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."
Monday 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*
Monday 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
Monday 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
Monday 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
Monday 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*
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# 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*
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# 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*
---
# 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
Corrected version: # 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*
Vasco 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, Jean-Charles 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, Ernest Theisen turned an eighth-place qualifying effort into fourth by the end of the opening lap, while George 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, Dave 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, Mutsuhito Dupiré and Mubarak Ali rounded out the points, with Mackie recovering to ninth after his first-lap disaster and Asim Ahidous, Leo Carroll and Talat Bilge completing the finishers.
Équipe Renault Elf had nothing to show for the weekend. Both cars retired with spins in the wet, Albert Augier's race ending after just ten laps and Didier 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*
Hubert 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 Nerijus 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. Wilhelm Wulf and Andreas 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. Thomas 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. Tor 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 Attila Kádas and Manfred Schweizer for Olivetti Corse. Otto Frey, Aleksi Huhtala, Genzo Hanada, Alexandre Azevedo, Gunter Adam and João Pasos filled out the points, with Konstantinos Papafilotheou, Hikaru Ashida, Emma de Bruyn Kops and Gijs 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*
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# Lane Wins a Race Fucho F1 Lost Before It Started
**Division 2.3, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
Robert 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 Oleh Lukashenko alongside him and Karlis 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, Eduardo Meireles and Vasco 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 Adalbert Klöb in fourth. Raimond Bimont and Ago Aasaroht rounded out fifth and sixth for KOD Racing and Boxhead Racing respectively, with Oliver 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.
Dénes Viirok took a comfortable pole in 1:25.613 with Andrea Moda Formula teammate Bruno 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 Alan 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 Gustav Viktor in third, the better part of fifty seconds back, ahead of Anna Clijsters and Sena Shobo for Tycoon R. INC. in fourth and fifth. Ravi Satyanarayana and Hamish McIlvenny brought the Leleux Racing cars home sixth and seventh, with Ottavio 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 Rikuto 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 Jonas Høier and Jesper 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 completely for a second. You've been vocal outside racing too, the SPÖ motion on algorithmic manipulation, the public health framing. Anything you want to add there?
**PE:** [laughs] You want to put politics next to my tyre rant, sure, why the fuck not, they're the same story anyway. You know what a seven-stop tyre compound and a TikTok feed have in common? Both of them are systems designed by people who understood the mechanism perfectly and shipped it anyway because somebody upstream cared more about engagement, or lap-time variance, or whatever the metric is, than about whether the person using the product actually understood what was happening to them. Nobody explains to a fourteen-year-old how the algorithm decides what they see, same as nobody explained to half this grid that their tyre choice was going to blow up their race by lap thirty. Ban without understanding gets circumvented, always has, Prohibition, fare-dodging, doesn't matter, doesn't work. What works is telling people straight what the mechanism is and letting them make an actual choice. That's the whole motion. It's not complicated, it's just inconvenient for people who profit from nobody looking too closely. And the party apparatus, don't get me started, you try pushing anything through a machine that big, it's like trying to overtake in the pit lane, technically possible, mostly you just get a penalty and nothing changes. Marina Hanke gets it, that woman actually gets it, most of the rest are optimizing for not getting yelled at at the next Sektion meeting.
**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 19, 2026 08:08 pm
Season 46, Week 7 — Zemplén Autódom *All Division 2 race reports and the Philip E. interview*
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# 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*
Vasco 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, Jean-Charles 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, Ernest Theisen turned an eighth-place qualifying effort into fourth by the end of the opening lap, while George 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, Dave 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, Mutsuhito Dupiré and Mubarak Ali rounded out the points, with Mackie recovering to ninth after his first-lap disaster and Asim Ahidous, Leo Carroll and Talat Bilge completing the finishers.
Équipe Renault Elf had nothing to show for the weekend. Both cars retired with spins in the wet, Albert Augier's race ending after just ten laps and Didier 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*
Hubert 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 Nerijus 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. Wilhelm Wulf and Andreas 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. Thomas 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 and simply left them on the car, pitting four times for fuel without a tyre change, and didn't switch to hards until lap fifty-six, with ten laps still to run. Fifty-five laps on one set of medium tyres, on a car that also happened to be quick, is not a story about luck. It's a story about a team that had done its homework on degradation while everyone else was still guessing.
The retirement column stayed almost empty by Zemplén's recent standards. Tor 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 Attila Kádas and Manfred Schweizer for Olivetti Corse. Otto Frey, Aleksi Huhtala, Genzo Hanada, Alexandre Azevedo, Gunter Adam and João Pasos filled out the points, with Konstantinos Papafilotheou, Hikaru Ashida, Emma de Bruyn Kops and Gijs 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 changed its tyres the least. 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*
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# Lane Wins a Race Fucho F1 Lost Before It Started
**Division 2.3, Season 46, Week 7, Zemplén Autódom**
*By Murray Ledger, Pitwall Times*
Robert 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 Oleh Lukashenko alongside him and Karlis 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, Eduardo Meireles and Vasco 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 Adalbert Klöb in fourth. Raimond Bimont and Ago Aasaroht rounded out fifth and sixth for KOD Racing and Boxhead Racing respectively, with Oliver 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*
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# 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.
Dénes Viirok took a comfortable pole in 1:25.613 with Andrea Moda Formula teammate Bruno 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 Alan 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 Gustav Viktor in third, the better part of fifty seconds back, ahead of Anna Clijsters and Sena Shobo for Tycoon R. INC. in fourth and fifth. Ravi Satyanarayana and Hamish McIlvenny brought the Leleux Racing cars home sixth and seventh, with Ottavio 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 Rikuto 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 Jonas Høier and Jesper 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 completely for a second. You've been vocal outside racing too, the SPÖ motion on algorithmic manipulation, the public health framing. Anything you want to add there?
