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.
11 hours ago
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.
23 hours ago
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.
Yesterday 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.
Yesterday 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.
Yesterday 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.
Yesterday 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
Division 2.1 JP Suave Racing Locks Out the Top Two as Ratchaphruek Punishes Everyone Else
JP Suave Racing Locks Out the Top Two as Ratchaphruek Punishes Everyone Else
Division 2.1, Season 46, Week 11 — Autodrome Ratchaphruek
By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
Fifty-nine laps of a bone-dry, sun-soaked Ratchaphruek and the result confirms what the sector times already suggested on lap one: JP Suave Racing simply had more car. Gusztáv Babály took the win, with teammate Vasco Micheli 7.222 seconds back after never seriously threatening. A clean, three-stop, front-running afternoon for a team that spent the rest of the field's race fighting the track instead.
Behind them, it got considerably less tidy.
The podium nobody chased
Ernest Theisen brought Dinger Zoomie Racing home third, but the timesheet tells the real story: 1:13.456 behind the winner despite a fourth stop that should have cost him more than it did. Teammate Žan Lakovič finished fourth on a soft-tyre gamble that nearly paid off in the closing stints, close enough (+11.681 to Theisen) that a cleaner final pit cycle would have flipped the order.
Jean-Charles Brissault salvaged fifth for Sutton Racing after his left-rear tyre let go on lap 46, forcing a slow crawl back to the pits. That he recovered to fifth at all says more about the carnage further down the order than about the stop itself.
Wolf GP: consistent, not spectacular
Leo Carroll and George Mackie brought both Wolf GP cars home sixth and seventh, Carroll's race complicated by a spin at turn 11 on lap 41 and a trip through the gravel on lap 42 that likely did his tyres no favours. Neither result changes anything for anyone, which in a race this messy counts as a result worth having.
Renault Elf and Arun: the race everyone else was actually in
Didier Bleneau (eighth) spun twice, laps 52 and 55, and still beat teammate Albert Augier home, who spent the second half of the race being passed and re-passing I Pasek Tabrani in a fight that went nowhere for either of them. Tabrani eventually took ninth off Augier before an off-track excursion on lap 46 cost him roughly 12 seconds and dropped him to tenth by the flag, his fourth stop doing nothing to repair the damage.
Talat Bilge brought the Pagani home eleventh, on hards for most of the distance and out of the fight from lap one.
The two who didn't make it
Asim Ahidous (Team VELOS, tyres, lap 36) and Dave O'Callaghan (Arun Racing Team, front wing, lap 30) failed to see the finish. No further details on either incident; both cars simply stopped producing lap times, which is its own kind of commentary on this circuit.
The number that matters
Two Suave cars finished over a minute clear of third. Everyone else spent 59 laps fighting each other for scraps, spinning, losing tyres, and making moves that mostly failed. That gap is not a form guide, it is a structural problem, and Division 2.1 will need to close it before this becomes a procession.
— Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times
August 17, 2026 01:17 am
Div 1 Pouillie leads start to finish, Hanson loses his rear wing and half his afternoon
**Pitwall Times — Season 46, Week 10, Division 1**
*By Murray Ledger*
**Pouillie leads start to finish, Hanson loses his rear wing and half his afternoon**
Évelien Pouillie led from lap one and was never seriously challenged for it, taking the flag in 1:36:16.676 on a two-stop hard-tyre strategy for Renttu Racing. Not a dominant margin by the numbers, 24.4 seconds, but a dominant race by the way it played out: nobody at the front ever had a look at her.
The fight behind her told a better story than the win itself. Nikolaj Napizia ran second at the end of lap one and stayed there for most of the afternoon, only to be swallowed up late by his own strategy: Renttu's second car, André Ferreira de Almeida, and SGA Racing's Elijah Potts both found more from their stops than Napizia's Silver Cosmos crew could answer. He crossed the line fourth, two seconds off the podium, having led it for most of the race. That's not a bad drive. That's a bad pit wall.
The real violence happened on lap two. Peter Hanson (MacSalaatikko) and Heinz Fisch (Slow Car McNoPace) collided in sector two, hard enough that Hanson lost his rear wing on the spot and the pit crew came sprinting out to meet a car that was never going to make it back. Thirty seconds gone in an instant, then the whole race gone with it: Hanson didn't see the checkered flag. Fisch did survive the contact, technically, dragging his car home eighteenth after a four-stop strategy that looked less like a plan and more like a man trying to outrun the damage he'd caused.
At the tail end of the strategy spectrum, Ronan Walrond stopped once for Handbrake RD and paid for the arithmetic: fifth, but over a minute off the winner, the single-stop gamble that every team tries once a season and every team regrets by lap 40.
Twenty classified finishers, one collision that ended two afternoons at once, and a winner who made the whole thing look easier than it was.
August 9, 2026 11:21 pm
Div 2.4 Pole to pit wall: Pirate Panda's whole weekend evaporates in fuel fumes
Pitwall Times — Season 46, Week 10, Division 2.4
By Murray Ledger
Pole to pit wall: Pirate Panda's whole weekend evaporates in fuel fumes
Dylan Viirok took Andrea Moda Formula's win from second on the grid, 1:38:55.464, with teammate Bruno Adam Negrete second, 12.4 seconds back. A clean team 1-2, no fireworks needed. Gaspar Viktor brought Zeroforce F1 home third from seventh on the grid, the biggest gain of anyone who actually crossed the line.
Which brings us to the two names missing from that finishing order. Remo Tito took pole for Pirate Panda Race and led early, lasting exactly 18 laps before parking it next to the tyre barrier, out of fuel. Teammate Alejandro Estrada Ojeda, who'd started fourth, did the identical thing one lap earlier. Two cars, two empty tanks, zero strategy input from the pit wall. Pole position translated into a double DNF before lap 20.
A short word with the man responsible for both fuel loads.
Pitwall Times: What happened out there, Philip?
Philip E.: I was sure I told my assistant to set up the strategy, since I wasn't available due to private matters. Then it hit me: I don't have an assistant.
That's the whole postmortem. Pirate Panda Race scores zero points from a pole position, and the only thing that ran the full distance was the excuse.
August 9, 2026 10:46 pm
Div 2.3 Arun Roughneck 1-2, Villard spins into the gravel and the retirement rumors
**Pitwall Times — Season 46, Week 10, Division 2.3**
*By Murray Ledger*
**Arun Roughneck 1-2, Villard spins into the gravel and the retirement rumors**
Robert Lane took pole and the win for Arun Roughneck Racing Team, 1:40:02.931, with teammate Oleksandr Lukashenko following him home 16.4 seconds back for a clean team 1-2. Nobody threatened either of them all race.
Serbian Engineering had a day split neatly in half. Andreas Klöb salvaged third after starting sixth, but teammate Kaupo Villard spun out after 11 laps and didn't come back, one race after a teammate's departure got aired in the chat as "the season starts with a bummer." It's one thing losing a driver over the winter, another watching the replacement park it in lap 11.
Aleksander Aasaroht (Boxhead Racing) had the worst race of anyone who actually finished: fourth on the road but 3:14.826 down, a result that looks fine on paper and terrible on a stopwatch. Raphaël Bimont and Oliver Butts brought KOD Racing home fifth and sixth, both sliding back from their grid slots. Fucho F1's Eduardo Meireles and Vasco das Dores Oliveira held station in seventh and eighth, the only team on track that finished exactly where it qualified.
Merial's verdict for the week: fast, forgiving to whoever avoids mistakes, brutal to whoever doesn't.
August 9, 2026 10:43 pm
Div 2.2 Voldek does the boring thing perfectly at Meria
**Pitwall Times — Season 46, Week 10, Division 2.2**
*By Murray Ledger*
**Voldek does the boring thing perfectly at Merial**
Mikkel Voldek took pole and the win, EquipeFlandre's second podium of the day after teammate Henri Adami held third to the flag. 1:37:36.786 total, 12.8 seconds clear of Nerijus Kudra (Arrows Grand Prix International), who converted third on the grid into second by race end. Wear the podium photo out, it won't happen twice.
Torbjørn Østerbø qualified second for ATMI Racing and finished fourth, the only driver in the top five to actually lose ground over 55 laps. Everyone else more or less held station: Wilhelm Wulf fifth from fifth, Aleksi Huhtala sixth from seventh.
The recovery drive of the day belongs to Aloïs Anderhub, who qualified sixteenth and dead last on a hard tyre after what his own teammate called an "operational clustershambles" in the chat. He finished twelfth. Take the compliment, Anderhub, nobody else is offering one.
