War! What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing...if you were up-and-coming junior single-seater driver Enrique Mansilla in the 1980s.

That’s because his professional life at that time was ultimately defined by two separate international crises and he was an unwilling and unlucky victim on both occasions.

All images courtesy of Jeff Bloxham and Enrique Mansilla

The first, as an Argentinian national racing in the UK in Formula 3 in 1982, was the Falklands conflict, and the other was a terrifying civil war in Liberia just when he was trying to re-establish his life away from motorsport to make money for another crack at a career in racing.

His life at this time reads like a long forgotten Norman Mailer novel, full of complexity, questioning, global events and the existential wonder of ‘what ifs’.

As a driver who finished a close second to one of the all-time greats, Ayrton Senna, in Formula Ford 1600 in 1981 and then to one of the 1980s' greatest lost talents, Tommy Byrne, in F3 a year later, Mansilla is perhaps a driver who has a claim to being the unluckiest of that decade.

Quick out of the blocks

Born in Buenos Aires in 1958, Mansilla didn’t even sit in a racing car until he was 19 years of age. But what he lacked in practice as a boy he made up for as a man.

Enrolling at a local race school in 1978 after his mandatory military service had been completed, Mansilla, known universally as ‘Quique’, soon discovered he had a natural aptitude for the art of controlling racing cars.

His tutors were astonished that with no prior experience he could vanquish several others who had been karting and competing in other forms of racing for years.

As a result, he won a scholarship to travel to the UK to follow in the footsteps of other talented Argentinian racers such as Carlos Reutemann, Ricardo Zunino and Oscar Larrauri.

Showing up at the famed Jim Russell Racing School in the summer of 1979, Mansilla hit his straps quickly and thoroughly impressed then head of the school John Kirkpatrick.

Kirkpatrick is unequivocal in his praise for Mansilla, telling The Race he was “a talent who would have made a mark in F1 had he got a chance” and a driver who was “a complete natural, a bit wild at times but the speed was most definitely there”.

His first Formula Ford season in the UK in 1980 fits that summary. He ran as a consistent top-six driver but the inevitable incidents while learning a whole new variety tracks ensured he finished his first-ever racing season ninth in the standings in what was his first-ever season of competition.

It was a massive culture change for the affable kid from Buenos Aires but he relished being in the UK.

“I was in this cold, wet place and I couldn’t speak a word of English but I was happy,” Mansilla tells The Race from his native Buenos Aires.

“I just felt so at home in the Formula Ford 1600 car and I ended up winning the world scholarship at the end of ’79.”

That enabled him to enter six RAC FF1600 races but that turned into a full campaign as he dredged in money from “anywhere and everywhere”.

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“I sold my cat, my dog and some fish!” recalls Mansilla.

By 1981, he was “quite ready” for a crack at the title with the factory Van Diemen team. That opportunity came after boss Ralph Firman had been impressed by his commitment when he had equalled 1980 champion Roberto Moreno’s benchmark in a hastily arranged test at Snetterton.

Offered a seat immediately, Mansilla was paired with Marlboro Mexico-backed Alfonso Toledano in a strong looking team. But as January turned to February and the cusp of the season approached, Firman wanted a word about a possible expansion of the team.

“Ralph got me in the office and said if I had anything against a third car being entered for a friend of Chico Serra’s,” says Mansilla.

“He went, ‘Yeah I’ve been recommended this guy da Silva’. I had not heard much about him but Emerson Fittipaldi was telling people he was something special.”

"‘OK, no big deal’ I thought. He’s probably just a bit overhyped. I was wrong!”

Fighting Senna (literally)

That driver turned out to be a 21-year-old karting prodigy called Ayrton Senna da Silva.

A few races into the 1981 season and several intra-South American incidents later, the works Van Diemen squad became ever more fractious.

Mansilla and Senna started to take points off each other and then matters came to a head at Mallory Park at the end of March when Senna was put on the grass on the final lap by the eventual winner Mansilla.

Words were exchanged in the paddock afterwards and Senna grabbed Mansilla by the throat. The pair had to be forcibly separated by several onlookers.

“Once, twice he hit me before in races,” says Mansilla. “The third time I knock him off. That’s when things started to get wrong. That's why at Mallory Park I did it to him the same way he did it to me many times.

“The only difference is that that this time he lost it and he came and grabbed me by the neck. So, we had an issue.”

So did Firman, who felt inclined to split them into different series that ran in FF1600 back then.

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In an intriguing microcosm, Mansilla had experienced peak-Senna before it really existed. Little did he know it at the time but he was a kind of test case for Nigel Mansell, Nelson Piquet and particularly Alain Prost a few years down the line. The great man often dished it out but seldom could he take it. That was always a chink in his armour.

That 1981 season they each won a title apiece. Senna won the Townsend Thoreson championship and Mansilla the P&O Ferries campaign. While the blood pressure was up on the track their relationship thawed somewhat off it.

“Ayrton was very introverted and he wouldn’t come out of himself easily,” Mansilla remembers.

“But our girlfriends [Senna was actually married to Liliane Vasconcelos for a few years] got on and we used to cook for each other, a Brazilian dish one night and an Argentine BBQ the next. We had some fun times as well as the difficult times too.

“But you know, Ayrton had been racing for 10 years longer than me in karts. I didn’t drive a car until I was 19. Big difference.”

In light of that, Mansilla’s 1981 had been an extraordinary success and perhaps it was overlooked, not only because Senna had come with so much fanfare but also a lot more experience.

“Quique was one of those guys that was just a free spirit,” recalls Kirkpatrick.

“He knew he was good and whatever challenge he was given, he faced it and he found the answer, and I'm sure he would have found the answer in F1 too.

“When you think how closely he ran Senna in ‘81 with such a comparative lack of experience, well that just tells you how good he really was.”

But if Mansilla thought Senna might have a bearing on his career, something way beyond his control in the deep South Atlantic was brewing to affect his 1982 ambitions in an unlikely but damaging way.

The Falklands (and taking it to Tommy Byrne)

A move to F3 in 1982 with the Dick Bennetts-led West Surrey Racing squad seemed to be the dream ticket for Mansilla with an immaculately prepared Ralt RT3.