**PE:** [laughs] You want to put politics next to my tyre rant, sure, why the fuck not, they're the same story anyway. You know what a seven-stop tyre compound and a TikTok feed have in common? Both of them are systems designed by people who understood the mechanism perfectly and shipped it anyway because somebody upstream cared more about engagement, or lap-time variance, or whatever the metric is, than about whether the person using the product actually understood what was happening to them. Nobody explains to a fourteen-year-old how the algorithm decides what they see, same as nobody explained to half this grid that their tyre choice was going to blow up their race by lap thirty. Ban without understanding gets circumvented, always has, Prohibition, fare-dodging, doesn't matter, doesn't work. What works is telling people straight what the mechanism is and letting them make an actual choice. That's the whole motion. It's not complicated, it's just inconvenient for people who profit from nobody looking too closely. And the party apparatus, don't get me started, you try pushing anything through a machine that big, it's like trying to overtake in the pit lane, technically possible, mostly you just get a penalty and nothing changes. Marina Hanke gets it, that woman actually gets it, most of the rest are optimizing for not getting yelled at at the next Sektion meeting.
**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 19, 2026 07:51 pm
# PITWALL TIMES — SEASON 46, WEEK 6: DIVISION 1, LONIARI
## A correction is owed, a bottle in a paper bag raises questions, and everyone else is asked politely to sit down
Five stars, bone dry, and pole for Ferreira de Almeida at 1:43.498. Standard stuff. Except it wasn't, because of who was starting second.
**The correction, first, because it matters.** Last week this paper told you that Evelien Pouillie had traded a race seat for a spot on the bench, "keeping her nails presentable rather than her hands on a wheel." That was wrong. Not a little wrong. Comprehensively, embarrassingly wrong. Pouillie started this race, and boy, how she started. Lined up second, she shadowed her own teammate's gearbox for twenty-three laps within half a second, absorbed a stumble in traffic around lap six that briefly stretched the gap past 0.6, clawed it straight back down, and on lap 24 simply drove past for the lead and never gave it up again. By the flag she'd built a cushion of over three seconds, watched it shrink to 1.297 under a late-race charge, and held on anyway. If any manager in this paddock still thinks she's better known for her manicure than her racecraft, they haven't been watching, and they should probably start, for reasons that go well beyond the results sheet.
**Which brings us to the man she replaced.** He was spotted at the pitwall mid-race, visibly agitated, nursing something out of a paper bag that nobody's in a hurry to identify officially. Draw your own conclusions. He currently leads the championship. He was not driving today. Those three facts sitting next to each other should make for an interesting team debrief.
**The lead battle, for the two laps a year it's worth discussing:** Ferreira de Almeida controlled the race cleanly from pole through lap 23, never looking troubled, right up until his own garage found something faster than him in the same colours. The pit sequence around lap 43 briefly flattered him with Potts up into second as the field cycled through stops, a mirage that lasted exactly one lap before order was restored and it was back to a two-way fight that only one of them was actually winning. Final margin: 1.297 seconds, a proper contest, decided late, the only genuine racing anyone did all afternoon.
**Everyone else, and we do mean everyone:** Potts brought it home third, presumably content, because nothing that happened behind the top two constitutes a plot worth following. Nava Castillo finished fourth having apparently agreed with Walrond in fifth that positions would simply be respected as assigned. Rodrigues de Morais sixth, Napizia seventh, Schmidt eighth, Calinoiu ninth, Sinivuori tenth, and so on down to Shimaoka in seventeenth, a procession so orderly you'd think it was a parade lap with a fuel stop attached. If any of them overtook anybody, it happened quietly enough that nobody felt the need to mention it.
**The retirements, because five cars didn't make it to the flag:** Camâra had the worst of it, and it started early. Down to twenty-first by lap 8 after a lap that cost him six seconds in one go, he clawed back to fourteenth through three stops of genuinely decent pace, 1:46s lap after lap, only for the car to give up entirely by lap 33. Whatever last week's press implied about the strength of the seat he inherited, today's version of events was a driver actually fighting for it before the machinery quit on him. Valença, Voldek, Aitchinson and Al-Fessi also failed to see the checkered flag, for reasons the timing sheet, as usual, declines to specify.
**Final classification:** Pouillie wins, +1.297 over her own garage. Everyone from third back finished in a queue nobody's bothering to review frame by frame. Five didn't finish. One very interesting bottle remains unaccounted for.
July 12, 2026 09:54 pm
PITWALL TIMES — SEASON 46, WEEK 6 SPECIAL REPORT DIVISION 2
## Loniari plays host to all four Division 2 grids, and the story is the same everywhere: somebody's dominant, somebody's imploding, and one team boss has a plan he'd like you to hear about.
---
### DIVISION 2.1: JP Suave makes it look boring, because it is
Cheng took pole and never gave anyone a reason to think twice about it, leading all fifty-eight laps from lights to flag while teammate Micheli sat a comfortable, disciplined second the entire distance. A clean 1-2 for JP Suave Racing, the kind of result that generates zero headlines and every points table advantage a team could want.
Behind them, Dinger Zoomie Racing quietly banked a double haul of their own, Theisen third and Lakovič fourth, while Brissault brought Sutton home fifth without incident.