No incidents, no safety car, no strategy story. Merial did what Merial does: separated the field by qualifying pace and left it there.
August 9, 2026 10:42 pm
Div 2.1 Babály cruises at Merial, Suave Racing doubles up
**Pitwall Times — Season 46, Week 10, Division 2.1**
*By Murray Ledger*
**Babály cruises at Merial, Suave Racing doubles up**
Gusztáv Babály converted pole into a lights-to-flag win at Merial Speedway, taking JP Suave Racing's Sunday from "decent" to "domination" in the time it took teammate Vasco Micheli to also finish second. 1:38:26.545 total, 39.5s clear of Micheli. No drama, no fightback, nothing for the highlights reel. That's what a 5.3km, 12-corner power track with a long pitlane does: rewards whoever qualified fastest and punishes anyone who thought strategy would save them.
Third and fourth went to Dinger Zoomie Racing's Žan Lakovič and Ernest Theisen, split by 0.3 seconds after 55 laps, which is the closest this race got to a story. Jean-Charles Brissault (Sutton Racing) rounds out the top five, sliding from third on the grid, the closest anyone came to actively losing position.
Everyone else finished, in order, roughly where you'd expect from Sector 1 pace in qualifying. Tuvalu's Mutsuhito Dupiré and teammate Mubarak Ali brought Forza Mutte home ninth and tenth, quietly, which is the only way that team does anything.
Merial rewards speed over everything else. This race proved it by refusing to produce a single overtake worth mentioning.
August 9, 2026 10:38 pm
Seven Down: Division 1's Attrition Special
# Seven Down: Division 1's Attrition Special
*by Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
While Division 2.4 was busy arguing about a broken timing screen, Division 1 had a rather more physical problem: keeping the cars running at all. By the chequered flag at Circuit des Laurentides, seven of the twenty starters were parked, and the paddock's own Dan Silver put it about as well as anyone: "can't remember that many retirements before!"
## Saturday
E. Pouillie took pole comfortably, the fastest first and last sector of the session and the only sub-1:40 lap anyone managed, 1:39.188. R. Walrond split the Renttu Racing driver from the rest by a mere 0.160s, an excellent lap that would count for very little by Sunday evening. Further down, Pouillie's own Renttu Racing teammate A. Ferreira de Almeida propped up the entire field in P20, over nine seconds off his teammate's pace, an ominous split for a car sharing the same garage.
## Sunday
Pouillie made pole count, leading every lap on his way to the win and, for good measure, posting the fastest pit stop of the race at 2.308s. E. Potts and N. Napizia completed the podium, comfortably clear of a compressed midfield fight for P4 onward.
The real story was further down the sheet. R. Walrond's promising front-row start unravelled at lap 7 with a floor problem, ending his race before it began in earnest, a brutal outcome for a Handbrake RD car that had looked like a genuine pole threat twenty-four hours earlier. Teammate A. Sayre salvaged something for the garage with a drive from P9 on the grid to P6 at the flag.
Fuel claimed four more. MacSalaatikko lost both of its cars to the same problem, O. Howlin out on lap 23 and P. Hanson on lap 27. Chaos Pudding Tank fared no better, M. Voldek stopping on lap 18 and S. Lucassen going the same way on lap 62 with the finish line in sight, reportedly not taking it well: paddock chat described him throwing his wheel out of the cockpit on the way out. ElMayoGPTeam rounded out the fuel casualties with C. Calinoiu parked on lap 63, one lap short of a finish his sister car (L. Alfonsetti, home in P10) never seriously threatened. Renttu Racing's misery was completed by Ferreira de Almeida, retiring with an electrical failure on lap 21, a lonely finish to a weekend that started with him nine seconds off his own teammate.
Amid the carnage, Slow Car McNoPace quietly had a decent day: both H. Fisch and C. Bakombo climbed from the back half of the grid into the points-adjacent places, P12 and P13, with Bakombo getting away with what the team chat called a small mistake at the cost of only two seconds, cheap by the standards of this particular Sunday.
## A familiar gremlin
Division 1's timing sheet had the same cosmetic problem that's been doing the rounds in 2.4: displayed lap times that don't match their own sector splits. If anything, it showed up more often here, 29 rows across the race against 17 in Division 2.4, spread across most of the same kind of teams, early laps and late laps, pitted and unpitted. As before, it's confined to the lap-time display field. Gaps, positions and the race-time chain all check out against the sector sums. Seven retirements were real. The timing glitch, again, changed nothing.
August 2, 2026 09:37 pm
Dominance and Broken Timing Screens Drive Managers Crazy
# Dominance and Broken Timing Screens Drive Managers Crazy
*by Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
Andrea Moda Formula scored a comfortable 1-2 in Division 2.4 today at Circuit des Laurentides, and by the time the chequered flag fell after 64 laps, the more interesting fight wasn't for the podium. It was in the timing screens themselves.
## Saturday: a damp lottery ticket
Qualifying was run with a little water still sitting on the track, four stars of it by the weather widget's count, which is exactly the kind of session that rewards whoever commits to the flying lap and punishes whoever hesitates for half a corner. D. Viirok didn't hesitate. His 1:47.092 was purple in all three sectors, the only fully purple lap of the session, and it put him on pole by four tenths over R. Tito. B. Adam Negrete completed an Andrea Moda-Pirate Panda sandwich in P3, six tenths back.
Further down the order, A. Estrada Ojeda's Saturday fell apart in the final sector of his lap, a 52.802 against a session best of 44.590 in that same sector, dropping him to P18 and setting up exactly the kind of race his team principal later described as compromised by traffic. Starting eighteenth on a 64-lap race at a track with a tiny pit box and a medium pit lane isn't a recipe for a clean afternoon regardless of pace.
## Sunday: dry, fast, and mostly a two-team story
Race day flipped the conditions entirely: sunny and dry from lights to flag, no repeat of Saturday's dampness anywhere in the forecast. Circuit des Laurentides itself is a power track more than a technical one, three long sectors built around straights well over a thousand feet with a handful of decent-to-good overtaking spots and not much in the way of a proper braking-zone banzai opportunity. On a lap-time track like that, raw pace matters more than tyre management tricks, which suited the car that had raw pace to spare.
Viirok converted pole into the win, with Adam Negrete crossing the line 19.842s back in P2, a place he took from Tito at some point after qualifying had the two of them split by four tenths. Tito held on for a clean, unspectacular P3, over a minute clear of R. Satyanarayana in P4. Andrea Moda ran the same five-stop rhythm on both cars all race; Pirate Panda took a different four-stop route on both Tito and Estrada Ojeda, banking longer stints on tyres the rest of the field didn't trust for that long.
Ojeda himself recovered from P18 to P8 by the flag, which on paper is one of the better drives of the afternoon even if it didn't feel that way from the pit wall watching him carve through traffic that a cleaner Saturday would have avoided entirely.
Further back, the retirement of the day belonged to A. Alberts, out with a tyre problem after 42 laps having managed only two stops all race, the same CJ Motorsport entry that had already given the paddock's timing-screen conspiracy theorists something to chew on earlier in the afternoon. Purely a footnote. Probably.
## The bug, again
Somewhere around lap 9, several paddock regulars noticed that the displayed lap times for Viirok and Adam Negrete didn't add up to their own sector splits. Not by a rounding error. By over a second, in some cases over two. J Spiteri asked the obvious question in the division chat: is it normal for sector times not to match the final laptime shown? Matteo Rossi, understandably in no hurry to look a gift horse in the mouth after his team's result, offered the standard explanation: happens when a faster driver gets blocked, pace is calculated properly regardless.
It is not, in fact, traffic. Traffic shows up inside a sector, because that's where the clock is actually running. A discrepancy between the sector sum and the total can only come from something added on top of the physical lap, not something that slowed a car down inside it.
One team principal in the paddock, evidently unwilling to let a good result stand unexamined, spent the better part of an hour cross-referencing sector data against the race-time and gap chain used for the actual classification. The finding: the standings, the gaps, the positions, all of it checks out and matches the sector sums exactly. The bug lives entirely inside the "Lap time" display column, a cosmetic field that has nothing to do with who's actually where on track. Seventeen instances of it turned up across eight different teams in this one race alone, several with no pit stop involved at all, which rules out the tidy "it's a pit-stop thing" theory some were reaching for. A ticket has been filed. Whether it gets looked at before the next broadcast is, as ever, a question for a different department.