The season got off to an inauspicious start when he was disqualified for overtaking under yellow flags in the opener at Silverstone, but by the next round at Thruxton he was a close third to Tommy Byrne and James Weaver.

Mansilla, starting just his third-ever season of racing, was still ultimately processing wings and slicks, something that he himself acknowledges took him “at least five or six races to fully feel and understand”.

But this positivity, in a very strong F3 field that included Weaver, Martin Brundle and Dave Scott, was about to be checked. Thousands of miles away in the South Atlantic, an island that few had heard of before started to hit global headlines.

On April 2, just two days before the fourth round of the British F3 season at Donington Park, Argentinian forces invaded the British-held territory of the Falkland Islands and occupied the largest town on the islands, Port Stanley.

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While President Leopoldo Galtieri, leader of the ruling Third Junta in Argentina between 1981 and 1982, planned to populate the island, Mansilla was preparing for free practice at Donington.

Like other Argentinian sports stars in the UK at the time, such as the Tottenham Hotspur football team's cultured playmaking duo Ricardo Villa and Osvaldo Ardiles, Mansilla was in a highly awkward position.

“It was a struggle,” sighs Mansilla. “The situation was very complicated with complicated feelings. I had friends in the Falklands and people were dying.

“War like this is crazy. Killing a lot of people and creating misery for nothing. Why? Crazy.”

While Mansilla juggled a host of new emotions, the speed eventually came and with Bennetts he was able to match the turn of pace with consistency in the summer months with four podiums. But his first of four wins that season didn’t come until August when he triumphed at Mallory Park.

By this stage, Byrne had started a largely ill-fated F1 odyssey with a decaying Theodore Racing operation and while he was away, Mansilla strung together a trio of wins at Oulton Park, Snetterton and Silverstone to thrust himself into title reckoning.

Byrne, though, in his Murray Taylor Ralt RT3, scored a crucial win at Silverstone in October. Yet, when Mansilla finished ahead of him in the penultimate round at Brands Hatch (pictured below) the two were tied on 95 points heading to Thruxton for the final race of the season under the full glare of BBC Grandstand cameras.

It started badly for Mansilla when he suffered issues with his Nicholson-McLaren-prepared Toyota engine in practice.

He qualified third behind Byrne and polesitter Brundle for the race, which was held in greasy conditions. It was a tense encounter, which although close never really caught alight as an out-and-out title scrap.

Mansilla burned up his wet tyres on the steadily drying track and it ended as it started, with second place enough for Byrne to take the championship and give himself a chance to impress McLaren with his legendary F1 test at Silverstone a few weeks later.

What many don’t recall is that Mansilla also got a crack at the big time in Niki Lauda’s MP4/1B, as did third in the British F3 Championship, Dave Scott, then sponsored by Marlboro.

While the test went well, Mansilla was aware that everything was coming at him very fast, and in his own words “I was testing a Formula 1 [car], it was too much”.

“So, my way of thinking then was, ‘I'm not supposed to do Formula 1, I was supposed to do testing and maybe one or two races'.”

“I got an offer,” says Mansilla cryptically, although he is talking generally about what was needed for some F1 teams at the time. “It was to do 5000 or 6000 miles of testing and two races.

The offer though was dependent on some budget being found and when Mansilla went back to a post-Falklands War homeland in the winter of 1982-83 “nobody gave a s*** about me anymore”.

“There was no money and I just couldn't do it,” he adds. “But you know, I never had an issue in England.

“I have British friends living in Buenos Aires and they didn't have any issues either. Buenos Aires is like London, very cosmopolitan and most people just recognised the war for what it was: madness.”

While Mansilla dealt with a complex situation while living and working in the UK admirably, the harsh reality was that getting money out of Argentina or any kind of serious backing to make the leap into F2 was nigh on impossible.

Kidnap in Liberia

Diamonds aren’t forever!

After a few races in F2, courtesy of Robin Herd of March, and in CART with Hemelgarn Racing in the mid-1980s, Mansilla acknowledges now that by the latter part of the decade he “wanted to get away from racing for a while” because it was “hurting me mentally and financially at every turn”.

That’s not to say Mansilla was bitter, far from it. There was, and still is, a benign resignation that circumstances beyond his control proved to be insurmountable for career progression. He’s long since been able to digest and understand the poor cards he was dealt.

If his meteoric rise in motorsport was remarkable, intense, and full of jeopardy, then the next phase of his life made all that look like a picnic in the park.

The racing world is familiar with Juan Manuel Fangio’s extraordinary shortlived kidnap in Havana in 1958, but very few know about Mansilla’s own horrendous ordeal in 1990.

Motorsport’s lesser-known kidnap story involves a harrowing ordeal for the then 32-year-old, who had elected to pursue opportunities in the mining industry, initially with a faint idea of perhaps making his fortune and re-engaging with racing.

Initially, the mining work was successful and Mansilla enjoyed his time in Liberia, a country that had abundant mineral reserves, particularly gold, iron ore and diamonds.

But by 1990 with the boom came extreme danger when the country was plunged into a brutal civil war. Incumbent dictator Charles Taylor of the National Patriotic Front (NPF) of Liberia was challenged by splinter organisation the Independent National Patriotic Front, led by Prince Johnson, and full-scale civil war broke out in many territories from the start of 1990.

Mansilla, who had a base in the country via the company that he was involved in, was aware of the dangers but they became all too real in February of 1990 when the hotel Mansilla was staying on the outskirts of the Liberian capital, Monrovia, was stormed by gun-toting operatives of the INPF.

“A bunch of rebels came into the hotel with guns and grenades and took us,” recalls Mansilla. “They thought I was American and I had to shout at them and tell them, ‘no I am Argentinian’.

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“They still wouldn’t believe me and said, ‘We go to your ambassador to do something for you to help stop the war’.

“I said, ‘I don’t have an ambassador here, so am I screwed? Because I really am Argentinian’.”

“Then one guy shouts, ‘Argentinian? Ahhh Maradona! Maradona!’”