The story of the day belonged to Wolf GP, and not in a good way. Somewhere in a strategy meeting, someone entered an extra pit stop that never registered, and Mackie found out about it the hard way: a single lap where he shed the better part of ninety seconds, running dry mid-circuit while the rest of the field cruised past. He salvaged seventh out of it. Teammate Carroll fared little better, four stops of his own and a finish over a minute down in tenth. Somewhere between them, Tabrani quietly clawed his way back from a lap-down mess in the midfield to steal ninth, the single best piece of unglamorous recovery driving all weekend, and nobody will remember it by Monday.
---
### DIVISION 2.2: the rain gambled, and the rain won
Four stars, "a little bit of water on track," and eighteen strategy departments who each thought they'd cracked it. Østerbø took intermediate-tyre pole and then simply drove away from the field, leading every single lap of the race. Canavesi, his ATMI teammate, spent most of the afternoon twenty-plus seconds adrift before clawing the gap down to under five at the flag, either the leader coasting home or a genuinely good final stint, take your pick.
But the real story was tyre roulette. Half the grid started on wets like sensible people. The other half fancied their chances on mediums and hards on a track that was still greasy, and paid for it in lost laps before the track finally came round to their side of the bet. Kádas and Schweizer, the two boldest gamblers, actually salvaged points-adjacent finishes once the sun did its job.
Then there was Gerhardt. Running a genuinely brilliant P4 on slicks after an early switch, matching the pace of cars twenty places ahead, he looked like the strategy call of the season. Lap 33, a 2:19 appears from nowhere. Lap 34, he's onto intermediates, and the car simply stops working: laps in the 2:14 to 2:32 bracket, for twenty-four straight laps, all the way to the flag. A driver fighting for a podium finished fifteenth, five minutes and forty seconds behind the winner. If you're the Exasperace principal wondering aloud in the chat why these races feel like a lottery, this is your answer in car form. Two more retirements, Papafilotheou and Pasos, didn't even make it that far.
---
### DIVISION 2.3: a battle that lasted four laps, and a boss who's already given up on his season
Lane took pole, lost the lead to his own teammate Lukashenko at the first corner, and spent the rest of the afternoon quietly taking it back and occasionally losing it again during the pit windows, twice for two laps at a time, before locking it down for good after lap 30. Arun Roughneck's 1-2 finished 32.8 seconds apart and utterly unchallenged by anyone else on the grid.
Villard brought it home third for Serbian Engineering, methodical and unspectacular, teammate Klöb fourth right behind him. KOD Racing's Bimont had a genuinely brutal middle stint, two laps around the two-minute mark that will have cost him any shot at the podium, and still salvaged fifth purely because the two cars that might have beaten him didn't make it to the flag. Fucho F1 lost both cars, Meireles and Oliveira, retiring within a lap of each other near the end, a fittingly grim capstone to a team whose principal opened the season complaining his best driver had already walked out the door.
---
### DIVISION 2.4: Andrea Moda's steamroller, and a Panda that had its moment
Høier took a commanding pole (1:44.773) and led the first eleven laps like a man who'd already won the race. Then Andrea Moda Formula called the undercut a lap before Jaguar did, and that was the whole afternoon decided in a single strategic phone call. Viirok inherited the lead on lap 12 and never surrendered it again, teammate Negrete tucking in behind for a serene 1-2, +14.5 seconds clear of everyone else by the checkered flag. Høier limped home third, +25.6 seconds down, out-thought rather than out-driven.
But buried in the middle of the race is the detail worth savouring: for thirteen laps, from 29 to 41, Pirate Panda Race's Remo Tito ran ahead of Høier's Jaguar on pure strategy, a pole-sitter genuinely unable to get back past a car that started third. Nobody threw a punch, nobody made a move, it just happened, and it's the kind of quiet superiority that doesn't show up in the highlight reel but absolutely shows up in the debrief.
And then there's Alejandro Estrada Ojeda, on his race debut, bringing the second Panda home fifth, first points on the board, +33.1 seconds back but classified, clean, and done. Zeroforce's Viktor finished a mere 0.295 seconds behind him at the flag, the tightest finish of the entire weekend across four divisions, and Estrada held the position anyway.
---
## THE INTERVIEW: Murray Ledger sits down with Philip E., Pirate Panda Race
**Murray Ledger:** Philip. P4 and P5 for you at Loniari, Estrada's first race in the car. Talk to me.
**Philip E.:** Look, it's a solid fucking result for a kid who's never sat in this thing in anger before. He didn't crash it, he didn't panic, he brought it home fifth, and Viktor was up his ass by three tenths at the flag and Alejandro still held him off. That's not luck, that's a driver doing his job. I'll take it every single week.
**ML:** And Tito ran ahead of Høier's Jaguar for thirteen laps in the middle of the race. Nobody's talking about it.
**PE:** Because nobody watches the middle of the race, Murray, that's the problem with this whole sport. Everybody wants the start and the flag and fuck-all in between. Tito had a pole-sitter stuck behind him for thirteen laps and it's a footnote. Fine. I know what my car did. I don't need CNN to confirm it.
**ML:** Meanwhile Andrea Moda Formula is running away with the division. Two wins, 1-2 finishes, does that worry you?
**PE:** Worry me? No. It should worry them, actually, because we're not sitting here with our thumb up our ass watching it happen. We're restructuring the whole operation over the break in two weeks. Real changes, not cosmetic bullshit. And here's the thing nobody thinks about: we might just sit on some engines for the second half of the season. Save them. Let everyone think we're managing decline while we're actually loading the gun.
**ML:** So you're saying the second half gets interesting.
**PE:** I'm saying Matteo can enjoy his 1-2s now, because when we come back from the break, it's going to get juicy. Write that down exactly like I said it. Juicy.