None of which changes the result. Andrea Moda were the better car by the better part of a second a lap all afternoon, undercut or no undercut, broken clock or no broken clock. Division 2.4 remains, for now, a one-team story with everyone else fighting for the minor placings.
## In the pit box
*We caught up with Philip E., team principal of Pirate Panda Race, shortly after the flag.*
**It got hot on the pit box today. Walk us through it.**
"Hot is generous. We had a car that was fast enough to be annoying to the guy in front and a timing screen that decided the story of the race was somewhere else entirely. You try running a strategy meeting while half the chat is convinced we've discovered a new law of physics. Tito drove a clean race and got the result his pace deserved. That part, at least, needed no forensic accounting."
**On Andrea Moda's pace today.**
"Their tyres are from another dimension. I don't know what they're feeding those cars, but a car that's a second a lap faster doesn't need a bug to win, it just needs to keep doing what it's doing. Credit where it's due. It's still not a fun division to race in when the gap looks like that."
**And Estrada Ojeda's afternoon?**
"Wrong side of the strategy given the traffic he ran into, plain and simple, nothing sinister about it. Start eighteenth at a track this size, in the dry, against a field that's mostly quicker in traffic than we'd like, and you spend the whole race paying for Saturday. He still brought it home eighth. That's the version of this sport where you make the right call for the data you had and the track hands you a different problem five laps later. Good boy Tito, though. He gave us the clean lap."
**There's a lot of noise today about a timing screen glitch. What actually happened, from where you sat?**
"For about two laps, the lap-time column was lying to everyone, ours and theirs both, that part's confirmed now, it's in a helpdesk ticket with the numbers to back it up. What it wasn't doing was lying about positions or gaps, that part of the system never blinked. So the honest answer is: a display bug made for a fun ten minutes of chat archaeology and changed absolutely nothing about who finished where. I'd rather it didn't happen, but I'd rather this than a bug that actually moves the timing sheet. Small mercies."
*Pirate Panda Race sit third in the Division 2.4 standings. Andrea Moda Formula lead by a margin that is, at this point, entirely earned on pace.*
August 2, 2026 07:00 pm
SEVEN CARS STARTED. THREE OF THEM SAW THE FLAG.
# SEVEN CARS STARTED. THREE OF THEM SAW THE FLAG.
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
**Circuit des Laurentides, Canada — 64 laps, Division 2.3**
Division 2.3 only had seven cars to begin with. By half distance it had three, and both retirements that mattered were the same story told twice.
Arun Roughneck Racing Team dominated from lights out. Ross Lane led every lap he was in the race, Oleksa Lukashenko sat comfortably in second, and by lap 11 both had pitted for fresh wets and rejoined exactly where they left, first and second, gap unchanged. It was a complete, boring, professional demonstration of how to win a wet race. Then on lap 24, within ninety seconds of each other, both cars ran dry. Lane first, Lukashenko a lap later. Two cars, one team, running one-two by nine and a half seconds, and neither of them made it halfway. Whatever number that team's fuel strategy was built on, it was wrong for both cars in exactly the same way, which rules out a one-off miscalculation and points at something more structural.
Fucho F1 didn't fare any better, just slower about it. Evaristo Meireles and Vítor das Dores Oliveira gambled on intermediates on lap 16 and 17 while the rest of the field stayed on wets, and it cost them badly, lap times ballooning into the 2:32 to 2:33 range while the leaders were still running low 2:08s. Whatever the team read into the track drying, it wasn't drying that fast. Both cars were already a lost cause on pace by the time it caught up with them anyway: on lap 32, four laps and three minutes after Arun Roughneck's cars went dry, both Fucho F1 cars ran out of fuel too. Four retirements, two teams, one shared failure mode, inside a single afternoon.
What was left of the race became a straight fight between Ain Aasaroht for Boxhead Racing and the KOD Racing pairing of Richard Bimont and Orson Butts, and it stayed properly close. The lead changed hands repeatedly through the second half, Aasaroht and Bimont trading the top spot multiple times between laps 33 and 41 before Aasaroht pulled away for good on a two-stop strategy that held up better than Bimont's one-stopper over the remaining distance. Butts never got into that fight, losing time in a string of late spins from lap 56 onward and finishing over a minute and a half back in third.
Final classification: Aasaroht, Bimont, Butts. That's the whole grid that finished. Whoever is running the fuel numbers for Arun Roughneck and Fucho F1 this week has some explaining to do, and given that Division 2.1 lost three cars to the same cause a few hours earlier, it might be worth checking whether it's the same spreadsheet.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
August 2, 2026 07:00 pm
ADAMI LEADS FROM THE FRONT AND NEVER LOOKS BACK
# ADAMI LEADS FROM THE FRONT AND NEVER LOOKS BACK
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
**Circuit des Laurentides, Canada — 64 laps, Division 2.2**
If you wanted incident, this was the wrong race to watch. Hendrik Adami took pole, led from lap 8 onward, and that was more or less the whole story. Sixteen cars started, sixteen finished, nobody's fuel calculation embarrassed them and nobody's tyres exploded on the final lap. Division 2.1 had all the drama this week. This one just had a winner.
Adami's margin at the flag was 25.084 seconds over Tore Morten Østerbø, built on a four-stop strategy that ran a full stint longer than most of the field on hard tyres. It was the kind of win that looks routine precisely because nothing went wrong, which in this game is its own achievement.
Behind him, ATMI Racing ran the strongest two-car campaign of the day. Østerbø took second on a five-stop medium strategy, with teammate Tabaré Canavesi fourth after a lap 10 mistake cost him six seconds and any shot at a podium he might otherwise have had. Willi Wulf split them in third for Exasperace, the fastest car on softs for most of the race but never quite in range of the podium ahead.
The strategy split of the day was three stops versus four or five. Mariano Schweizer and Alpár Kádas both ran the conservative three-stop hard-tyre plan and both finished exactly where that plan was always going to put them, ninth and fifteenth. Track position bought by tyre life doesn't mean much if the pace isn't there to use it, and neither car had the pace to make the extra stint count.
The drive of the day belonged to Andreas Anderhub, who started sixteenth and last, and worked his way forward the hard way, on a five-stop soft strategy that had him fighting through traffic from the moment the tyres were fresh. His best spell came in the closing ten laps, a string of overtakes on Frey, Kádas, and Cheng inside three laps that took him from the back of the midfield to eleventh at the flag. It's not a result that shows up anywhere near the top of the sheet, but it was the only piece of actual racing in an afternoon that otherwise ran to plan.
Final classification: Adami, Østerbø, Wulf, Canavesi, Kudra, Hanada, Huhtala, Pasos, Schweizer, Adam, Anderhub, Frey, Cheng, Azevedo, Kádas, Ashida. Trackhouse Racing quietly banked a solid seventh and eighth with Huhtala and Pasos, doing nothing wrong and nothing spectacular, which on a weekend like this was more than most managed.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
August 2, 2026 06:55 pm
MICHELI RUNS AWAY WITH IT WHILE THE GRID SETS ITSELF ON FIRE
# MICHELI RUNS AWAY WITH IT WHILE THE GRID SETS ITSELF ON FIRE
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
**Circuit des Laurentides, Canada — 64 laps, Division 2.1**
Vasco Micheli won this one comfortably. Everything else about it was chaos.
Qualifying had promised a straight fight up front between Gusztáv Babály's pole lap and Micheli's, split by three tenths. That fight lasted approximately one lap. Babály boxed from pole before lap 1 was even finished, a call nobody watching the timing screen understood at the time and one the team never fully explained afterward. He rejoined last, and spent the rest of the afternoon setting fastest lap after fastest lap in a car that had nowhere to go. By lap 34 he'd clawed back to sixth. On lap 53, running seventh with the best pace on track by a wide margin, his car simply stopped. Out of fuel. The fastest driver in the field did not finish the race.
He wasn't alone. Forza Mutte Racing lost both cars to the exact same cause within five laps of each other, Dupiré on lap 11 and Ali right behind him. Two cars, one team, one fuel number, both wrong. That is not bad luck, that is a sum that was never checked.
While JP Suave Racing's other car quietly self-destructed, Micheli got on with it. He was through to the front by lap 3, and from there the race behind him was the only interesting part of his afternoon. Four stops, medium tyres for most of the distance, and a winning margin of 1:22.334 over Dave O'Callaghan that never looked in danger.
O'Callaghan's second place cost him five pit stops chasing lap time on softs. Jean-Charles Brissault ran a leaner three-stop on hards and still lost over a minute to him across the race, which tells you which strategy actually worked. I Pasek Tabrani rounded out the points on the same five-stop soft plan as O'Callaghan.