“I couldn’t believe it. Here we were in this situation and he is chanting Diego’s name. I had to laugh!”

While the few light-hearted moments sustained Mansilla, 5000 people died in the first months of the war and no resolution looked possible. For Mansilla, that meant a six-month ordeal as a captive of unpredictable soldiers of the INPF.

“It was very tough because we were in this house surrounded by guys pointing [guns] at us,” describes Mansilla.

“But we managed. I mean, amazingly. No one got killed. No one got hurt, no one got sick in all that time.

“They didn't mistreat us. We just sat there doing f*** all.

“We did listen to the radio - the BBC World Service - so we knew what was happening in the outside world but we ran out of batteries pretty quickly. But the grand prix coverage was not so good on that station!”

Eventually, Mansilla and some of the other captives were freed when it became clear to the INPF that their currency was weakening and no deals could be done.

Astonishingly, Mansilla kept working in the country for a time after that and still has some land there (as well as machinery capable of excavating diamonds).

“The country [Liberia] I love and some of the people too,” he says. “I am in contact with children of old friends that have gone now and it is nice but I needed to return to Argentina because my experiences outside of my homeland were obviously a mix of good and bad. But that’s life.”

'My story isn't over'

“You make your own luck, but you have to be lucky as well,” says Kirkpatrick.

“Whenever Quique had the opportunity he made his own luck in terms of whatever he was pursuing.

“He was quick and competitive but just so bloody unlucky that the Falklands war came along at the same time as he was making a name for himself.

“I'm sure Argentina recognised what a talent they had. But nobody dared put him in a decent car in Europe and he was just unable to generate the necessary backing to get the momentum he needed. He was so bloody unlucky and it was by no means fair on him.”

Mansilla concurs, saying that his life has been “quite something really, but I still have a good chunk of it to live too, so my story isn’t over”.

Today, he’s still embedded in motorsport in his homeland where he has run teams, acted as a consultant and organised many aspects of national series. Mansilla also heads up title-winning TCR South America outfit PMO Motorsport.

“I had a lot of fun racing Senna and loads of other quick guys,” concludes Mansilla.

“I have those memories forever, even the bad ones which are a big part of my life. It’s just the way it goes sometimes. You get lucky, you get unlucky.

“You have to accept things and just keep going. We all need to do that, right?”

Max Verstappen has his issues with modern Formula 1. He dislikes what it prioritises, and what it is asking of its drivers. He has no qualms with walking away if it stops giving him what he wants or needs - in fact, he actively advertises his intention to do exactly that.

The three-time world champion can satisfy a generic love for driving anywhere, and, in his mind, the scales will not be tipped in F1's favour for much longer if things go too far down a certain path.

Verstappen hinted that F1 held a finite pleasure for him when he won his first title, was even more explicit after the second, and returns to the theme once more as he digests a record-breaking third title with The Race in the middle of a rapid-fire run of end-of-season media duties, truly his favourite of all F1 activities.

But this time it’s with a bit of a twist. He would not only leave F1 because of the prospect of sprint weekends, boring street tracks, or F1 leaving him feeling like a “clown”, as he did in a Las Vegas Grand Prix week that featured many a Verstappen broadside at what he feels F1 is becoming.

Of the things he disagrees with in F1’s expansive calendar, and the encroaching razzle-dazzle, how much it all takes out of him is not a deal-breaker right now. But as he has hinted at before, it will be one day.

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Fortunately, Verstappen doesn’t fear burnout. Because he will walk before the F1 schedule takes that kind of toll on him.

“It's very simple,” Verstappen says.

“I will always approach it in the same way until the day I tell myself that I cannot do that anymore. And then I stop.

“Because I know that if I do it at a lower intensity, I'm not at 100% of what I can do.

“And if I'm not giving it 100%, then I'm fed up with myself, and I prefer not to drive [than feel like that].”

VERSTAPPEN'S TRUE MOTIVATIONS

Verstappen is on the path of the relentless - the type of driver who will retire with many people still feeling like he has something to offer, rather than the type to overstay his welcome.

He is almost certainly not going to be running around in the midfield to extend his career. Even if he could probably bank a mighty salary on his terms for a long, long time.

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Verstappen's already armed with a lucrative Red Bull deal but there's no need to sully things by talking about finances. He's got simple, sincere motivations for racing - F1 and Red Bull are just letting him satisfy them at the highest level.

“I love the competition,” he says. “I love to beat everyone else. And I like to win races.

“I like that you are constantly testing yourself. You’re constantly learning.

“It's not boring. Never.”

Is that the same as the other driving he does - simracing, for example, or trackdays in GT cars?

“Yeah, it's exactly the same, but in a different way,” he says.

“Different cars, they have different needs to an F1 car. And that's what I like.”

Verstappen stresses the need to “switch off” between races and he seems to have blended his F1 commitments well with his personal life.

But switching off really just means tuning out of F1 for a bit. Cars, real or virtual, are never going to be far away. Because getting behind the wheel is what Max Verstappen does.

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“I'm driving different kinds of cars, and I'm helping the younger generation in the team, with advice, and I like how they are communicating with each other,” he says.

“And I'm just there, sometimes in the background. [Maybe] a bit more relaxed. But we still want to win - the motivation is always there.”

That competitive intensity is the common thread between Verstappen's extracurricular activities and his day job. It’s telling that what Verstappen does for fun is, for the most part, what underpins seasons like his record-breaking 2023 campaign.

“F1 is still fun,” he contends. “But it’s very professional, it’s the highest.

“When I go and drive a GT3 car, it's not as sophisticated. But that's also nice, because it all goes a bit more back to the old-school and it's just a bit different to drive.

“Of course, you don't have like 20 people working on your car, there are not endless possibilities with what you can do on the car, like, 'I want to change this' but sometimes that's not possible.

“It’s a bit simpler. And sometimes it's nice to just go back a step.”

BREAKTHROUGH IN THE DAY JOB

You can see how Verstappen’s two racing worlds complement one another. F1 is many things but could never be described as ‘simple’. And right now, that fits Verstappen perfectly.

He is uncompromisingly competitive and F1 is a perfect fit for a driver of his intensity. You don’t hear many drivers say that they enjoy a grand prix more than qualifying, for example.