**ML:** I will. Thanks, Philip.
**PE:** Yeah. Now piss off, I've got a team meeting.
July 12, 2026 09:41 pm
THE PODIUM THAT BROKE IN HALF: FÜRST, DIVISION 1
Twenty-one cars and dry all weekend, the kind of conditions where excuses run thin. Twenty finished. One didn't.
The story of the day isn't at the front, it's in the middle of the order, where Nicholai Bech Napizia spent the first third of the race putting on the best show nobody talked about. From the green flag he was glued to the back of Edmund Potts, lunge after lunge, corner after corner, failed overtake logged on failed overtake logged, a proper old-fashioned scrap that ran from lap 1 all the way past lap 13 without either man giving an inch. He finally got it done around lap 26, ran as high as third, and looked for all the world like a driver about to bank the best result of his season. Then on lap 34 his suspension let go and he simply climbed out of the car. No warning in the sector times, no drama building, just gone. Dan Silver, the man running Napizia's side of the garage, put it about as well as it can be put: "that was the most certain I'd ever been for a podium." Brutal way to lose one. Nothing to add to that, it says everything on its own.
Which set up the actual story of the podium: Edmund Potts drove the race of his weekend and very nearly didn't get to show for it. He'd been in the thick of the early fight with Napizia, held station through the first stops, and then on lap 26 his own pit crew handed him a nightmare, a wheel that simply wouldn't seat, mechanics scrambling while the whole queue of cars behind streamed past him on pit exit. That's the kind of moment that ends races quietly in eighth or ninth with nobody remembering it happened. Potts didn't let it. He clawed his way back through the same field that had just walked past him and crossed the line third, over ninety seconds down on the winner but comfortably clear of everyone chasing him for the final podium spot. That is the single best recovery drive of the day, full stop, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than buried under a results table.
Duarte Camâra had a rather worse afternoon, and it's worth explaining why, because it says something about depth. He's in the SGA seat this year in place of Evelien Pouillie, who swapped it for a spot on the Renttu bench, where she is, by all accounts, doing an excellent job of keeping her nails presentable rather than her hands on a wheel. Camâra's race unravelled almost entirely at his first stop on lap 5: the pit work itself was clean enough, under five seconds, but he emerged straight into a wall of traffic and got picked off by essentially the entire midfield in the space of about ninety seconds, one overtake after another logged against his name. He never really recovered position after that, finishing tenth, a lap down on where his pace through the opening stint suggested he belonged. Replacing an absent driver with a full seat is one thing. Surviving the pit-exit lottery on a track this unforgiving is another, and today it cost him.
Elsewhere it was the usual grind of a fifty-lap race on a track that chews through strategy patience: five-stop outings from Sayre, Aitchinson, Nava Castillo and Voldek, wheel dramas that also caught out Vladimir Babić on lap 36, a plastic bag flying into Lucien Alfonsetti's airbox on lap 35 for the most pointless mechanical scare of the day, and Jaiden Compton's tyre exploding into a retirement-in-all-but-name on lap 6 before he fought all the way back to twelfth. Compton also picked up a first-lap collision investigation that went nowhere, the stewards clearly deciding a Sunday afternoon wasn't worth the paperwork.
At the very front, exactly one team had the pace to lap the field into submission and spent the whole race trading the lead back and forth between its own two cars rather than fighting anyone else. Final gap at the flag: 11.6 seconds. Not going to spend more words on it than that.
Final order: 1st and 2nd as above, Potts third, Sayre fourth, Schmidt fifth, Aitchinson sixth, Nava Castillo seventh, Rodrígues de Morais eighth, Calinoiu ninth, Camâra tenth, Walrond eleventh, Babić twelfth, Compton thirteenth, Sinivuori fourteenth, Alfonsetti fifteenth, Voldek sixteenth, Shimaoka seventeenth, Hanson eighteenth, Fisch nineteenth, Al-Fessi twentieth. Napizia the only retirement, suspension failure, lap 34, robbed of what would very likely have been his best result of the season.
Murray Ledger covers the paddock for the Pitwall Times.
July 5, 2026 08:29 pm
FÜRST WEEKEND ROUNDUP, DIVISION 2
MURRAY LEDGER, PITWALL TIMES
Four races at the same circuit, same Sunday, same tarmac, and the story changes completely depending on which garage you were standing in.
**2.1** was the one that will get talked about in the paddock for weeks. Ye Cheng took pole and simply drove away from the field, banking fastest sector after fastest sector, and on lap 4 he put down a 2:32.581 that nobody else in any of the four divisions came within half a second of all weekend. He ran the whole race on medium tyres, three stops, same compound every single time, no gamble on anything harder or softer. It looked, for forty-one laps, like the most comfortable win of the day. Then on lap 42, with the lead in hand and no contact recorded anywhere near him, he simply lost the car and spun himself out of the race. No mechanical warning in the times beforehand, nothing. Vasco Micheli inherited a lead he hadn't really earned in that moment and made no mistake closing it out, one stint of soft to open, then four even, unspectacular medium stints, the kind of strategy that wins races by simply being the last car standing rather than the fastest. Behind them the track was chewing through rubber and drivers in equal measure: Brissault's tyre let go at Turn 1 on lap 21 and put him straight into the barrier hard enough to bring out the safety car, and Leo Carroll ran his stops down to the wire and then discovered on lap 48 that the pit crew simply didn't have another set of the compound he needed, a genuinely embarrassing way to end a race. Four cars didn't see the flag.