Dinger Zoomie Racing deserves its own paragraph, and not a flattering one. Žan Lakovič and Ernest Theisen started the race on wet tyres and, as far as the data shows, never came off them, despite a track that dried out to the point where every rival team was cycling through softs, mediums and hards. Five stops each, wet tyres both times, and a finish more than eighteen minutes off the winner. Whatever the team thought the track was doing, it wasn't doing that.
The last ten laps turned into a tyre-reliability horror show for Wolf GP. George Mackie's tyres had been blistering since lap 23. Leo John Carroll's exploded outright on lap 63, sending him off track and into the pits for the fifth time. Mackie's went the same way one lap later, on the final lap of the race. Both drivers still finished, fifth and sixth, but neither team will want to look too closely at why identical failures hit both cars in the closing laps. Asim Ahidous had already suffered the same fate on lap 61, costing Team VELOS what had briefly looked like a top-five run.
Talat Bilge brought Pagani home eighth after a slow start and a mid-race puncture-adjacent moment of his own. Équipe Renault Elf split their strategies between Bleneau and Augier, with neither troubling the group ahead, and Albert Augier's afternoon included more off-track excursions than laps led.
Final classification: Micheli, O'Callaghan, Brissault, Tabrani, Mackie, Carroll, Bleneau, Bilge, Ahidous, Augier, Lakovič, Theisen. Babály, Dupiré and Ali did not see the chequered flag, all three for the same reason. If there is a theme to this round, it's that the field was faster at building race pace than it was at counting fuel.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
August 2, 2026 06:54 pm
# Pitwall Times — Season 46, Week 7 — Zemplén Autódom *All Division 2 race reports and the Philip E. interview*
# Pitwall Times — Season 46, Week 7 — Zemplén Autódom
*All Division 2 race reports and the Philip E. interview*
---
# Micheli Wins a Race He Never Fully Led as Lakovič's Fuel Sums Fall Apart at Zemplén
**Division 2.1, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
V. Micheli won the Division 2.1 race at Zemplén Autódom on Sunday, and he did it without ever putting together a commanding run at the front. In a race where the lead changed hands nine times and the podium was ultimately decided in the pit lane rather than on track, Micheli's JP Suave Racing car simply needed fewer stops than the two Dinger Zoomie Racing cars that spent most of the afternoon looking like the faster package.
Qualifying had already hinted that this would not be straightforward. The session was run on a flooded track under a one-star weather rating, and Micheli took pole in 1:47.828 with teammate Y. Cheng alongside him in second. Ž. Lakovič qualified third, J. Brissault fourth. None of it mattered much by Sunday. Cheng did not start the race, JP Suave ran a single car, and the field that actually lined up was effectively fourteen cars deep rather than fifteen, with everyone from third on down bumped up a place they hadn't technically earned.
The start made a mockery of the adjusted grid anyway. Lakovič, now elevated to third, got the jump into the first corner and led at the end of lap one with Micheli demoted to second despite starting from pole. Further back, E. Theisen turned an eighth-place qualifying effort into fourth by the end of the opening lap, while G. Mackie went from seventh on the grid to last, evidently finding the limit of a car rated as needing serious handling and cornering ability on a circuit still carrying standing water.
What followed was less a race than a fuel-strategy standoff dressed up as one. Lakovič held the lead through the first stint before a round of pit stops from lap ten onward began shuffling the order. Theisen took over at the front briefly, Micheli reclaimed it, Brissault had his own spell in the lead in the midrace laps, and Lakovič came back through again past lap twenty. The pattern repeated itself through the second half of the race, with the lead swapping between Micheli, Theisen and Lakovič roughly every five to ten laps as each driver's pit window opened and closed. By the chequered flag the position had changed at the front nine times, and only a handful of those changes had anything to do with overtaking.
The number that actually decided the race was pit stops. Micheli made four. Theisen made five. Lakovič made six, and the sixth was the one that mattered. At a circuit burning through 3.5 to 3.8 litres of fuel per lap, a car already needing more stops than its rivals was never going to have much margin for error, and Lakovič had none. A message posted in the session chat during qualifying, complaining that an extra pit stop entered into the system hadn't registered and had left a car stranded without fuel, reads in hindsight like a preview of exactly the kind of mistake that cost Lakovič the race on lap fifty-eight. He had led the race five separate times by that point. He finished third, 31.4 seconds behind the winner, having done more of the actual leading than anyone else on the timing sheet and having nothing to show for it.
Theisen's race was the tidier of the two Dinger Zoomie efforts. His five stops tracked closely enough to Micheli's strategy that he was able to retake the lead twice in the final third of the race before eventually settling for second, 11.8 seconds back. It was enough to secure Dinger Zoomie a one-two on laps led without the result to match.
Behind the leading trio, D. O'Callaghan brought his Arun Racing Team car home fourth, over a minute and a half down, ahead of Brissault in fifth for Sutton Racing. I. Tabrani, M. Dupiré and M. Ali rounded out the points, with Mackie recovering to ninth after his first-lap disaster and A. Ahidous, L. Carroll and T. Bilge completing the finishers.
Équipe Renault Elf had nothing to show for the weekend. Both cars retired with spins in the wet, A. Augier's race ending after just ten laps and D. Bleneau lasting until lap thirty-seven before joining him in the garage. Two cars, two spins, no points, on a track that had already told everyone through its official characteristics that cornering and handling would be the difference between a finish and a walk back to the paddock.
Micheli's win will go into the record book as a victory, but it was a victory built on arithmetic rather than pace. He was rarely the fastest car on track. He was, for most of the afternoon, second or third best. What he had was a strategy team that got the sums right when it mattered, on a day when the two cars that beat him more often than he beat them could not say the same.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
---
# Adami Wins in the Dry, But It Took Sixteen Lead Changes and a Tyre He Never Changed to Get There
**Division 2.2, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
H. Adami won the Division 2.2 race at Zemplén on Sunday, and unlike his counterpart one division down, he actually looked like he deserved it. Where Division 2.1 turned into a swamp and a fuel-arithmetic farce, Division 2.2 got five stars and a dry track for both sessions, and the result was a proper strategy fight rather than a survival exercise.
Qualifying was tight at the front and Adami took it in 1:25.694, with N. Kudra a mere three thousandths behind in second. Someone in the session chat asked, not unreasonably, whether EquipeFlandre had started hiring Ferrari engineers. They hadn't, but Adami's pace suggested somebody at the team knew what they were doing. W. Wulf and A. Anderhub filled row two for Exasperace, and the top eight were covered by half a second, which is the kind of qualifying gap that promises a race won and lost in the pits rather than on the grid.
It mostly was. Kudra jumped Adami off the line and led the first six laps before handing it to Wulf, who'd started the race on hard tyres while most of the field around him gambled on softs or mediums. From there the lead changed hands sixteen times across the afternoon, cycling primarily between Kudra, Wulf and Adami as their staggered pit strategies crossed over lap after lap. T. Canavesi even got a single lap at the front on lap fifteen before the leading three reasserted themselves for good.
The tyre story is where this race actually got decided. Kudra started on softs and switched to mediums by lap eight, then stayed on that compound for the rest of the afternoon regardless of how many times he came in, which tells you those later stops were fuel-only. He pitted seven times in total, the most of anyone in the field, and still finished second, 7.2 seconds back. That's an aggressive short-stint strategy that very nearly worked. Wulf went the other way, starting on hards and running them all the way to lap fifty-seven before finally switching to mediums for the run to the flag, finishing third.
Adami's approach split the difference and turned out to be the right one. He started on mediums, stayed on the compound through four pit stops, and didn't switch to hards until lap fifty-six, with ten laps still to run. That's compound choice, not confirmed tyre age: the timing sheet shows what mixture was fitted, not whether a fresh set of mediums went on at each of those stops. What it does show is a team that picked one strategy early and didn't flinch from it for fifty-five laps, on a car that also happened to be quick.
The retirement column stayed almost empty by Zemplén's recent standards. T. Østerbø, who'd started fourth after a strong qualifying lap on softs, pitted once on lap nine and spun out of the race one lap later. He was the only driver who didn't see the chequered flag.
Behind the top three, Canavesi brought his ATMI Racing car home fourth, the better part of a minute down, ahead of A. Kádas and M. Schweizer for Olivetti Corse. O. Frey, A. Huhtala, G. Hanada, A. Azevedo, G. Adam and J. Pasos filled out the points, with K. Papafilotheou, H. Ashida, E. de Bruyn Kops and G. Dokkum completing the finishers well down the order, the two Climate Masters cars anchoring the back of the field on a strategy that never got them close to the action at the front.
