps, 36 through 39, actually out front of the entire Division 2.4 field, Tito running second behind him for three of those same laps. It didn't last, everyone else caught up on tyres eventually, but for a few laps in the middle of an ordinary Sunday, Pirate Panda Race had the whole field behind them.
The slicks came out around lap 41 and 42, and with them went the lead. Ojeda dropped to third, Tito to fifth, and that's where both stayed until the flag. Not the win the inters stint promised, but a podium and a top five that started with a mid-pack afternoon and briefly became the fastest cars on track.
### The Pit Wall Diary
It started before the race even went green. Friday, weather uncertainty already in the air: *"weather lottery are the right words,"* Matteo Rossi wrote. Philip E. wasn't even sure he'd be around to watch it live: *"interesting weather and I'm not sure if I can watch the race live, so maybe one of my strategies work, maybe not. good luck in the weather lottery."* Zeroforce's Joseph Stam summed up the whole gamble a day out: *"Damp race in the Desert. Seems Legit. Not sure about starting tyre but hopefully changes all work."* Jaguar's Matthias Engelmann, in the same boat: *"yeah...wont be live either. Hope i chose the correct lap to change."*
Come race day, Philip wished everyone well two hours out, *"godd uck and good racing"* (typo his, sentiment sincere), and then things got interesting. An hour in, genuine surprise: *"interessting, why is Ojeda now on p2?"* Nobody was more confused by Pirate Panda's own race than Pirate Panda. Track drying out helped: *"ok, inters are much faster now."* Rossi, watching his own strategy misbehave in parallel, offered the kind of solidarity only a fellow sufferer can: *"same old bug."*
That bug, and the reason Philip's podium car spent time buried a lap down before it wasn't, came down to a pit-stop timing quirk that has apparently been annoying this paddock for a while. Setting a tyre change two laps ahead didn't reliably trigger the actual call: *"cost me an extra lap out inters. got the inters just in time, set the medium to late, so the drivers did not pit."* He wasn't sure if it was his own mistake or the interface: *"might be, just mess up my strategy 
."* A few minutes on, still puzzling it out: *"or maybe they dont pit at all, why should they when stop is set 2 laps ahead."* Then it worked: *"ok, now they do."* And then the line that'll sound familiar to anyone who's watched Philip deal with LTW's software: *"If there would be a developer I'd ask to fix the pit stop delay or make it more clear when the last call can be."* Spiteri, deadpan: *"bad there is none."* Philip: *"I know, mean, but ancient issues."*
Somewhere in the middle of all that, the conversation drifted into engine mode settings, because apparently everyone's fighting the same interface. Rossi: *"like another race, with Viirok I'm unable to manage push and engine mode. I change them in the strategy page, but the driver remains with the same levels I decided before the race."* Philip found a workaround mid-race: *"I increased the engine setting starting lap 50 and..."* then asked Rossi where to even check it. Spiteri chimed in with the actual fix: *"did you try refreshing just before updating?"* It worked. Rossi's own tip for next time: *"I always change them 2 laps in advance at least."* Philip, taking the note with a jab at the leader: *"might help them defending against the mighty Andrea Moda team 
thanks for the reminder."* Turns out both his drivers had fuel to spare too, so he tried the same trick with Tito, hoping it'd hold *"at least 2 laps ahead."*
Meanwhile Spiteri was having the worse afternoon watching his own CJ Motorsport car get lapped in real time: *"Watching races like this live when your team is lapped should be classified as torture."* Philip's reply put it in perspective, though not about his own race, Moneytron's inters gamble had left them a lap down by that point: *"true, but coming from drop dead last on inters the situation is not that bad."*
Post-race, the mood turned to congratulations. Philip to Zeroforce: *"Gratulations Joseph, fanatastic win."* Then, honestly: *"True, I also need to wait to get the data for the news article which takes long."* (He wasn't wrong. This one took a while.) Rossi had the line of the day for anyone who'd bet on the wrong tyre: *"gg, better to stay offline when rain."* And Gareth Bennett closed the thread out with the nicest thing said all weekend, congratulating CJ Motorsport's J Spiteri and Bobbo F1's Timo Kemi on their first points of the season.