“Qualifying is fun sometimes, but I really like the Sunday,” he says.

“Everyone can do a quick lap, but it's more about just race and try to really execute it in the best way possible.”

That is something Verstappen is almost freakishly good at. While his speed is an obvious strength, this season has demonstrated incredible levels of concentration and consistency.

It has not been as easy as it looked at times. The RB19, Verstappen notes, was a slightly more predictable car to set-up than RB18. But early on it was difficult for him to click with: “Initially on the braking, I was always quite afraid it would lock up.

“It was about finding the balance there, and not hurting the rear tyres in the long run. Just getting that combination together. And then every track is also a little bit different in terms of how you want the car.

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“It was just getting all these little details together, but in a different way. Because you can set up the car in a lot of different ways to achieve a certain balance.”

The breakthrough came in Verstappen’s Azerbaijan GP defeat to team-mate Sergio Perez. Once he had unfortunately lost track position due to an ill-timed caution, Verstappen looked nailed on to re-pass Perez - but for the second time in four races (after Saudi Arabia), he actually had no answer when it counted.

He used the final stint in Baku to finesse some tools in the car and in his technique - relating to differential settings, steering inputs and brake use - that got some small but important details “a bit more under control, and just changed the behaviour of everything around it”.

What happened in Baku, and in Jeddah, didn’t happen again. Verstappen was not beaten by Perez once more all season. He won 17 of the remaining 18 races, including 10 in a row, despite a spate of rain-affected weekends with qualifying sessions and races made more awkward time and again.

“In the middle of the season, when we were on that winning streak, maybe it looked a bit easy,” Verstappen says.

“But there were a lot of times that it was very difficult situations in qualifying or the race with rain and making the right calls is very crucial as a team as well. And we never really seemed to trip up.

“That also has been very, very difficult to manage. It would have been easy to throw away a race by making a wrong call. But I think we didn't do that.”

WHERE NEXT - AND WHEN?

More pressure will inevitably lead to more mistakes, but 2023 had a few curveballs and it was very, very rare that Verstappen was caught out. It was unquestionably his best season in F1.

“Every year you want to try and improve a little bit,” he says.

“It's not massive steps. It's impossible in F1. But I do think that it was, again, a little bit better, more consistent, less mistakes.

“That's what I always try to aim for. The rest is the car. You are dependent on how competitive it is.”

There’s no doubting how good Verstappen’s RB19 was. An improvement on the predecessors that had already let him tick off the most important item on his to-do list in 2021 and 2022, it has facilitated incredible things for Verstappen to accomplish. He now has 54 wins, putting him third on the all-time list. At 26, he is already one of the best and most successful drivers in history. A three-time world champion, he must be the favourite for a fourth in 2024.

None of that would be possible were Verstappen not uncompromisingly competitive. The better you understand the intensity that drives his success, the better you understand how important it is for Verstappen that this intensity is sustained.

It is very clearly augmented by a deep joy for driving, too. And there will come a point when F1 does not satisfy Verstappen in that way. That is when he will weigh up the other things he wants to direct his energy to, while he can still be competitive and, in his words, give it 100%.

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This is ultimately why Verstappen has such a simplistic view about calling time on his F1 career, regardless of what the exact trigger might be. The question is not if Verstappen will stop racing in F1 and drive somewhere else, but when and where?

One idea: his eponymous simracing team is moving into the real world, initially the GT arena. Sportscar racing massively appeals to Verstappen, who has repeatedly talked up the World Endurance Championship's Hypercar boom and made his desire to compete in the Le Mans 24 Hours one day clear.

By the time he wants to call it quits in F1, The Race suggests, maybe his own team will be at Le Mans, waiting for him.

“Who knows? It would be nice,” Verstappen says.

“I have a lot more going on, or planned, outside of Formula 1. I'm also looking forward to the future.”

As The Race reflects on the 2023 motorsport season - one that featured a record-equalling Formula 1 schedule, no fewer than 39 MotoGP races, and no shortage of on- and off-track drama in IndyCar and Formula E - we’ve asked our writers to recount their standout motorsport memory or feeling from the past 12 months.

Our Formula E correspondent Sam Smith picks the moment the biggest on-track and off-track stories of the year intersected in Rome.

The Formula E silly season was nothing short of sensational in 2023, even compared to a 2022 off-season that seemed busy - only Jaguar Racing had stuck with its two incumbent drivers that year.

But this past season tested managers, lawyers, drivers, team principals and, yes, writers, to the very maximum in terms of how the market chopped and changed.

The standout move, one which The Race described as a ‘blockbuster’ one, was Jaguar’s signing of Nick Cassidy.

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Tracking this move reads like a long forgotten John Le Carre novel and one that ultimately came to fruition sometime in mid-to-late June. But it's not done until it's done, so I had to hold off writing it until it was 100% nailed.

That seemed to come in the first days of July just before the Rome E-Prix. You don’t go all in with these things until you are certain and I wasn’t until that point.

The final 1% confirmation came via two clandestine meetings in a sweltering central Rome. One was in the back of a Gelato shop a mile away from the circuit on the Wednesday before the race. The other was behind a concrete wall just adjacent to the pits on Thursday morning.

Breaking these stories will always annoy someone and unfortunately on this occasion it was Sam Bird, the driver Cassidy would replace.

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He made his annoyance crystal clear to me, as did some of his management team, which was absolutely their right. You try to do these things as ethically as possible but there is always a likelihood someone will take it badly. The Bird camp certainly did.

It was a tumultuous weekend for him. As we've seen before, he performed excellently on pure pace but made a key error in the first race. It was a small one with huge consequences as it triggered a big accident from which those involved fortunately emerged unscathed.

Around 24 hours later, with a brand new car, Bird took third place - perhaps one of the performances of the season put in the context of what had happened the day before.

For Cassidy, too, there was a contrast of emotions. On one hand, he knew his future was secured with a major manufacturer and he knew going into the weekend he had a genuine crack at the title after winning three of the previous five races.