Adami's win will look, on paper, like a comfortable one. It wasn't. It was a race where three different cars led at three different points on three different tyre philosophies, and the one that got the balance right was the car that stuck with its compound choice the longest. In a series where the sister race one division down was decided by a driver who forgot how many pit stops he'd paid for, that's a fairly stark contrast in competence.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
---
# Lane Wins a Race Fucho F1 Lost Before It Started
**Division 2.3, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
R. Lane won the Division 2.3 race at Zemplén on Sunday from pole, and the honest version of the story is that his win was decided less by what he did than by what two other cars didn't. Qualifying had been run in the dry, five stars, clean track, and Lane took pole in 1:25.656 with Arun Roughneck Racing teammate O. Lukashenko alongside him and K. Villard third. By Sunday afternoon the sky had done what it does at Zemplén and the race started under rain showers with the track rated one star and officially flooded, a session status it kept for all sixty-six laps.
Everyone who mattered adjusted. Everyone except Fucho F1.
Both of the team's cars, E. Meireles and V. das Dores Oliveira, started the race on medium slicks. On a track the weather graphic was calling flooded before the green flag even dropped. They were already the better part of thirty seconds off the pace on lap one, a gap that had nothing to do with driver ability and everything to do with a strategy call made before anyone left the garage. Both cars pitted around lap fifteen and sixteen with the timing sheet recording it simply as a stop with no tyre change, which is the polite way of saying the team had nothing appropriate to put on the car when it arrived. Neither driver saw the chequered flag. It was the second bad break in as many sessions for a team whose own chat channel had opened the weekend by noting their best driver had already left before the season started. At this rate that may not be the last departure.
With two cars gone by a quarter distance, the seven that remained ran what amounted to a processional, wet-weather strategy race. Lane led the first ten laps, lost the front briefly to Lukashenko between laps eleven and thirteen, and reclaimed it on lap fourteen, after which nobody seriously threatened him again. He made five pit stops across the distance to Lukashenko's three and still crossed the line 2 minutes and 25 seconds clear, which tells you the gap between the top two Arun Roughneck cars was never really about strategy. Lane's car was simply faster in the conditions, and the team could afford the extra stop.
Villard brought his Serbian Engineering car home third, over four minutes back, ahead of teammate A. Klöb in fourth. R. Bimont and A. Aasaroht rounded out fifth and sixth for KOD Racing and Boxhead Racing respectively, with O. Butts completing the finishers in seventh, the better part of nine minutes off the winning pace after a lap-one qualifying differential that had already put him a full second behind pole and never recovered from there.
There is not much more to say about the racing itself. In flooded conditions on a circuit that already rates cornering and handling as important characteristics, this was always going to be a race of attrition and tyre management rather than wheel-to-wheel drama, and with only two genuine lead changes across sixty-six laps, that's exactly what it was. The story of the weekend was written in the garage, not on track, and it belonged entirely to the team that brought the wrong tyres to a race everyone else could see coming.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
---
# Andrea Moda Formula Make It Look Easy Again as Adam Negrete Beats His Own Teammate to the Flag
**Division 2.4, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
Zemplén did to Division 2.4 exactly what it did to every other division this week: five-star dry qualifying on Friday, one-star flooded rainshowers by Sunday. Nobody at the track should be surprised by that pattern anymore, and yet somehow the strategy calls kept getting made as if it might not happen.
D. Viirok took a comfortable pole in 1:25.613 with Andrea Moda Formula teammate B. Adam Negrete second, a tenth back on the timesheet and a division's worth of pace ahead of the field. The team's own chat channel was already celebrating before the race had started, someone congratulating the squad on a fifth one-two finish of the series and predicting a championship with 99.93 percent confidence. Confident, but not wrong.
The race itself was closer than the qualifying gap suggested. Viirok led the first seven laps before Negrete took over on lap eight. That lasted three laps until A. Estrada Ojeda, of all people, briefly led lap eleven on an early strategy gamble for Pirate Panda Race, a moment of promise that evaporated almost immediately. Negrete reclaimed the front on lap twelve and held it for the next thirty-five laps before Viirok, on a different pit cycle, took it back on lap forty-eight. Negrete had the last word, retaking the lead for good on lap sixty-two and crossing the line 4.469 seconds ahead of his own teammate after five stops to Viirok's six. It was Andrea Moda Formula's race from start to finish, decided only by which of their two drivers got the strategy marginally more right.
Behind that pair, the podium in miniature was Zeroforce F1's G. Viktor in third, the better part of fifty seconds back, ahead of A. Clijsters and S. Shobo for Tycoon R. INC. in fourth and fifth. R. Satyanarayana and H. McIlvenny brought the Leleux Racing cars home sixth and seventh, with O. Premiani completing the points for Zeroforce F1 in eighth.
Pirate Panda Race's early promise did not survive contact with the rest of the afternoon. Estrada Ojeda's lap-eleven lead was as good as it got. He fell to ninth by lap twenty and stayed there for the remainder of the race, finishing over three minutes down on only two pit stops, a stop count low enough to suggest a fuel-saving strategy that never delivered the pace to make it worthwhile. Teammate R. Tito had an even quieter afternoon, running a single pit stop across sixty-six laps and finishing tenth, five minutes and fifteen seconds off the winner. Two cars that qualified third and fourth on Friday finished ninth and tenth on Sunday. That is not a strategy call paying off, that is a team that got its read on the conditions wrong and then compounded it by not reacting.
Jaguar Racing Team's weekend ended worse than that. Both J. Høier and J. Lustig retired from the race with the same cause, out of fuel, Høier on lap thirty-eight after a single stop and Lustig on lap forty-five after two. Running out of fuel twice in the same race for the same team is not bad luck, it's a fuel model that was wrong for both cars and nobody caught it before it cost them the result entirely.
Andrea Moda Formula's dominance is now a pattern rather than a result. A fifth one-two of the season, delivered on a weekend where half the grid behind them either misjudged the changeover from dry to flooded or ran their strategy too close to the edge, says as much about the gap at the front as it does about anyone's driving.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
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# "Seven Stops Is Not Tyres, That's a Fucking Crime Scene" — Pitwall Times Sits Down With Philip E.
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
We caught up with Philip E., team principal of Pirate Panda Race, three days after his cars finished ninth and tenth at Zemplén. He was not in a mood to pretend the weekend went well, and he was not in a mood to be polite about anyone else's either.
**Murray Ledger:** Philip. Mid-season. How's it going.
**Philip E.:** Mid-season is going exactly how I fucking planned it, which is to say it looks like shit on paper and it's not shit at all if you know what you're looking at. Ninth and tenth at Zemplén. I know how that reads. I don't give a fuck how it reads.
**ML:** Talk me through that, because from the outside it looked like a car that had nothing left after lap twenty.
**PE:** Because we took nothing to the fucking track after lap twenty, on purpose. We sacrificed that race. Not lost it, sacrificed it. There's a difference and it's the whole point. We ran two stops on one car and one stop on the other while everybody else was in the pits every five minutes like it's a fucking car wash. That's not us being slow, that's us not burning setup data and strategy tools on a race we can't win anyway, so we can actually use them in the second half of the season and going into next year. You spend your bullets where the target's worth hitting. Zemplén in the wet with this tyre situation was not worth hitting.
**ML:** So what's the target now, realistically, for the rest of this season?
**PE:** Second. That's it. That's the honest ceiling and I'll say it out loud instead of bullshitting you and everyone reading this. First is gone, first was gone the moment this tyre nonsense showed up on the calendar. Second is still on the table if we stop wasting races we can't win and start winning the ones we can.
**ML:** The tyre nonsense. You want to explain that for people who weren't watching the other divisions?
**PE:** Yeah I fucking want to explain it. Go look at Division 2.1. Go look at Division 2.2. Guys doing five, six, seven pit stops in a single race. Seven! One driver, one race, seven stops. That is not a tyre strategy, my friend, that is a factory recall. That's not racing, that's a fucking pit lane conga line. You cannot build a championship around a tyre that needs changing seven times in sixty-six laps, that's not performance, that's a safety bulletin. Somebody in race control needs to look at that and ask themselves what the fuck they signed off on. This should be banned. Not "reviewed," not "monitored," banned. You put a compound like that on the grid, you're not creating strategy, you're creating a lottery where the guy who miscounts his own pit stops loses the race to arithmetic. That happened. In front of everybody. A driver ran out of fuel because his own extra stop didn't register in the system. That's not racing drama, that's a fucking spreadsheet error deciding a race result.