### The Official Word
Asked afterward for the short version, Philip E. kept it simple:
*"Not too bad, though. Just when we tried to call in the drivers for slicks the fucked radio did not work, cost us two laps and a potential win. Nice to see Ojeda on the podium."*
Read against the lap chart, "the radio didn't work" lines up with the slicks call around lap 41, right where Pirate Panda dropped from the lead back to third and fifth. Same result either way: track position lost right when it mattered, a podium instead of a shot at the win.
### What It Means
Andrea Moda's promotion is a formality, 344 points and eight wins with one round left. Pirate Panda sit second on 122, comfortably clear of Jaguar Racing Team in third on 107, and a podium plus a P5 against Jaguar's sixth and seventh only widens that gap. Second place is theirs to lose with one round left. The relegation fight stays at the bottom between Moneytron ACS, Pablov GP, Vezper Racing and Apex Velocity, and for at least two of those four, the fight isn't about pace so much as whether anyone's still logging in.
*One round remains.*
August 23, 2026 09:41 pm
Division 2.3 Arun Roughneck Do It Again, Because Nobody Else Is Left to Stop Them
# PITWALL TIMES
### Murray Ledger, Chief Correspondent
## Arun Roughneck Do It Again, Because Nobody Else Is Left to Stop Them
**AUTODROME AL-ZUBARAH** — Division 2.3 doesn't have a title fight. It has Arun Roughneck Racing Team, five other cars that showed up, and seven teams that didn't bother entering the season at all. Round nine changed none of that. Ryan Lane won again, third from third, 1:42:32.609 after 54 laps and three stops, teammate Olena Lukashenko a lonely 46.7 seconds back in second. Six wins from nine rounds, twelve podiums from a possible twelve. There is no suspense left in this division's top spot, and there hasn't been for a while.
Behind the two green cars, the closest thing to a story was Serbian Engineering's Karel Villard bringing home third on a four-stop, ahead of KOD Racing's Owen Butts in fourth. Anton Klöb needed six pit stops to salvage fifth for Serbian Engineering, which is either a tyre-management horror show or a strategy nobody's explained. Enzo Meireles brought the lone surviving Fucho F1 car home sixth, over eight minutes off the win.
The other three retired. Vasco das Dores Oliveira went out with brake failure on lap 25, Rui Bimont's KOD Racing car lost its tyres on lap 20 without ever pitting, and Aleksander Aasaroht's Boxhead entry did the same on lap 15. Half the retirements in this field never made a single stop before the mechanical bill came due, which says something about how seriously the back half of a nine-car grid is being run.
Nine cars entered. Five teams. Twelve are registered for the division.
The paddock chat tells you more about this season than the timing sheet does. A now-deleted account posted back in December, before the season even started: *"the season starts with a bummer. my best driver left."* Nobody replied for months. This week, Luke Butcher checked in with the only question that matters for half this grid: *"Is the game stuck?"* It isn't. It's just mostly empty.
### The Standings, Such As They Are
Arun Roughneck lead by 104 points with one round left, which was already a formality before this weekend and is more of one now. Nobody is catching them, nobody was trying to.
The real story is at the bottom, and it's not really a story about racing. Places nine through twelve, Shelby-Hayden f1, Arrows, 23Racing, Impen Race, are relegated: zero points, eight missed rounds out of nine, indistinguishable from each other on paper. But sixth, seventh and eighth, Skylark Racing, JVRacing and MY SPARROWHAWK RACING, have the exact same record. Zero points. Eight missed rounds. The only thing separating them from the relegation zone is wherever the tiebreaker in this game's ranking algorithm happens to land, since none of these seven teams turned a wheel all season.
Skylark Racing survives on that tiebreaker. Skylark Racing is run by Frank, the same Frank who designed the ranking system deciding it. Whether that's a coincidence or just what it looks like when the person who wrote the rules also has a team sitting exactly on the line those rules draw, this desk isn't in a position to say. It is, at minimum, a funny place for the voodoo math to land.