But he too took a turn on the rollercoaster when his future team-mate and good friend Mitch Evans unintentionally drop-kicked him out of the race and, to all intents and purposes, both of them out of realistic title reckoning.

Bird and Cassidy left Rome after starring in their own Biblical epic. Those of us just writing about it barely drew breath either amid events that tested everyone to the absolute maximum.

In a year of motorsport documentaries headlined by the retelling of Jenson Button's fairytale 2009 Formula 1 title on Disney+, we've already highlighted another lower-profile F1 documentary well worth watching: the bizarrely brilliant tale of Andrea Moda.

But Sam Smith has another suggestion: the story of a driver whose extremely promising start to his Formula 1 career was dramatically undone by an accident that would mean he'd never race in F1 again.

Even to those who know Martin Donnelly’s story well, its brutal conclusion never fails to shock - not least in a brand-new F1 TV documentary.

The horrific accident that befell him at Jerez in 1990 was, on one hand, the most dreadful way possible to end a very promising F1 career but, on the other, it was an absolute miracle that he survived at all.

A new appreciation of one of the late-1980s' most promising young British drivers is available to watch on F1 TV and has been executively produced by ex-racer Simon Harrison, who has since become the co-founder and managing director of Kingdom Creative.

Harrison and his team capture a good proportion of the momentum that Donnelly had earned for himself by 1990, a year in which he occasionally impressed with an unwieldy Lotus Lamborghini as team-mate to the far more experienced Derek Warwick.

Up until that point, Donnelly had gone from teenage Formula Ford firebrand sponsored by Potato Farms to a hot property on the international scene.

But the backdrop to Donnelly’s story, growing up in a divided, conflict-torn Northern Ireland, is an important part of the narrative because Donnelly clearly to some degree pursued his love of racing to escape the unpleasantness in his country of birth.

The documentary features a scene where he goes back to one of the so-called Belfast peace walls - barriers that separated broadly republican and loyalist neighbourhoods - and is plainly staggered that they still exist.

Like many of his era, Donnelly appears genuinely baffled by the conflict and the utter waste of human life that it unleashed upon his and his country's communities.

By 1988, he was winning on his F3000 debut at Brands Hatch and signing a test driving deal with Lotus. One year later he deputised for Warwick at Arrows to make his F1 debut at the French Grand Prix, qualifying mid-grid and ahead of team-mate Eddie Cheever, effectively announcing himself to the F1 world and putting his name in the shop window.

He dovetailed that F1 cameo with a second year in International Formula 3000 as team-mate to Jean Alesi at Eddie Jordan Racing. He should have challenged the French-Sicilian force of nature for the title but had a win early in the season at Vallelunga chalked off for a controversial nosebox infringement, eventually ending the season in eighth - albeit with another victory at Brands Hatch.

But a deal to race for Lotus in 1990 seemed to be the dream ticket and when that was renewed just before the ill-fated weekend at Jerez it meant Donnelly would've driven alongside future F1 champion Mika Hakkinen in 1991 and 1992.

“When you live your life on the edge, that’s when you feel most alive,” attests Donnelly at the start of the film. Those are words spoken by a man who knows all about them.

During free practice for the Spanish Grand Prix, Donnelly’s Lotus suffered a huge impact and, in his own words, “everything went dark”.

In a sense, that was a blessing because the sight of his body on the race track is something few who have seen it will ever forget. Only for the quick reactions of doctors at the scene, led by Professor Sid Watkins, did Donnelly survive.

Donnelly retraces the accident by visiting the exact spot where his life changed forever.

Staring at the ground, he then looks to the camera and says matter-of-factly, “technically this is where I died”.

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Except he didn’t. Survival is one thing but recuperation is quite another, and a gruelling couple of years of fighting to try to get back to the cockpit meant more dark days than light.

But Donnelly never gave up, somehow returning to the track in a specially arranged test by Eddie Jordan in 1993 to finally sign off on his F1 dream.

Letting that go was every part as excruciating as his recovery, and this comes across in the 20-minute film when Donnelly admits he became uncontrollably upset when a surgeon told him he would never drive in F1 competitively again.

But there is a happy ending, as Donnelly did drive a 1990 Lotus once more at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Footage of him blatting the V12 car up the hill is an uplifting way for the film to fade out.

If there is one minor criticism of the film, it's that, Donnelly aside, there are no other viewpoints or memories. Eddie Jordan, Damon Hill, Jean Alesi or Derek Warwick would have been great additions. But perhaps, actually, Donnelly’s central voice to his own story makes this film what it is - an intense, bittersweet journey of a driver who was dealt an unbelievably harsh hand in life just as he was reaching his zenith.

On the whole, this is an excellent appreciation of Donnelly, who comes across as exactly as you would imagine if you know anything about the man. He’s matter of fact, unwavering in his outlook that he has a second chance at life, and completely without any pretence.

That he survived at all was miraculous, but that he went on to taste success as a team owner, a driver steward for the FIA, and also as husband and father, is simply a triumph of the human spirit in extreme adversity.

Martin Donnelly - Life on the Edge can be viewed on F1 TV.

There’s never been a better time to own a Formula 1 team, but as the good times roll in Haas is in danger of missing out thanks to underinvestment that risks making it forever the poor relation on the grid.

It’s time for owner Gene Haas either to put up, by maximising the allowed investment in the team, or get out by selling on to someone who will.

There is, of course, a middle way whereby a minority stake can be sold to raise funds for the necessary spending.

Alpine, for example, sold 24% of its F1 team to an investment group but retains control.

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But the point is that Haas has a fantastic opportunity and risks squandering it.

It’s easy to criticise Haas given its poor on-track performance in 2023, but that’s not the main symptom of the problem.

Instead, you have to ask whether a team that did a remarkable job to establish itself in F1 during far more difficult financial times, and survived its brush with oblivion during the COVID-19 pandemic, is wasting the opportunity F1’s recent growth presents.

HOW MUCH IS HAAS ACTUALLY WORTH?

Haas F1 is still worth big money thanks to being only one of 10 F1 teams.

Earlier this year, Forbes estimated the value of the team at $780million and as there is no lack of aspiring investors searching for opportunities to buy into teams, or even acquire them outright, there’s no reason why that value couldn’t be realised.