**ML:** Fair to say Andrea Moda Formula didn't have that problem.
**PE:** No they did not, and credit where it's due, congratulations to Matteo, genuinely, five one-two finishes this season is not an accident, that's a team doing its job properly while half the paddock is out here reinventing the pit stop as a form of self-harm. My problem isn't with Matteo. My problem is there was no competition for him on tyre choice, because everyone else was too busy stopping seven times to actually race him. You win a one-two by ten seconds when the field behind you is stopping every eight laps, that's not domination, that's the rest of us handing it to you gift-wrapped. And listen, Matteo, enjoy it while it lasts, because next season you're up in Division 1, and Division 1 doesn't give a shit how many one-twos you scored down here. Division 1 is going to eat that record for breakfast and ask for seconds. Good luck, genuinely, you'll need it.
**ML:** Let's shift gears for a second. You've talked before about the development and finance side of this game, not just the tyres. Anything you want to get off your chest there?
**PE:** Oh, you want to open that door, sure, why the fuck not, we're already here. And let's actually get the mechanic right, because it's stupider than "rich get richer." You get one shot at selling shares. One. Not a tap you can turn on whenever you're short, one single sale, and if you time it well that's seven hundred million to a billion in one hit, no income tax on it either. Fine, that's a real opportunity, I'm not complaining about that part. Here's the part that's actually broken: sitting on that money costs you. One to ten percent a season, gone, just for having it in the bank. Not interest you missed out on, an actual charge for the crime of having cash reserves. So the system doesn't let you sit patient and wait for the right moment to spend, it forces your hand every single season, staff, drivers, suppliers, spend it or lose it to a holding cost, whether or not that's actually the smart call for where your team is at.
And the annoying thing is there's a boring, obvious fix for all of it. F1 worked this out years ago, put a cost cap on spend so the big teams can't just outspend the problem, or tie development time to finishing position so the team at the back builds faster than the team at the front. Either one closes the gap without anyone needing to be punished for having money. Instead we're running on a financial model that plays like it got bolted together sometime in the nineties for a completely different game and nobody's opened the hood since. It's not that the fix is a mystery. It's that we're stuck with a system nobody's bothered to modernize, and every season the gap gets decided by whoever timed their one share sale best.
**ML:** Of the two, cost cap or performance-based development time, which one would you actually pick?
**PE:** Performance-based, every time. A cost cap just means everyone spends the same amount badly. Tie development time to where you finished and the team at the back gets to build faster with what it's got, that's the closest thing to a comeback mechanic this game's got room for. Right now the smart move if you're mid-pack is exactly what we did at Zemplén, sacrifice a race you can't win and bank whatever you can for later, because the system punishes you for trying to fight above your reserves. That's not strategy, that's triage. Fix the money before you fix the tyres, honestly, the tyres are just this week's headline, the finance model is the thing actually deciding championships three seasons out.
**ML:** Anything you want to say to close this out?
**PE:** Yeah. Fix the tyres, or ban them, I don't care which, just do it before someone loses a championship to a spreadsheet again. And second half of the season, watch us. We didn't forget how to race, we just decided not to waste it on a race that was never ours to win.
**ML:** Philip E., thank you.
**PE:** Anytime. Don't print the swearing. [We printed the swearing.]
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
July 20, 2026 12:50 am
# Pitwall Times — Season 46, Week 7 — Zemplén Autódom *All Division 2 race reports and the Philip E. interview*
# Pitwall Times — Season 46, Week 7 — Zemplén Autódom
*All Division 2 race reports and the Philip E. interview*
---
# Micheli Wins a Race He Never Fully Led as Lakovič's Fuel Sums Fall Apart at Zemplén
**Division 2.1, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
V. Micheli won the Division 2.1 race at Zemplén Autódom on Sunday, and he did it without ever putting together a commanding run at the front. In a race where the lead changed hands nine times and the podium was ultimately decided in the pit lane rather than on track, Micheli's JP Suave Racing car simply needed fewer stops than the two Dinger Zoomie Racing cars that spent most of the afternoon looking like the faster package.
Qualifying had already hinted that this would not be straightforward. The session was run on a flooded track under a one-star weather rating, and Micheli took pole in 1:47.828 with teammate Y. Cheng alongside him in second. Ž. Lakovič qualified third, J. Brissault fourth. None of it mattered much by Sunday. Cheng did not start the race, JP Suave ran a single car, and the field that actually lined up was effectively fourteen cars deep rather than fifteen, with everyone from third on down bumped up a place they hadn't technically earned.
The start made a mockery of the adjusted grid anyway. Lakovič, now elevated to third, got the jump into the first corner and led at the end of lap one with Micheli demoted to second despite starting from pole. Further back, E. Theisen turned an eighth-place qualifying effort into fourth by the end of the opening lap, while G. Mackie went from seventh on the grid to last, evidently finding the limit of a car rated as needing serious handling and cornering ability on a circuit still carrying standing water.
What followed was less a race than a fuel-strategy standoff dressed up as one. Lakovič held the lead through the first stint before a round of pit stops from lap ten onward began shuffling the order. Theisen took over at the front briefly, Micheli reclaimed it, Brissault had his own spell in the lead in the midrace laps, and Lakovič came back through again past lap twenty. The pattern repeated itself through the second half of the race, with the lead swapping between Micheli, Theisen and Lakovič roughly every five to ten laps as each driver's pit window opened and closed. By the chequered flag the position had changed at the front nine times, and only a handful of those changes had anything to do with overtaking.
The number that actually decided the race was pit stops. Micheli made four. Theisen made five. Lakovič made six, and the sixth was the one that mattered. At a circuit burning through 3.5 to 3.8 litres of fuel per lap, a car already needing more stops than its rivals was never going to have much margin for error, and Lakovič had none. A message posted in the session chat during qualifying, complaining that an extra pit stop entered into the system hadn't registered and had left a car stranded without fuel, reads in hindsight like a preview of exactly the kind of mistake that cost Lakovič the race on lap fifty-eight. He had led the race five separate times by that point. He finished third, 31.4 seconds behind the winner, having done more of the actual leading than anyone else on the timing sheet and having nothing to show for it.
Theisen's race was the tidier of the two Dinger Zoomie efforts. His five stops tracked closely enough to Micheli's strategy that he was able to retake the lead twice in the final third of the race before eventually settling for second, 11.8 seconds back. It was enough to secure Dinger Zoomie a one-two on laps led without the result to match.
Behind the leading trio, D. O'Callaghan brought his Arun Racing Team car home fourth, over a minute and a half down, ahead of Brissault in fifth for Sutton Racing. I. Tabrani, M. Dupiré and M. Ali rounded out the points, with Mackie recovering to ninth after his first-lap disaster and A. Ahidous, L. Carroll and T. Bilge completing the finishers.
Équipe Renault Elf had nothing to show for the weekend. Both cars retired with spins in the wet, A. Augier's race ending after just ten laps and D. Bleneau lasting until lap thirty-seven before joining him in the garage. Two cars, two spins, no points, on a track that had already told everyone through its official characteristics that cornering and handling would be the difference between a finish and a walk back to the paddock.
Micheli's win will go into the record book as a victory, but it was a victory built on arithmetic rather than pace. He was rarely the fastest car on track. He was, for most of the afternoon, second or third best. What he had was a strategy team that got the sums right when it mattered, on a day when the two cars that beat him more often than he beat them could not say the same.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
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# Adami Wins in the Dry, But It Took Sixteen Lead Changes and a Tyre He Never Changed to Get There
**Division 2.2, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
H. Adami won the Division 2.2 race at Zemplén on Sunday, and unlike his counterpart one division down, he actually looked like he deserved it. Where Division 2.1 turned into a swamp and a fuel-arithmetic farce, Division 2.2 got five stars and a dry track for both sessions, and the result was a proper strategy fight rather than a survival exercise.
Qualifying was tight at the front and Adami took it in 1:25.694, with N. Kudra a mere three thousandths behind in second. Someone in the session chat asked, not unreasonably, whether EquipeFlandre had started hiring Ferrari engineers. They hadn't, but Adami's pace suggested somebody at the team knew what they were doing. W. Wulf and A. Anderhub filled row two for Exasperace, and the top eight were covered by half a second, which is the kind of qualifying gap that promises a race won and lost in the pits rather than on the grid.