*One round remains, for what it's worth.*
August 23, 2026 09:13 pm
Division 2.2 Voldek Holds On at Al-Zubarah as Exasperace Refuses to Go Away
# PITWALL TIMES
### Murray Ledger, Chief Correspondent
## Voldek Holds On at Al-Zubarah as Exasperace Refuses to Go Away
**AUTODROME AL-ZUBARAH** — Different division, different race entirely. Where Division 2.1 was a procession, Division 2.2 actually had a fight in it. Marek Voldek took pole and the win for EquipeFlandre, 1:42:23.866 after 54 laps and four stops, but Wolfgang Wulf's Exasperace never let the gap open past 13 seconds. Second place, but the closest thing to a threat the leader saw all afternoon.
Behind Voldek, it was EquipeFlandre's own second car that gave the game away. Hugo Adami actually matched Wulf's pace on the final lap, quicker by eleven thousandths, and it didn't matter: he crossed the line in third, 25 seconds behind Wulf, the gap built earlier in the race and never clawed back. A weekend where the team won on raw pace but let the other side keep the fight alive by not covering their second car properly.
Everyone else finished on the same lap, which by the standards of this weekend at Al-Zubarah counts as an event in itself. Antti Huhtala brought Trackhouse Racing home fourth, over a minute back, with teammate João Pasos sixth after a straightforward three-stop. Nikolaus Kudra split them in fifth for Arrows Grand Prix International, the only driver in the top ten to gamble on hard tyres and make it stick. Matthias Schweizer and Attila Kádas scored seventh and ninth for Olivetti Corse, sandwiching Owen Frey's RSA Racing car in eighth. Yusuf Cheng completed Arrows GP's afternoon in tenth, Amaro Azevedo brought the second RSA car home eleventh.
Exasperace's second driver, Anton Anderhub, had a weekend to forget: twelfth, over two and a half minutes off his teammate, doing nothing for the constructors' fight his own car was supposed to be helping. Genki Hanada and Hiro Ashida rounded out YMSF's afternoon in thirteenth and fourteenth. At the back, alone, Gijs Dokkum brought Climate Masters N.V. home fifteenth, six and a half minutes off the pace, the only car all weekend that looked like it was racing a different race entirely.
Fifteen cars started, fifteen finished. No retirements, no drama on track, which made the paddock chat log more interesting than the timing sheet. Marcus Ern's one-word entry, *"Oups,"* Friday evening, got a reply from Gareth Bennett a few minutes later: *"Yeah, where are your drivers? Some kind of bug?"* Nobody from ATMI Racing showed up to qualifying or the race at all. Fifth in the championship, and the team simply wasn't here this weekend. No explanation on record, so none offered.
### The Numbers That Matter
EquipeFlandre led Exasperace by 31 points coming in. A 1-3 finish against a 2-12 finish stretches that further, EquipeFlandre's second car did its job today in a way Exasperace's didn't. The promotion fight for Division 1 isn't over on paper, but it's tilting harder in one direction with every round.
At the other end, nothing changed hands. Climate Masters N.V. actually turned up and finished this time, for what it's worth, but a car six and a half minutes off the winner scores no points and closes no gaps. Wanda GPx, sigma and CJ Racing BR remain where they've been all season: not on track, eight missed rounds out of nine, occupying the bottom three places by default rather than by racing. Barring a mass late entry that hasn't shown any sign of coming, those four go down together.
ATMI Racing's no-show costs them nothing in the relegation fight, they're nowhere near it, but a missed round while sitting fifth is still a missed round. Whatever happened to their entry, they'll need to explain it before the season closes.