**2.2** could not have been more different if it tried. Wulf took pole, led every single lap, and that was more or less the whole afternoon. He ran medium to start and then committed to hard tyres for three long stints, fewer pit stops than almost anyone else on the grid, while the rest of the field burned through four and five stops chasing shorter bursts of pace on softer rubber. It didn't matter. He won by three tenths of a second over Huhtala at the flag, a gap that had actually been larger for most of the race and only came down once Wulf started nursing the final stint home rather than pushing it. Adami was the only one willing to gamble on soft tyres mid-race and rewarded himself with the outright fastest laps of the entire session, low 2:30s, good enough for third but not for a fight at the front. One retirement all day: Ashida's brakes cooked themselves and sent him straight into the tyre wall on lap 37. Fifteen of sixteen starters finished, no safety car needed.
**2.3** had the smallest grid and the ugliest numbers. Eight cars started, five finished, and the three that didn't went out for reasons that should worry every team running this compound. Howlin and Lane, team-mates at Arun Roughneck, swapped the lead back and forth in the opening laps before Howlin reasserted himself and held on to win by 0.315 seconds, a margin practically identical to the 2.2 finish down to the decimal. Behind them, Bimont had a rear tyre explode under him on lap 15, nursed the car back to the pits, kept racing, and then had a second tyre blow out on lap 41, and somehow still crossed the line fourth. Klöb wasn't so lucky, his tyre went on lap 26 and put him in the wall for good. And then there's Fucho F1, whose two cars, Meireles and das Dores Oliveira, both ran completely dry on the exact same lap, 46, within three minutes of each other. That is not the track's fault. That is somebody on the pit wall getting the fuel maths wrong twice in one afternoon.
**2.4** was the calm after three storms. Viirok took pole and led almost the entire distance stride for stride with team-mate Adam Negrete, both of them running identical soft-then-medium strategy, until lap 47, when Viirok inexplicably lost the better part of eighteen seconds in a single lap and had to pit again a lap later for an unplanned fifth stop. The timing sheet doesn't say why. Whatever it was cost him the win outright, and Negrete cruised home 5.4 seconds clear. Pirate Panda brought both cars home in the points, Tito fifth and Hewitt sixth, on the same strategy as the race winners, without a single incident to blame for the gap. When a race is that clean and you still finish over a minute back, there's no cover story left, the pace simply wasn't there.
Add it all up and the tyre carnage varies from zero DNFs to three depending entirely on which garage you were standing in. Same track, same compound, same Sunday. If there's one villain here it isn't purely the rubber, it's how each team chose to lean on it.
---
**PADDOCK: PHILIP E., PIRATE PANDA RACE**
*Ledger found the Pirate Panda principal in the paddock after 2.4, already looking at his phone.*
**Ledger:** Fifth and sixth. Thoughts?
**Philip E.:** Points. Fine. Not a podium, not close to one, more than a minute back from the win is a different fucking category of race, we all know that. But nobody crashed, nobody did anything stupid, so I'll take boring points over an exciting DNF any day.
**Ledger:** And Hewitt specifically. Sixth place, no dramas.
**Philip E.:** Hewitt was not awesome. Let's be clear about that. But he was stable, he did what he was supposed to do, no mistakes, nothing thrown away. I'm not counting him out. He might end up reserve next week, that's a real possibility, but that's not a punishment, that's just where the numbers put him right now. Stable is worth something. It's just not worth a podium.
**Ledger:** Is the team where it needs to be?
**Philip E.:** No. Obviously not. We need restructuring, and I'm not going to sugarcoat that for you or for the team. Then this attack on Henri and Renttu happens and it doesn't help anybody, it just adds noise when we're trying to fix something internally. And on top of that we lose Hallikäär. That's a real problem, not a footnote.
**Ledger:** What did losing him actually cost you?
**Philip E.:** Money that isn't money. What we got for him, after tax, is not even a drop on a hot stone. More than half of it gone before it touches the account. And you can't fix what that does to the team internally with a cheque anyway, synergy doesn't come back because the bank balance looks okay. It's bullshit, honestly, at its absolute best.
**Ledger:** Can you prepare for something like this in advance?
**Philip E.:** Not really. Unless you want to massively overpay for a decent midfield driver who might actually shine down here in Division 2. I liked Hallikäär, I still do, but let's be honest, he was never top-shelf Division 1 material. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if he never sees a Renttu cockpit at all.
**Ledger:** Plans for the rest of the season?
**Philip E.:** Stabilize what we have. Find the right drivers for next year so we're actually in a better spot when it counts. This season, there's not much left to fix, we play out the hand we're holding. And the tyres are terrible, let's just say it, Supergrip and Andrea Moda Formula have something the rest of us don't, and we are not catching that up in five races. *(already walking off)* That's it. That's the interview.
---
*Murray Ledger covers Division 2 for the Pitwall Times.*
July 5, 2026 07:00 pm
Breaking News!!! Halikäär leaves Pirate Pandas mid week!!!
PITWALL TIMES — Division 2.4
By Murray Ledger
HALIKÄÄR TO RENTTTU, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY
Halikäär has left Henri Racing for Rentttu Race, a 45,500,000 cash buyout, effective immediately, days before Sunday's race at Fürst.
Pirate Panda Race, which loses the seat, keeps Remo Tito in the car and brings in Hewitt for the second. Rising junior Alejandro Estrada Ojeda was unavailable, having already run a feeder race this week.
More, as ever, from the paddock.
---
TEAM PRINCIPAL PHILIP E., NO FILTER
Murray Ledger caught up with Pirate Panda Race principal Philip E. He had opinions, and he did not ration a single word of them.