It mostly was. Kudra jumped Adami off the line and led the first six laps before handing it to Wulf, who'd started the race on hard tyres while most of the field around him gambled on softs or mediums. From there the lead changed hands sixteen times across the afternoon, cycling primarily between Kudra, Wulf and Adami as their staggered pit strategies crossed over lap after lap. T. Canavesi even got a single lap at the front on lap fifteen before the leading three reasserted themselves for good.
The tyre story is where this race actually got decided. Kudra started on softs and switched to mediums by lap eight, then stayed on that compound for the rest of the afternoon regardless of how many times he came in, which tells you those later stops were fuel-only. He pitted seven times in total, the most of anyone in the field, and still finished second, 7.2 seconds back. That's an aggressive short-stint strategy that very nearly worked. Wulf went the other way, starting on hards and running them all the way to lap fifty-seven before finally switching to mediums for the run to the flag, finishing third.
Adami's approach split the difference and turned out to be the right one. He started on mediums, stayed on the compound through four pit stops, and didn't switch to hards until lap fifty-six, with ten laps still to run. That's compound choice, not confirmed tyre age: the timing sheet shows what mixture was fitted, not whether a fresh set of mediums went on at each of those stops. What it does show is a team that picked one strategy early and didn't flinch from it for fifty-five laps, on a car that also happened to be quick.
The retirement column stayed almost empty by Zemplén's recent standards. T. Østerbø, who'd started fourth after a strong qualifying lap on softs, pitted once on lap nine and spun out of the race one lap later. He was the only driver who didn't see the chequered flag.
Behind the top three, Canavesi brought his ATMI Racing car home fourth, the better part of a minute down, ahead of A. Kádas and M. Schweizer for Olivetti Corse. O. Frey, A. Huhtala, G. Hanada, A. Azevedo, G. Adam and J. Pasos filled out the points, with K. Papafilotheou, H. Ashida, E. de Bruyn Kops and G. Dokkum completing the finishers well down the order, the two Climate Masters cars anchoring the back of the field on a strategy that never got them close to the action at the front.
Adami's win will look, on paper, like a comfortable one. It wasn't. It was a race where three different cars led at three different points on three different tyre philosophies, and the one that got the balance right was the car that stuck with its compound choice the longest. In a series where the sister race one division down was decided by a driver who forgot how many pit stops he'd paid for, that's a fairly stark contrast in competence.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
---
# Lane Wins a Race Fucho F1 Lost Before It Started
**Division 2.3, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
R. Lane won the Division 2.3 race at Zemplén on Sunday from pole, and the honest version of the story is that his win was decided less by what he did than by what two other cars didn't. Qualifying had been run in the dry, five stars, clean track, and Lane took pole in 1:25.656 with Arun Roughneck Racing teammate O. Lukashenko alongside him and K. Villard third. By Sunday afternoon the sky had done what it does at Zemplén and the race started under rain showers with the track rated one star and officially flooded, a session status it kept for all sixty-six laps.
Everyone who mattered adjusted. Everyone except Fucho F1.
Both of the team's cars, E. Meireles and V. das Dores Oliveira, started the race on medium slicks. On a track the weather graphic was calling flooded before the green flag even dropped. They were already the better part of thirty seconds off the pace on lap one, a gap that had nothing to do with driver ability and everything to do with a strategy call made before anyone left the garage. Both cars pitted around lap fifteen and sixteen with the timing sheet recording it simply as a stop with no tyre change, which is the polite way of saying the team had nothing appropriate to put on the car when it arrived. Neither driver saw the chequered flag. It was the second bad break in as many sessions for a team whose own chat channel had opened the weekend by noting their best driver had already left before the season started. At this rate that may not be the last departure.
With two cars gone by a quarter distance, the seven that remained ran what amounted to a processional, wet-weather strategy race. Lane led the first ten laps, lost the front briefly to Lukashenko between laps eleven and thirteen, and reclaimed it on lap fourteen, after which nobody seriously threatened him again. He made five pit stops across the distance to Lukashenko's three and still crossed the line 2 minutes and 25 seconds clear, which tells you the gap between the top two Arun Roughneck cars was never really about strategy. Lane's car was simply faster in the conditions, and the team could afford the extra stop.
Villard brought his Serbian Engineering car home third, over four minutes back, ahead of teammate A. Klöb in fourth. R. Bimont and A. Aasaroht rounded out fifth and sixth for KOD Racing and Boxhead Racing respectively, with O. Butts completing the finishers in seventh, the better part of nine minutes off the winning pace after a lap-one qualifying differential that had already put him a full second behind pole and never recovered from there.
There is not much more to say about the racing itself. In flooded conditions on a circuit that already rates cornering and handling as important characteristics, this was always going to be a race of attrition and tyre management rather than wheel-to-wheel drama, and with only two genuine lead changes across sixty-six laps, that's exactly what it was. The story of the weekend was written in the garage, not on track, and it belonged entirely to the team that brought the wrong tyres to a race everyone else could see coming.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
---
# Andrea Moda Formula Make It Look Easy Again as Adam Negrete Beats His Own Teammate to the Flag
**Division 2.4, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
Zemplén did to Division 2.4 exactly what it did to every other division this week: five-star dry qualifying on Friday, one-star flooded rainshowers by Sunday. Nobody at the track should be surprised by that pattern anymore, and yet somehow the strategy calls kept getting made as if it might not happen.
D. Viirok took a comfortable pole in 1:25.613 with Andrea Moda Formula teammate B. Adam Negrete second, a tenth back on the timesheet and a division's worth of pace ahead of the field. The team's own chat channel was already celebrating before the race had started, someone congratulating the squad on a fifth one-two finish of the series and predicting a championship with 99.93 percent confidence. Confident, but not wrong.
The race itself was closer than the qualifying gap suggested. Viirok led the first seven laps before Negrete took over on lap eight. That lasted three laps until A. Estrada Ojeda, of all people, briefly led lap eleven on an early strategy gamble for Pirate Panda Race, a moment of promise that evaporated almost immediately. Negrete reclaimed the front on lap twelve and held it for the next thirty-five laps before Viirok, on a different pit cycle, took it back on lap forty-eight. Negrete had the last word, retaking the lead for good on lap sixty-two and crossing the line 4.469 seconds ahead of his own teammate after five stops to Viirok's six. It was Andrea Moda Formula's race from start to finish, decided only by which of their two drivers got the strategy marginally more right.
Behind that pair, the podium in miniature was Zeroforce F1's G. Viktor in third, the better part of fifty seconds back, ahead of A. Clijsters and S. Shobo for Tycoon R. INC. in fourth and fifth. R. Satyanarayana and H. McIlvenny brought the Leleux Racing cars home sixth and seventh, with O. Premiani completing the points for Zeroforce F1 in eighth.
Pirate Panda Race's early promise did not survive contact with the rest of the afternoon. Estrada Ojeda's lap-eleven lead was as good as it got. He fell to ninth by lap twenty and stayed there for the remainder of the race, finishing over three minutes down on only two pit stops, a stop count low enough to suggest a fuel-saving strategy that never delivered the pace to make it worthwhile. Teammate R. Tito had an even quieter afternoon, running a single pit stop across sixty-six laps and finishing tenth, five minutes and fifteen seconds off the winner. Two cars that qualified third and fourth on Friday finished ninth and tenth on Sunday. That is not a strategy call paying off, that is a team that got its read on the conditions wrong and then compounded it by not reacting.
Jaguar Racing Team's weekend ended worse than that. Both J. Høier and J. Lustig retired from the race with the same cause, out of fuel, Høier on lap thirty-eight after a single stop and Lustig on lap forty-five after two. Running out of fuel twice in the same race for the same team is not bad luck, it's a fuel model that was wrong for both cars and nobody caught it before it cost them the result entirely.
Andrea Moda Formula's dominance is now a pattern rather than a result. A fifth one-two of the season, delivered on a weekend where half the grid behind them either misjudged the changeover from dry to flooded or ran their strategy too close to the edge, says as much about the gap at the front as it does about anyone's driving.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
---
# "Seven Stops Is Not Tyres, That's a Fucking Crime Scene" — Pitwall Times Sits Down With Philip E.
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
We caught up with Philip E., team principal of Pirate Panda Race, three days after his cars finished ninth and tenth at Zemplén. He was not in a mood to pretend the weekend went well, and he was not in a mood to be polite about anyone else's either.