*One round remains.*
August 23, 2026 09:07 pm
Division 2.1 Suave Sweeps Al-Zubarah, Ninth Round Leaves Only One Left to Save the Rest
# PITWALL TIMES
### Murray Ledger, Chief Correspondent
## Suave Sweeps Al-Zubarah, Ninth Round Leaves Only One Left to Save the Rest
**AUTODROME AL-ZUBARAH** — Round 9 of 10, and JP Suave Racing did what JP Suave Racing has done all season: took both steps of the podium and went home. Vasco Micheli led every lap that mattered, crossing the line in 1:44:06.376 after 54 laps on a three-stop strategy, no drama, nobody within a lap of him by the end. Teammate Gusztáv Babály never threatened, running mediums to Micheli's early pace before switching to softs and coming home 32.6 seconds back in second. Barring a mechanical apocalypse next round, that's the constructors' title and the Division 1 promotion spot decided with a race to spare.
The scrap for the last podium spot went to Dinger Zoomie Racing's Ernest Theisen, who held off teammate Žan Lakovič for third, both on three-stop strategies that got them nowhere closer than a minute and a half off the lead. It's the shape of Dinger Zoomie's whole season in one result: solid, distant, never actually threatening.
Arun Racing Team's Dave O'Callaghan came home fifth, unbothered by the four stops it took to get there. Teammate I. Pasek Tabrani picked up the last point in eighth after four stops of his own. Sutton Racing's Jean-Charles Brissault set the fastest lap of the race on his final tour but needed five pit stops to salvage sixth, a strategy call that either says something about tyre wear at Al-Zubarah's notoriously tiny pitbox or something about Sutton's pit wall. This desk isn't in the business of guessing which.
Équipe Renault Elf split their approach: Didier Bleneau ran hards into a two-stop for seventh, Albert Augier needed two stops of his own for a distant tenth. Wolf GP, by contrast, had a day to forget. Leo Carroll's final classification carries unexplained timing flags on his last lap that the source data doesn't clarify, and George Mackie retired on lap 29 after two stops, no points, no explanation. Asim Ahidous brought Team VELOS home a lap down in eleventh after five stops of his own.
At the back, the two teams already staring at relegation delivered exactly what the table suggested they would. Pagani's Talat Bilge retired on lap 26, the team's latest scoreless weekend in a season built almost entirely of them.
Cornered near the Wolf GP garage, a team principal bearing a strong resemblance to a certain Austrian-South-Tyrolean paddock veteran offered his verdict: *"We came here to score points, we scored zero. One driver retires, the other, I don't even know what happened on his last lap, the sheet has brackets on it. I'm not a mathematician, I'm not a magician. We fix the car, we come back, we hope Renault Elf has a worse day than us next time. That's the plan."*
At the front, nobody from JP Suave felt the need to say anything. Winning has a way of doing the talking for you.
### Can Fitzgerald Turn It Around?
Down in the relegation zone, the arithmetic is closer than the reality. Pagani sit ninth, three points off safety, and on paper that gap closes with one decent Sunday. On the pit wall, the picture looks thinner: one driver, one designer, an empty second seat, no mechanic, no coach, no scout, and a contract question mark hanging over both of the two people they do have. [Archie Fitzgerald](https://pitwall.org/member/3688/archie-fitzgerald), the man running the operation, has a handful of days left in the season to find fuel for the car, a mechanic for the box, and a second driver for the seat that's been empty since nobody can remember when.
Theoretically, none of it is impossible. Practically, it's a lot of theoretically for one race weekend. Whether Fitzgerald wrenches this back from the brink or whether Pagani go quietly into Division 3, this desk isn't betting either way, we're just watching the clock.
*One round remains.*
August 23, 2026 09:02 pm
Division 1 Renttu Wins Again, But It Isn't the Procession It Used to Be
Renttu Wins Again, But It Isn't the Procession It Used to Be
Division 1, Season 46, Week 11 — Autodrome Ratchaphruek
By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
Álvaro Ferreira de Almeida took Renttu Racing's win, again. On paper that's the same headline this column has written most of the season. On the timesheet, it's a different story: 13.125 seconds over Edmund Potts (SGA Racing), the smallest winning margin Renttu has posted in weeks, after a lead that changed hands more times than the highlight reel could keep up with.