For sufficiently motivated buyers, and there’s a few of those around, it could even be higher.

But it’s not just F1’s popularity that’s driving the talk of multi-billion-dollar teams.

The prevailing financial conditions, notably the cost cap, set at a baseline of $135m per season, and the more equitable distribution of the slice of F1’s revenue shared by the teams means the economic foundations are better than they have been for decades - perhaps ever given the potential rewards on offer.

 The conditions are therefore perfect for Haas.

When it joined the grid in 2016, spending was unlimited - meaning that even hefty investment could represent only a drop in the ocean.

Therefore, you could pour hundreds of millions into your team year after year and see little or no yield in terms of either competitiveness or value.

Owner Gene Haas publicly questioned whether it was worth continuing given the struggle to get sponsors, suggesting that after five years competing it might be time to stop.

That was before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, with the financial impact meaning that Haas’s future looked bleak.

But having weathered that storm thanks to team principal Guenther Steiner’s strategy of minimising investment in on-track performance in the rest of 2020 and 2021, along with taking on drivers who brought money - notably Nikita Mazepin and his Uralkali money - Haas survived.

The new, more favourable, Concorde Agreement was signed and a team that could realistically have been closed down made it to F1’s brave new financial world.

What’s more, the team was in a better position technically with the establishment of a design office in Maranello under technical director Simone Resta.

It retains a technical partnership with Ferrari, which provides all the components that are permitted under the regulations, and continues to be allied with Italian chassis manufacturer Dallara, but today Haas is more of a ‘complete’ F1 team than it has ever been.

Now, Haas must build on that and the full funding does not appear to be there to do so.

HOW RIVALS ARE LEAVING HAAS BEHIND ON SPENDING

To maximise the performance potential of an F1 team, it’s necessary not just to be at the limit of cost cap spending, and Haas was close this year, but also the permitted capital expenditure.

That allowance was recently increased by a further $20m, which can be invested in infrastructure and key tools.

Haas’s direct rivals are spending big.

AlphaTauri is upgrading its facilities by moving some of its operation to Red Bull’s Milton Keynes campus, Sauber is benefitting from Audi money and Williams is gradually growing under sustained spending from Dorilton Capital.

Haas needs to keep pace or risk falling behind. Despite landing some lucrative partners, such as title sponsor MoneyGram and new arrival Play’n Go, Haas is unlikely to have the capital to match them all.

Finishing last in the constructors’ championship when it was in the mix to finish as high as seventh, which represents a difference of approximately $30m given there’s around $10m difference per position in prize money, is also a big blow.

Given Haas was eighth in 2022, that means one income source is slashed by about $20m.

There is unlikely to be a top up to compensate for that, so it’s going to be dependent on bringing in more money to get close to the investment level needed do more than tread water.

DOES THE HAAS TEAM DESERVE EXTRA FUNDING?

“We just need to make it up,” Steiner tells The Race when asked about the financial impact of finishing last.

“We found more partners. We announced Play’n Go, in Las Vegas, they are big partners and they help making up the losses.

“But in the end we need to see where we find the additional financing.”

However, Steiner also defends the team’s position on the basis that it’s all well and good throwing cash in but it depends on investing it properly.

“I look back to the old days, when people said money makes you the best team, it didn’t because some people spent a lot of money and didn’t win anything, so you need to be careful,” says Steiner.

“It needs to be not expenditure, but investment. That’s the key word here. What do you invest to get better?

“It’s not that you get a return tomorrow, it takes time. A lot of people speak about investment and it’s a lot of propaganda, it’s about whether the investment works out.”

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That’s true, but you cannot always count on rivals squandering investment. Haas needs to keep pace if it’s to have the chance to be more than a perennial back-of-the-grid operation.

You could argue that Gene Haas would be within his rights to cite the team’s current underachievement as evidence that the investment level is not the problem.

He’d be right insofar as its 2023 struggles aren’t a direct result of that given there’s no question it had the resources to do significantly better.

However, that would neglect the big picture.

HOW HAAS SQUANDERED ITS 2023 POTENTIAL

The 2023 Haas was brisk over a lap but ate its tyres in race stints, meaning points were rare.

That was the consequence of some flat-footed technical decision-making and the failure to change the aerodynamic design direction until months of stagnation in finding performance in the windtunnel.

That new direction yielded a hastily designed change in aerodynamic concept introduced late in the season that wasn’t an instant hit, but that the team hopes will have accelerated its learning curve to feed knowledge into the 2024 car.

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“We got hit pretty badly with not making progress in development,” says Steiner. “We put all the effort in, there was no limitation on effort, and we had the budget to do upgrades.

"Everybody thinks we don't do upgrades because we don't have the money but we didn't find any performance, that was the biggest thing.

“And the other thing was that when we realised, it was a little bit late and we should have to caught that earlier.

"We just need to get better in the windtunnel, otherwise the team is not too bad. It could always be better, but it’s just that we didn’t find anything.”

WHAT DOES THE IDEAL FUTURE LOOK LIKE FOR HAAS?

There’s no immediate intention to strike out on its own rather than relying on Ferrari for the majority of its car, which is a sensible strategy that allows Haas to focus on making improvements with its production of the listed team parts that make the big difference in terms of performance.

And there’s no doubt whatsoever that the problems in 2023 were aerodynamic, not mechanical.

However, there’s still plenty that can be done within the current business model.

And that’s what Gene Haas should be investing in so that the team not only maximises its performance under its current constraints, but can be in a position to grow long term along with its rival teams.

“At the moment, the best way for us is to keep the same business model because if you change it you need to do it slowly,” says Steiner.

“The difficulty we have is that if we try to take on more work, it wouldn’t go well because you normally take a step back before you go two forward if you completely change.

“In the short term, we stay with the same business model.

“There are pros and cons to this model. For example, we don’t have a 60% windtunnel and investing $50m to build a windtunnel in 2023 is a difficult task because windtunnels will be around, but not forever.

"And Gene already has a windtunnel, Windshear, but that’s a 100% one and asking him to buy another windtunnel is a stiff demand.