ML: Halikäär's gone to Rentttu. Effective immediately.
PE: A spree, that's what they'll call it, and fuck off with "spree," Murray, it's a fucking looting, plain and simple. Forty-five and a half million, cash, for Halikäär, and Pouillie strolls out of her SGA deal for nothing the same week. And this isn't new, this is the whole business. You want to know what Rentttu actually does? Look at what's left behind. Bora came out of minardi, three titles in a row that team had, three, back to back to back. Where's minardi now? Gone. Vanished. de Almeida came out of Fenninger, a multiple Division 1 champion, and Fenninger's still there, still got a full team, but it's not top shelf anymore and the morale's in the gutter. That's the trick. You take their best drivers, their best staff, you leave them enough to limp on in midfield, and you let the motivation rot from the inside. That's strip-mining a champion and leaving the shell running just so everyone can see what happens when you don't sell.
ML: And the money keeps flowing their way.
PE: That's the part that really cooks me, Murray. The winner takes it all. Rentttu wins Division 1, so the fans throw their money at Rentttu, because that's what fans do, they back the winner, and now the richest team on the grid is also the one getting fed the most. And then the tax system tells them the smart move is to piss that money away on purpose. You know how you save forty-five million from the taxman? You don't. I've already got ten million parked from bonus payments just to dodge the tax on it, and that's me being small about it. You want to hide the rest? You park it as an investment, they take their cut, you pay tax on whatever's left anyway. Or you spend it on a driver you don't need and write the whole thing off as a loss. So the system is literally paying them to loot their rivals. Running a clean, sustainable team like a responsible adult? Punished. Burning cash to kneecap the competition? Rebate. It's insane and everyone's known it for seasons.
ML: There have been announcements about reforming exactly that.
PE: Announcements. Oh, there's always an announcement. "We're looking into it." "Changes are coming." You can write whatever you want, Murray, same as that changelog. Meanwhile nothing moves and Rentttu buys another one. At some point they run out of rivals to strip and they'll be sitting there racing against themselves, one Rentttu car chasing the other, like a troll who cleared the whole server and now shouts into an empty room. And they'll call that a championship.
ML: There's the small matter of the transfer timing, too.
PE: Ah, now you're getting to the good part. Their own changelog, December, in writing: a driver on an immediate transfer while he's still contracted somewhere else only moves the following Monday. Monday. They wrote it, they published it. So explain to me how Halikäär is gone right now, mid-week, four days before I race. Either it's a bug they swore they'd handled, or the rule only applies when it's convenient. Some people call these things bugs. I've got a shorter word for it.
ML: So who's in the car for Fürst?
PE: Tito stays. Obviously, don't even ask me that, he's earned his seat ten times over. The second seat, Christ. Hewitt's in, and Hewitt still doesn't know his left from his right half the time, this season, last season, doesn't matter. And the guy who is ready, Estrada Ojeda, is off winning fifth place somewhere else, five tyre stops, some track that chews tyres for breakfast, and now he's locked out because he already fucking raced this week. So the rules apply to me just fine when they cost me a driver, but somehow don't apply to Rentttu when they're gaining one. Funny how that works.
ML: There's chatter that older drivers should be pushed down to lower divisions to free up development slots.
PE: Oh for fuck's sake, here we go, blame the veterans, always the easy target. Meanwhile there's a dead team, minardi, three-time champion, gone, and Fenninger limping around midfield with the fight drained out of it, both hollowed by exactly the thing nobody wants to name, and we're going to talk about whether some forty-year-old should retire? Nobody's age has anything to do with any of this. It's money draining the life out of everything it touches. Go reshuffle grandpas after you've explained to me where minardi went.
ML: If it stays this way, what happens to Pirate Panda?
PE: Honestly? No idea. Probably the same thing that happened to minardi, except there won't even be a successor team to take the slot. And here's the part that'll make you laugh, Murray, or cry, I can't tell anymore: you know who actually profits from Halikäär leaving down here in 2.4? Andrea Moda. Matteo Rossi's outfit. And Matteo, in case anyone's forgotten, used to run minardi. The team Rentttu strip-mined into the ground. So the guy who got hollowed out at the top is now quietly cashing in on the exact same machine one division down. That's not justice, that's not a comeback, that's just the same wheel turning and landing on a different face. I'm not making plans. I'm going to go get a drink. You can come along if you want, just don't hurt yourself again. MotoGP's interesting. Curling's interesting. God help me, right now even curling looks more interesting than another season of this Pitwall circus.
ML: And Halikäär?
PE: Good luck to him, genuinely, no bullshit. He got bought because he's good, he didn't do a single thing wrong. Same with Pouillie. I'm not angry at them. I'm angry at the machine that turns three-time champions into ghosts and calls it a transfer market. Now get out of my garage, Murray, I've got four days and a car that isn't going to fix itself.
July 1, 2026 05:11 pm
RENTTU PICK UP WHERE THEY LEFT OFF: BORA AND FERREIRA LOCK OUT THE FRONT
New season, same opening chapter. If you covered last year, you can skip the formalities: Renttu Racing arrived at Rivemaure on the front row and left it with both top steps, and at no point in between did anyone in Division 1 have a coherent answer.
Enver Bora led from pole and ran the full 54 laps unchallenged, a three-stop afternoon completed in 1:34:19 with the fastest lap banked early on lap 7 just to make the point. Teammate Alvaro Ferreira de Almeida brought the second car home 32 seconds back for the Renttu one-two. Two cars, front row to chequered flag, untroubled. The blue cars have turned season-openers into a procession, and the rest of the grid spent the day racing for third.