The lead nobody could hold onto
Ferreira de Almeida lost the lead to Potts before the first pit stops had even cycled through, got it back, lost it again to Pouillie, then to Napizia, then made a costly seven-second error mid-race that should have ended the conversation. It didn't. He clawed back through Napizia and Potts a second time in the closing stints and made the final pass stick with the race well past halfway, running a hard-tyre strategy that looked like a gamble right up until it wasn't.
Potts never went away. Second at the flag, on softs, having led multiple stints himself, this was the closest Renttu has been made to work for a win all season. Nicholai Napizia completes the podium for Silver Cosmos, up a position from his grid slot and part of the same three-way scrap for most of the distance, +26.669 at the flag but considerably closer than that number suggests for long stretches of the afternoon.
Evelien Pouillie brought the second Renttu home fourth, +27.781, after surviving a tyre failure early on that could easily have ended his race instead of just costing him a stop. That Renttu still has both cars in the top four despite one of them nursing a blown tyre back to the pits is the actual story behind "still winning" this week: the margin is shrinking, but the depth isn't.
Handbrake RD and Paolonio Racing, quietly effective
Rasmus Walrold and Aleksi Sayre brought both Handbrake RD cars home fifth and sixth, a tidy result without a headline. Bard Habat and Philip Schmidt did the same for Paolonio Racing in seventh and eighth. Nobody in that group won anything or lost anything dramatic, which after the front-row fight is almost a relief to write.
Fenninger Racing: two cars, two gearboxes, zero finishers
Somebody at Fenninger Racing needs to have an uncomfortable conversation with their gearbox supplier. Eulalio Nava Castillo lost most of his gears and rolled to a stop near a marshal post on lap 50. Seven laps and a lot of hope later, Slade Aitchinson suffered a gearbox problem of his own and joined him in the retirement column. Two cars, two unrelated gearbox failures, same team, same afternoon. That is not bad luck twice, that is a supplier or a build process with a question to answer, and it's the second week running this column has had to write about a Fenninger mechanical DNF.
The number that matters
Renttu's margin has gone from routine to competitive in the space of a few weeks, and it took a genuine three-way fight, a driver error, and a survived tyre failure to get there. Division 1 is still Renttu's to lose. It is no longer a foregone conclusion, and that's a better story than another lights-to-flag procession.
— Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
Overheard in the paddock: Tim Prince (Slow Car McNoPace) on his team's pace this weekend: "We're taking the team name too literal this season."
August 17, 2026 01:35 am
Division 2.4 Andrea Moda Formula Doubles Up, Pirate Panda Race Takes the Best of the Rest
# Andrea Moda Formula Doubles Up, Pirate Panda Race Takes the Best of the Rest
**Division 2.4, Season 46, Week 11 — Autodrome Ratchaphruek**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
Dry, sunny, five stars of track grip all weekend, and Andrea Moda Formula made the most boring possible use of it: pole to flag control, both cars, no drama required. Dominik Viirok took the win from teammate B. Adam Negrete by 18.166 seconds, a margin built in qualifying and never seriously challenged.
**Pirate Panda's split result**
Remo Tito qualified second, split the Andrea Moda cars for most of the weekend, and came home third, +30.806, after a clean four-stop race. That's solid points off a strong quali lap and the sort of result a midfield team takes without complaint.
Alejandro Estrada Ojeda is the harder one to explain. He qualified sixth, six hundredths of a second off his own teammate's pace, close enough that on Friday this looked like a genuine one-two threat on Andrea Moda. By Sunday he was over fifty-five seconds behind Tito for an identical number of stops, sixth at the flag. Whatever went missing happened somewhere between the grid and lap one, not in the pit lane. Team boss Philip E. flagged him coming off a fuel-strategy issue from last week's race too, so this is starting to look like a pattern rather than a one-off.