"The Ferrari windtunnel is good, so we have a known quantity and why change that?

"It’s more important for us to look over the parts we make, the aero. The problem is not the business model.

“We need to exploit the potential of the business model we have at the moment, which we are not because we are last in the championship.

"There is more in it than that. Can you win a world championship with our business model? I don’t think so, but can you be fifth? Yes, because we did it before.”

Next season should be better for Haas and there’s no reason why it can’t finish higher in the championship.

That’s the current short-term goal, to make the most of the aerodynamic capacity it has got.

But hand-in-hand with that must go the evolution of the team, and that’s going to require maximising the investment.

One visually obvious example of where it falls behind is its motorhome in the paddock, which it has used since 2016.

While that might not seem relevant to the performance of the car, when you are trying to bring in partners and you have comfortably the smallest facility in the paddock it makes a visual statement.

These are the areas where money could be spent for positive effect and it would probably only require an extra $50-100m over the coming years to ensure the growth rate is maximised.

What’s frustrating to those who have followed the Haas story for the past decade is that it has achieved so much and has survived against the odds, yet risks not taking the final step to ensure not just to maximise its value, but also its performance potential.

Ultimately, it’s Gene Haas’s choice given he’s the owner of the team, but it seems perverse to go through all that and invest so much then neither pump in what is relatively speaking a small sum to go the final mile, nor sell up to let someone else do it.

As The Race reflects on the 2023 motorsport season - one that featured a record-equalling Formula 1 schedule, no fewer than 39 MotoGP races, and no shortage of on- and off-track drama in IndyCar and Formula E - we’ve asked our writers to recount their standout motorsport memory or feeling from the past 12 months.

Much like a couple of drivers in the 2023 F1 field, Ben Anderson had spent some time away from the paddock - so it's not hard to see why getting stuck back in was our Group F1 Editor’s pick (even if there was a hiccup along the way).

Representing The Race at the Qatar Grand Prix was easily my standout moment of 2023.

Our standout 2023 moments

• Jack Benyon: A poignant IndyCar trip to Nashville

I hadn't attended a grand prix since Japan 2019, when a typhoon threatened to wipe us off the face of the Earth, and hadn't visited the F1 paddock since pre-season testing in 2020 - just before Covid changed everything for a good long while.

Things didn't get off to a brilliant start. When I arrived at the FIA's accreditation centre to collect my pass, it turned out they'd printed one for Gary Anderson rather than me!

But once we finally straightened things out and I gained access to the F1 paddock for the first time in four years, I thoroughly enjoyed being back in the thick of covering F1 on the ground: catching up with familiar faces, meeting some new ones - and also dealing with what turned out to be an unexpectedly dramatic weekend amid Max Verstappen putting the world championship beyond any shadow of a doubt.

It felt like a homecoming of sorts, and great to be back after far too long away.

It is a testament to the particular beauty of professional sports - this absurd, almost anti-natural multi-faceted field of human activity we allow ourselves to feel so many things about and feel them so strongly - that almost any ending is a storybook ending if you look closely enough.

This year's Valencian Grand Prix was not supposed to mark the end of Pol Espargaro's full-time MotoGP career - not when he rejoined the KTM camp on a two-year deal after a failed Honda dalliance, not when he reunited with the Tech3 team that gave him his premier-class start, not when he donned Gas Gas red for the first time.

And yet, as of this time of writing, it sure looks like a 14th-place finish at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo has drawn a line under a 17-year stint in grand prix racing. Yes, Espargaro should line up on the grid again, and nobody has quite ruled out a full-schedule return in the future - but it feels fanciful for a rider who will turn 33 next year, juxtaposed against an ever-more youthful premier class roster.

"It's the start of the finish. It's the beginning of the end," said Espargaro after the flag in Valencia, sounding very much not like somebody who is very confident of getting a full-time gig again down the line.

"I feel that one chapter is closing today in my life. And, it's okay that I will race but it's going to be something very different."

But if this 14th place, coming home two laps down on a crashed bike after buckling under pressure from Fabio Quartararo, is indeed "the beginning of the end", there's a poetic symmetry of sorts to it.

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Espargaro's trademark MotoGP ride, after all, was also one where he crashed and got back up again. And it was also Valencia - 2018, the rain-hit and restarted race, in which a post-crash third place was not just KTM's first podium in MotoGP but also Espargaro's. Seven more followed, some of them on objectively more impressive weekends, but none as magical.

When KTM wins its first MotoGP title - and that day is coming, sooner or later - that ride is bound to be part of the montage. And the rider behind it will likely feature in it extensively, having played such an important role in the project's formative years and having established a KTM legacy that, in 2023, he was hoping to shore up and add to.

A CAMPAIGN DERAILED

Just how good Espargaro's 2023 was actually going to be, particularly in comparison with an increasingly-established Brad Binder who was already giving him trouble as his works KTM team-mate three years prior, is a valid question to ask. But obviously it should've been much more fruitful than this.

"The lost son was back" was how Tech3 boss Herve Poncharal described Espargaro's return into the KTM fold in a post-season interview with The Race.

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"Really, really happy, so full of energy, so full of everything, telling everyone 'I want to be the captain, I want to be Gas Gas captain'. And he was feeling that he was finally in the right place at the right moment, he was having the level, with the experience, not doing the mistakes he was doing before.

"And clearly inside the Pierer Mobility [Group] there was an even treatment, the same treatment for Jack [Miller], Brad and Pol. They were the three top guys. And Pol was quite sure that he was going to be at the level of Jack and Brad, fighting with them, and eventually be the one.

"Clearly [inside the team] there was the boss, the captain, and the rookie [Augusto Fernandez] that was going to learn from the top guy - but not be in the spotlight, be working quiet, in his environment... unfortunately happened what happened in Portimao, which was a real disaster.

"I don't want to comment any more, but that was very scary because it was a very, very bad accident. And Pol has been injured in every department, physically but also mentally."

There's no use relitigating the exact mechanics of the crash - and the specific role of the new format and the particularities of the Portuguese tracks - other than saying Espargaro got a rough deal. Likewise, there is no use revisiting the litany of injuries - jaw, spine, you name it - other than to say Espargaro got a rough deal, but was also fortunate to escape with his life.