**Murray Ledger:** Philip. Mid-season. How's it going.
**Philip E.:** Mid-season is going exactly how I fucking planned it, which is to say it looks like shit on paper and it's not shit at all if you know what you're looking at. Ninth and tenth at Zemplén. I know how that reads. I don't give a fuck how it reads.
**ML:** Talk me through that, because from the outside it looked like a car that had nothing left after lap twenty.
**PE:** Because we took nothing to the fucking track after lap twenty, on purpose. We sacrificed that race. Not lost it, sacrificed it. There's a difference and it's the whole point. We ran two stops on one car and one stop on the other while everybody else was in the pits every five minutes like it's a fucking car wash. That's not us being slow, that's us not burning setup data and strategy tools on a race we can't win anyway, so we can actually use them in the second half of the season and going into next year. You spend your bullets where the target's worth hitting. Zemplén in the wet with this tyre situation was not worth hitting.
**ML:** So what's the target now, realistically, for the rest of this season?
**PE:** Second. That's it. That's the honest ceiling and I'll say it out loud instead of bullshitting you and everyone reading this. First is gone, first was gone the moment this tyre nonsense showed up on the calendar. Second is still on the table if we stop wasting races we can't win and start winning the ones we can.
**ML:** The tyre nonsense. You want to explain that for people who weren't watching the other divisions?
**PE:** Yeah I fucking want to explain it. Go look at Division 2.1. Go look at Division 2.2. Guys doing five, six, seven pit stops in a single race. Seven! One driver, one race, seven stops. That is not a tyre strategy, my friend, that is a factory recall. That's not racing, that's a fucking pit lane conga line. You cannot build a championship around a tyre that needs changing seven times in sixty-six laps, that's not performance, that's a safety bulletin. Somebody in race control needs to look at that and ask themselves what the fuck they signed off on. This should be banned. Not "reviewed," not "monitored," banned. You put a compound like that on the grid, you're not creating strategy, you're creating a lottery where the guy who miscounts his own pit stops loses the race to arithmetic. That happened. In front of everybody. A driver ran out of fuel because his own extra stop didn't register in the system. That's not racing drama, that's a fucking spreadsheet error deciding a race result.
**ML:** Fair to say Andrea Moda Formula didn't have that problem.
**PE:** No they did not, and credit where it's due, congratulations to Matteo, genuinely, five one-two finishes this season is not an accident, that's a team doing its job properly while half the paddock is out here reinventing the pit stop as a form of self-harm. My problem isn't with Matteo. My problem is there was no competition for him on tyre choice, because everyone else was too busy stopping seven times to actually race him. You win a one-two by ten seconds when the field behind you is stopping every eight laps, that's not domination, that's the rest of us handing it to you gift-wrapped. And listen, Matteo, enjoy it while it lasts, because next season you're up in Division 1, and Division 1 doesn't give a shit how many one-twos you scored down here. Division 1 is going to eat that record for breakfast and ask for seconds. Good luck, genuinely, you'll need it.
**ML:** Let's shift gears for a second. You've talked before about the development and finance side of this game, not just the tyres. Anything you want to get off your chest there?
**PE:** Oh, you want to open that door, sure, why the fuck not, we're already here. And let's actually get the mechanic right, because it's stupider than "rich get richer." You get one shot at selling shares. One. Not a tap you can turn on whenever you're short, one single sale, and if you time it well that's seven hundred million to a billion in one hit, no income tax on it either. Fine, that's a real opportunity, I'm not complaining about that part. Here's the part that's actually broken: sitting on that money costs you. One to ten percent a season, gone, just for having it in the bank. Not interest you missed out on, an actual charge for the crime of having cash reserves. So the system doesn't let you sit patient and wait for the right moment to spend, it forces your hand every single season, staff, drivers, suppliers, spend it or lose it to a holding cost, whether or not that's actually the smart call for where your team is at.
And the annoying thing is there's a boring, obvious fix for all of it. F1 worked this out years ago, put a cost cap on spend so the big teams can't just outspend the problem, or tie development time to finishing position so the team at the back builds faster than the team at the front. Either one closes the gap without anyone needing to be punished for having money. Instead we're running on a financial model that plays like it got bolted together sometime in the nineties for a completely different game and nobody's opened the hood since. It's not that the fix is a mystery. It's that we're stuck with a system nobody's bothered to modernize, and every season the gap gets decided by whoever timed their one share sale best.
**ML:** Of the two, cost cap or performance-based development time, which one would you actually pick?
**PE:** Performance-based, every time. A cost cap just means everyone spends the same amount badly. Tie development time to where you finished and the team at the back gets to build faster with what it's got, that's the closest thing to a comeback mechanic this game's got room for. Right now the smart move if you're mid-pack is exactly what we did at Zemplén, sacrifice a race you can't win and bank whatever you can for later, because the system punishes you for trying to fight above your reserves. That's not strategy, that's triage. Fix the money before you fix the tyres, honestly, the tyres are just this week's headline, the finance model is the thing actually deciding championships three seasons out.
**ML:** Anything you want to say to close this out?
**PE:** Yeah. Fix the tyres, or ban them, I don't care which, just do it before someone loses a championship to a spreadsheet again. And second half of the season, watch us. We didn't forget how to race, we just decided not to waste it on a race that was never ours to win.
**ML:** Philip E., thank you.
**PE:** Anytime. Don't print the swearing. [We printed the swearing.]
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
July 20, 2026 12:50 am
# Ferreira de Almeida Beats His Own Pole-Sitter as Zemplén Floods Division 1 Too
# Ferreira de Almeida Beats His Own Pole-Sitter as Zemplén Floods Division 1 Too
**Division 1, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
By the time Division 1 rolled around, the Zemplén weather pattern had stopped being a surprise and started being a running joke. Five stars and bone dry for qualifying on Friday, one star and officially flooded for the race on Sunday, for the fourth division running. Renttu Racing didn't seem to mind either way. Evelien Pouillie took pole in 1:24.235 with teammate Alípio Ferreira de Almeida right behind, two tenths back, and between them they had the fastest car in the field by a comfortable margin over Elliot Potts in third for SGA Racing.
It was Ferreira de Almeida, not the pole-sitter, who did the winning. He led the opening fourteen laps before Pouillie came through and took over from fifteen to twenty-nine, at which point Ferreira de Almeida reclaimed it and the lead started properly rotating. Potts got two separate spells at the front, laps thirty-two to thirty-nine and again from forty-nine to fifty-two, sandwiched around another Ferreira de Almeida stint from lap forty to forty-eight. The lead changed hands seven times across the race, mostly among those same three cars, before Ferreira de Almeida took it back for good on lap fifty-three and controlled the run to the flag from there. He won with three pit stops to Potts's four, crossing the line 3.185 seconds clear. Pouillie, who'd out-qualified his own teammate by two tenths, ended up third, 12.328 seconds back, on the same number of stops as the winner. That's not a strategy loss. That's simply the other Renttu car being slower in the wet on the day.
Behind the top three, Napizia salvaged fourth for Silver Cosmos ahead of Schmidt and Walrond, with Rodrígues de Morais completing the group inside a minute of the leader. Further back, Fenninger Racing's Eulalio Nava Castillo turned a genuinely dreadful qualifying lap, a spin through the final sector that cost him fifteen and a half seconds and left him twenty-second on the grid, into a ninth-place finish, which is the kind of recovery that says more about the race than the result sheet does. Teammate Slade Aitchinson had his own moment further down the order, credited with the fastest pit stop of the session at 2.667 seconds, useful compensation for a race that otherwise finished outside the points in eleventh.
Two cars didn't make it to the flag. John Compton retired with a suspension failure on lap thirty-seven, and Paul Hanson spun out of the race on lap forty-three after running as high as the midfield. The session chat had been needling Hanson before the race even started, one poster suggesting he was losing time just by driving like a Stroll. Spinning out six laps into the second half of a flooded race isn't going to quiet that down.
Khemais Al-Fessi's weekend was the outlier at the back. He qualified twenty-first, over six and a half seconds off pole after a sector-one lap that had nothing to do with the rest of his session, then spun during the race and lost roughly six seconds on top of an afternoon that was already lost. He finished nineteenth, last of the classified runners, nearly thirteen minutes down.
Renttu Racing leave Zemplén with a comfortable one-two, but the story of the race belongs to Ferreira de Almeida rather than the sheet. He didn't have pole, he wasn't the fastest man in the field on Friday, and he still spent more of Sunday at the front than anyone else. In conditions that punished every division this weekend, that's the difference between a car that's quick and a driver who actually reads the race.
*Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
July 20, 2026 12:33 am