**The midfield, briefly**
Rohan Satyanarayana brought Leleux Racing home fourth, +37.315, the closest anyone got to touching the podium without a factory Andrea Moda tag on the car. Gunnar Viktor was fifth for Zeroforce F1, over a minute back. Behind the top six the race scattered into the usual mix of extra stops and tyre gambles, with CJ Motorsport's two hard-tyre cars and Moneytron ACS's Y. Menshikov finishing outside the ten-minute mark, further evidence that hards were the wrong read at Ratchaphruek this week.
---
## Team Boss Corner: Philip E. Speaks
*Pitwall Times sat down with Pirate Panda Race principal Philip E. after the flag. He had a cigar he wasn't smoking and opinions he wasn't holding back.*
**Pitwall Times: Third for Tito. Happy?**
**Philip E.:** Happy is a strong word, but yeah, I'll take it. Kid qualified P2, lost one spot to Negrete who's basically driving a different car than everyone else out there, and brought it home clean. Four stops, no drama, no gravel trap tourism. That's a Tuesday for this team and I'll sign up for a hundred more of those.
**PT: And the other side of the garage?**
**Philip E.:** Yeah. Let's talk about that. Ojeda qualifies six hundredths off Tito. Six! That's nothing, that's a driver having his best coffee of the season. Then Sunday happens and he's fifty-five seconds off his own teammate with the same strategy, same stops, same tyres. I don't have an answer for you and I'm not going to make one up on live television. Something's off, we saw it last week with the fuel numbers too, and if it's a pattern I'll find it before he does, or the numbers will find it for both of us.
**PT: Is he going to be alright?**
**Philip E.:** He's fine, he's not hurt, nothing's broken except his weekend. He's a good driver, I picked him for a reason, and one bad weekend doesn't undo that reason. He'll be better next time. If he's not, we'll have a different conversation, but that's not today's conversation.
**PT: There's a rumor going around that you were seen with Comin Farahvash Fashandi.**
**Philip E.:** [laughs] People really don't have anything else to do, huh? Yeah, I met him. He's good, he's exactly the kind of driver I'd want in that second seat, and I told him that to his face. Paolonio Racing made him a better offer. I don't know if that was money or a straight shot at Division 1 or both, probably both, and I'm not going to pretend I can compete with a Division 1 seat on paper. Doesn't mean I'm happy about it. Means I'm realistic about it. There's a difference.
**PT: So no seat change coming?**
**Philip E.:** Nobody's getting fired off one bad Sunday, I just told you that. Ask me again if it's still a story in three weeks.
*— Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
August 17, 2026 01:35 am
Division 2.3 Wet, Small, and Over Before It Started: Arun Roughneck Walks It in Division 2.3
Wet, Small, and Over Before It Started: Arun Roughneck Walks It in Division 2.3
Division 2.3, Season 46, Week 11 — Autodrome Ratchaphruek
By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
Seven cars started, seven cars finished, and full wet tyres never left the compound list all afternoon. On a track that stayed damp from lights to flag, Division 2.3 produced the shortest classification sheet of the weekend and, fittingly, its most one-sided result.
Arun Roughneck Racing: a team race in name only
Ross Lane took pole and never gave it up, winning by 1:07.094 over teammate Oleksa Lukashenko. That gap is not a typo. Lane had a moment of his own, a spin that cost him roughly four seconds, and it still didn't matter: the next fastest team was over six minutes back by the flag. Lukashenko's race was a straightforward defensive exercise against nobody, since second place was never seriously threatened either.
The other five, fighting for scraps six minutes down
Orson Butts (KOD Racing) took third after the sort of afternoon that makes a wet race entertaining for everyone except the man driving it: two separate off-track excursions, one of them a high-speed trip into the gravel that cost him roughly 15 seconds and had him fighting to keep the engine running. He still beat Boxhead's Ain Aasaroht to the line, +6:14.099 to +6:30.994, in a fourth place fight that ran the full distance, with Aasaroht and Richard Bimont (KOD Racing) trading the position back and forth multiple times in the closing stages before Aasaroht's late move made it stick over Bimont for fourth, Bimont settling for fifth.