That fight, at least, had some life in it. Edmund Potts (SGA) qualified third and then watched half the field stream past him in the opening stints, shuffled back as far as the upper midfield before the strategy turned his way. He clawed the entire deficit back, four-stopping his way home to take the final podium spot less than a second off Ferreira's gearbox at the flag. From third to nowhere to third again: the most honest day's work on the timing screen.
Behind the recovered Potts, Patrick Schmidt (Paolonio) and Nicola Napizia (Silver Cosmos) completed the top five, both on three-stoppers that held station while the four-stop runners shuffled around them. Walrond, Pouillie and Compton filled the points.
For a season opener at a track that asks little of the car, it was a remarkably clean race. The only stewards' note of consequence went to Martti Voldek, a 5-second penalty for causing a collision, which dropped him to the tail of the order. No blowouts, no fuel embarrassments, no safety drama: just Renttu out front and everyone else sorting out the leftovers.
Verdict: the procedure is the story, and the procedure is unchanged. Renttu look exactly as unstoppable as they did last season, and the only open question in Division 1 is whether anyone develops a car quick enough to make them work for it before the title is mathematically gone. On day one, the answer was no.
June 28, 2026 11:30 pm
PITWALL TIMES FRANCE GP, PARC DE RIVEMAURE — DIVISION 2.4
*by Murray Ledger*
**ANDREA MODA MARCH ON: VIIROK LEADS HOME ANOTHER ROSSI DOUBLE**
Some weekends you cover the racing. Other weekends you cover a coronation and try to find a fresh angle on it. Saturday at Rivemaure was the latter.
Daniil Viirok converted pole into a lights-to-flag win, the Andrea Moda car never headed across 54 laps and quick enough at the end to bang in the fastest lap of the race, a 1:43.553 on lap 48 when the job was already long done. Behind him, Benito Adam Negrete completed the formality: an Andrea Moda one-two by 54 seconds, the kind of margin that turns a race report into a press release.
Two cars, two top steps, and a championship that increasingly reads like a countdown. Matteo Rossi's outfit has made the double its house style this season. The only open question in Division 2.4 is the calendar: how many weeks until the promotion maths is settled. On this evidence, not many.
The genuine racing happened behind the runaway pair, and it was an in-house scrap in green. Pirate Panda Race took third and fourth through Remo Tito and Bilal Hallikäär, but not before the two of them spent half the afternoon trading paint-free passes on each other and everyone within reach. Hallikäär at one point muscled past both his own teammate and Viirok himself; Tito got shuffled back through a busy midfield, dug in, and came back to take the flag third, four-stopping his way ahead of a teammate who stopped one fewer. Two cars, two solid hauls, internal order sorted on track rather than by pit board. Tidy work.
Jaguar's Josef Høier and Milivoi Maniu followed in fifth and sixth, the best of the rest behind the two front teams.
The day's misfortune clustered at the back. Henry McIlvenny parked in the grass with a car failure, leaving the fire marshal his moment on camera. Alf Alberts collided with Wesley Addams, then ran his tank dry; Addams did the same a few corners earlier. Out-of-fuel finishes remain Division 2.4's most reliable self-own.
---
**PADDOCK NOTEBOOK: FIVE MINUTES WITH PHILIP E., PIRATE PANDA RACE**
*Ledger: Third and fourth. Pleased?*
"Not bad. Not happy either. Third and fourth is points and it's two cars in the right half of the order, so I won't pretend it's a bad day. But Andrea Moda were in a different race and we both know it. I don't do satisfied with best-of-the-rest."
*Ledger: Your two were racing each other pretty hard out there.*
"They were. That's fine. They're free to race until it costs us, and it didn't cost us, so no complaints. Tito got himself buried in the midfield and dragged it back, which I rate. Hallikäär had the pace earlier and the strategy went the other way. It evened out. Nobody hit anybody. That's the bar."
*Ledger: Andrea Moda look gone. Is the title race over?*
"It's over when it's over. They've got a gap and they've earned it, I'm not going to insult anyone by pretending otherwise. But the season's long and cars change. We've got some updates coming. I'd rather be the team improving than the team defending. Ask me again in a few weeks."
*Ledger: Updates?*
"Updates are on the way. That's all you're getting."
*And with that, he was back to the pit wall. Pirate Panda leave Rivemaure with a clean double-points day and, by their own boss's reckoning, unfinished business.*
June 28, 2026 11:28 pm
FRANCE GP, PARC DE RIVEMAURE: Serbian Engineering Inherit a Quiet One
Division 2.3, Race 4, Day 2 — 54 laps, dry
A thin grid and a thinner race. With only a handful of cars on track, this came down to who kept their car running, and the two who couldn't were the two who started on the front row.
Arun Roughneck Racing locked out the front in qualifying through Owen Howlin (pole, 1:42.383) and Ross Lane, and both threw it away in near-identical fashion. Lane's left rear exploded after he pushed the tyres too hard, then he ran out of fuel limping back. Howlin suffered the same tyre failure and the same dry tank. Two cars, two blowouts, two empty fuel loads: the fastest team in qualifying scored nothing.
That handed the race to Serbian Engineering, who needed no luck beyond staying out of trouble. Albrecht Klöb came through from fourth on the grid to win, clearing Bimont and Lane on track before the Arun cars self-destructed, on a four-stop run completed in 1:39:39. Teammate Kaupo Villard made it a one-two, just three tenths behind at the flag after the pair ran nose-to-tail in the closing laps without incident.
Orson Butts (KOD) took the final podium step in third, a distant 57 seconds back, the last driver on the lead lap. Fucho F1 filled the remaining places with Meireles fourth and das Dores Oliveira fifth.