Bimont had the messiest race of the lot without ever losing much time for it individually: repeated small mistakes, a spin of his own, and a string of half-second and one-second errors that added up but never cost him a position outright.
Fucho F1's Evaristo Meireles and Vítor das Dores Oliveira brought up the rear in sixth and seventh, +13:21.309 and +14:44.107, a distant but complete result for the smallest team on the entry list.
The number that matters
Two teams finished six minutes apart, and the gap between first and second in that lead group is bigger than the gap covering third through fifth combined. On a wet track with a seven-car grid, that is not a competitive division, that is a training exercise for Arun Roughneck and a survival exercise for everyone else.
— Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
August 17, 2026 01:24 am
Division 2.2 EquipeFlandre Leads All Race, Wins Nothing: Fuel Strategy Hands Kudra the Trophy
EquipeFlandre Leads All Race, Wins Nothing: Fuel Strategy Hands Kudra the Trophy
Division 2.2, Season 46, Week 11 — Autodrome Ratchaphruek
By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
Martti Voldek took pole by three tenths and led long stretches of this race. Hasan Adami, his teammate, spent much of the afternoon right behind him, occasionally in front of him. Between them, EquipeFlandre looked like it had this one covered.
Neither car finished. Voldek parked it on lap 57, out of fuel, on the racing line, on his own team's watch. Adami went one better, or worse, running dry on the very last lap with the flag in sight. Two cars that led the race, beaten not by anyone else's pace but by their own strategist's arithmetic. Norbert Kudra inherited a win he was, by lap 40, nowhere near contesting on merit.
The winner nobody saw coming until lap 57
Kudra (Arrows Grand Prix International) takes it, 0.313 seconds ahead of Willi Wulf (Exasperace) after a race in which both men spent long stretches getting overtaken rather than overtaking. Kudra was reportedly seen hitting his steering wheel mid-race, a detail that fits a driver who had no reason to expect he'd be fighting for the win in the closing laps. Wulf, for his part, survived a spin of his own and a string of lost positions through the pit-stop cycles before both front-runners handed him a route back to second.
Andreas Anderhub completes the podium for Exasperace, +10.789, a straightforward double points finish for a team that did nothing wrong and got rewarded for it.
Everyone else: a normal race that just doesn't matter as much now
Mariano Schweizer and Alpár Kádas brought both Olivetti Corse cars home fourth and fifth, +19.872 and +20.657, a tight and clean run through the field once the frontrunners self-destructed. Antonio Huhtala and Jorge Pasos followed for Trackhouse Racing in sixth and seventh, Ye Cheng eighth for Arrows despite starting sixteenth and four laps down on fuel usage warnings by the look of his pace. Gombei Hanada took ninth for YMSF on softs, the only top-ten finisher not on mediums. Ottó Frey and Afonso Azevedo rounded out the points for RSA Racing in tenth and eleventh, with Hideyoshi Ashida twelfth for YMSF.
Guido Dokkum was the sole finisher for Climate Masters N.V., a distant thirteenth on hards, +8:20.255. His main entertainment for large parts of the race was failing to pass teammate Elco de Bruyn Kops, right up until de Bruyn Kops solved that problem for him by retiring.
The two retirements that actually mattered
Elco de Bruyn Kops didn't get the memo about tyre management, twice. A burst tyre around lap 20 sent him limping back to the pits; by lap 41 the second one let go for good, in the gravel, bringing out the safety car to clear it up. A rough day for Climate Masters, whose other car finished but never featured.
Two ATMI Racing entries, Oliver Acerbi and A. Agh, do not appear in the final classification or in a single race highlight. Whatever happened to them happened before this reporter's data started, or off camera entirely. Worth a question to the team, not a guess in print.
The number that matters
Two cars led this race on merit and finished it in the pits, out of fuel, forty seconds apart in timing but identical in cause. That is not bad luck, that is a strategy call, made twice, by the same team. EquipeFlandre had the fastest package in Division 2.2 this week and will leave Ratchaphruek with zero points to show for it.
— Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
August 17, 2026 01:21 am