Verdict: not much to report, and that is the report. Serbian Engineering won by surviving while Arun Roughneck handed them the race with a double mechanical implosion. On a dry day at a track that asks little of the car, the only drama was self-inflicted, and it all happened to the team that should have won.
June 28, 2026 11:24 pm
FRANCE GP, PARC DE RIVEMAURE: Adami Masters the Drying Track
Division 2.2, Race 4, Day 2 — 54 laps, wet start drying out
The qualifying sheet was a clean dry session led by Willi Wulf on pole. The race was nothing of the sort. It began wet, ran through intermediates, and only dried to slicks in the closing stint, and that single fact rewrote the entire result. Lap times told the story: openers north of 2:00, the front-runners eventually dipping into the 1:44s as the surface came good.
Hasan Adami (EquipeFlandre) read it best. Starting third, he was shuffled backwards early, overtaken in turn by Kádas, Pasos, Papafilotheou and Huhtala while he struggled to clear Wulf. Once he found a way through and the conditions swung his way, he was untouchable: a relentless run of fastest laps culminating in a 1:44.343 on lap 28, five pit stops to stay on the optimal rubber, and a winning margin of 41 seconds. From the moment the track turned, nobody else was in the race.
Antonio Huhtala (Trackhouse) brought it home second on a four-stop, the best of the rest by a clear gap. Gabriel Adam made it two EquipeFlandre cars on the podium in third, also on five stops, completing a strong team day built on getting the tyre calls right rather than on raw qualifying pace.
Jorge Pasos (Trackhouse) took fourth, Olivier Frey (RSA) fifth. Alpár Kádas salvaged sixth on a three-stop, the highest-placed driver to gamble on fewer changes and make it stick.
The wet conditions punished the careless. Willi Wulf, the pole man, picked up a 5-second penalty for causing a collision with Andreas Anderhub, the contact costing Wulf around nine seconds, and finished a deflating ninth: pole to ninth is the day's bluntest verdict on the weather. Anderhub took his own 5-second penalty for a false start. Both Exasperace cars qualified on the front row and left with nothing of note.
The fuel gremlins struck at the back. Kostas Papafilotheou ran dry and hurled his steering wheel out of the cockpit in disgust, while Tore Morten Østerbø's ATMI car also coasted to a halt out of fuel. In wet-to-dry conditions the extra stops shred fuel margins, and the strategy software does not forgive a miscalculated extra stop.
Verdict: a track that flipped from dry qualifying to a wet, drying race turned the grid inside out. Wulf converted pole into a penalty and ninth. Adami converted a tricky third into a 41-second masterclass. On days like this, tyre timing is the whole game, and EquipeFlandre played it cleanly enough to put two cars on the box.
June 28, 2026 11:18 pm
FRANCE GP, PARC DE RIVEMAURE: Theisen Steals Brissault's Pole DayFRANCE GP, PARC DE RIVEMAURE: Theisen Steals Brissault's Pole Day
Division 2.1, Race 4, Day 2 — 54 laps, dry throughout
Jean-Charles Brissault arrived as the man to beat. His Sutton machine had swept all three sectors in qualifying for a 1:44.261 and pole by three tenths. By the end of 54 laps he was fourth, and the fastest car of the weekend had nothing to show for it.
Ernest Theisen took the win instead. Starting second, the Dinger Zoomie driver got ahead of Brissault early, set the fastest lap on the opening tour, and ran his three-stop race from the front without ever being seriously threatened. He crossed the line after 1:38:08, fully in control.
Behind him sat the most quietly impressive drive of the day. Dave O'Callaghan (Arun Racing) was handed a 5-second penalty for a false start on lap 1, the onboard confirming he jumped the lights. He served it at his first stop and still finished second, 2.6s clear. Started fourth, lost five seconds to the stewards, came home as runner-up: the net winner of the afternoon on pure pace.
Žan Lakovič completed an all-Dinger sandwich on the podium, and earned it the hard way. He qualified last of the running order after a scrappy lap, then spent the early stints carving forward with a long string of clean overtakes, briefly drawing a collision investigation along the way. A botched third stop, where a wheel refused to seat, cost him time but not the position. P3 from the back is the recovery drive Brissault wanted and never got.
Brissault's own day came apart at the tyres. Having lost the lead to Theisen, he pushed a set past their limit and suffered a blowout around lap 19, limping back for fresh rubber. The pace was never in doubt: he produced the race's outright fastest lap on lap 21 (1:45.997) and climbed back to fourth. From pole, that is a salvage job, not a result.
George Mackie (Wolf GP) took fifth on a two-stop that undercut several three-stoppers, turning a P3 grid slot into a clean points haul. Mubarak Ali survived a sticky-wheel pit fumble to take sixth ahead of Tabrani, Bleneau, Carroll and Augier.
Forza Mutte had a day to forget. Beyond Ali's pit drama, the team flagged afterward that an extra stop entered for one of their cars failed to register, leaving the driver stranded out of fuel: a strategy-software failure rather than a racing one, and the kind of self-inflicted loss that stings more than any on-track mistake.
The strategic split decided the midfield cleanly. The three-stoppers held the top four on raw pace, while the two-stop runners (Mackie, Bleneau, Carroll, Augier) traded track position for fewer stops and clustered behind. On a track rated normal for speed and cornering, with handling flagged as not very important, tyre management was the only real variable. Brissault's blowout delivered the verdict in the bluntest terms available: fastest car, no win, pole thrown away to a single overcooked stint.
June 28, 2026 11:17 pm