THE COMEBACK TOUR

"Honestly a lot of us inside the team and inside Pierer Mobility were having doubts about the possibility for him to come back, also when we saw the spine, we were talking to the doctors, it was not easy, he wanted to come [back to riding] but... you remember how many times it was postponed?" recalled Poncharal.

"The doctors said 'oof, in case something happens...'. Anyway, he managed to come back, and although he did his best result the second race he came back, in Spielberg [in the sprint], it was not easy."

Espargaro scored four points in that Red Bull Ring sprint - but he averaged a pretty shocking 0.7 points per weekend, not even per start much less per sprint, the rest of the way.

There were some flashes of speed but never enough to come together for anything even resembling a complete weekend - and while that could also accurately describe some other phases of Espargaro's career, here it was stark and it seemed obvious to everyone involved that he was just never fit.

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"With all respect for Pol, you can see that he still hasn't recovered completely," said Poncharal.

"I think both mentally and physically. More physically, clearly.

"In Qatar he was having back pain. But that was not related to his problem, that was muscle, because he is still a bit weak on the left side and then he's using some other muscles too much... and of course he wants to show, and he's in a situation now where he cannot be matching, for example, Brad.

"But he wants to. Because he thinks he can. And then you are [pushing] too much."

"He definitely needs now a full winter to work on his body," KTM and Gas Gas motorsport boss Pit Beirer told The Race.

"That's also why, the decision for him [to step aside], you guys followed it, for sure was not easy, but somehow still also took some pressure off his shoulders. Because he's not 100 percent there."

"For sure I need time," Espargaro himself acknowledged.

"I thought that I would recover the muscles, that I still have not recovered, much faster. But still there are some muscles that, doctors told me, they could take three months or one year and a half. You never know when the nerves recover at 100 percent.

"But it's obvious there are muscles that still I have like 40 percent of power. These don't disturb me so, so much riding the bike - but as soon as it's a long race distance, after the sprint race, my body gives up, collapses, especially in the left corners. And I really feel, after 10-12-13 laps, I start to feel this. It's a big problem.

"For sure I need some time this winter."

ODD ONE OUT

In the meantime, KTM/Gas Gas found themselves in a pickle. Rookie Fernandez was riding too well to be discarded, also because the optics would've been truly rancid given KTM had already dropped two rookies the year before. Pedro Acosta was doing too well in Moto2 to hang around. And MotoGP promoter Dorna just would not budge on allowing a new premier-class team to enter and run a couple more KTM RC16s.

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A popular perception was that Espargaro would just step aside and solve the problem, but Espargaro himself made it repeatedly clear he had little interest in doing so. Yet that was the eventual outcome in the end.

KTM higher-ups have been keen on projecting this as a mutual decision, which, contractually, it had to be. But some decisions are more mutual then others.

"It was difficult to swallow for him, but which after a while he understood," said Poncharal of Espargaro. "He understood well.

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"Even after Qatar he told me 'f***, I can do a lap, but for the race distance I'm not physically- I cannot do it yet'. Maybe '25 he will be [able to], I don't know. So now he understands."

"Pol helped us to basically fix our huge problem" was how Beirer framed it.

Ultimately though, Espargaro himself never went on record to suggest he was being moved aside against his wishes, or that his ties with the brand(s) had been undermined, and every indication is that he is being taken care of financially.

And, even though the off-season will have obviously helped Espargaro, you can also understand why KTM would prioritise building around Acosta and Fernandez rather than waiting to see whether it would get the Espargaro it signed back - even if ideally (and contractually) it would've gladly paid up to satisfy both requirements.

FOR THE BEST?

Poncharal added: "Also he understands he's got two beautiful daughters, a beautiful wife. He has a good place now in Andorra. The life is good.

"This is something that he's done - but clearly the Tech3 Gas Gas MotoGP development was a lot relying on him for results."

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Espargaro's Portimao crash was obviously horrifying regardless of his family status - losing him, or seeing him end up with injuries that would've torpedoed his quality of life longer-term, would've been no less a tragedy if he were a committed bachelor.

But when you think of the toll 2023 took not just on Espargaro but on his wife Carlota, even if it doesn't necessarily translate to a higher risk of re-injury or what have you relative to his MotoGP peers (whose health is equally valuable), there's something perhaps irrational that makes it feel like it's the right time for him to largely step aside.

Yes, the 32-year-old Espargaro will almost certainly retire winless. But a tie for 14th-most MotoGP starts all-time with Kenny Roberts Jr. (Espargaro will break that tie with his first wildcard, albeit will also be overtaken by the likes of Maverick Vinales and Jack Miller soon enough), eight podiums, three poles, nearly 900 points, some really good seasons and a Moto2 title - that's a good career, a proud career.

Right now, Espargaro is in the middle of what he planned to be quite an intense, fitness-oriented winter. If he's back to his best physically for his wildcards - of which KTM will now be allowed six next year, although surely you'd also want at least one or two to go to Dani Pedrosa - then 2025 hasn't really been taken off the table.

"If he's back to the form where he was and where he wanted him and where he was our planned captain of the Gas Gas project, we will talk about it," said Beirer.

"But of course now it's a lot of if and when and maybe, because we don't have a third team! If we have a third team, for sure he's in the game to be one of the main riders."

For a variety of reasons, it sounds like a long shot, and reading between the lines Espargaro sounds okay with slowly but surely pivoting to perhaps an off-track role in the project - ambassadorial or whichever form it will take.

Don't forget, after all, that he rebuffed a Honda approach to potentially return to its camp for 2024 as a full-time rider.

"At the moment I'm pleased where I am," he said.

You really want to believe that. Especially if you suspect - and I do - that a 2025 return is probably a long shot.

Espargaro the tester, Espargaro the ambassador - and maybe one day Espargaro the manager? - are all roles that seem a good way for the capable, affable Spaniard to remain in the MotoGP orbit.

Maybe there was more to achieve on track. He was, after all, one final-corner melee away from being a grand prix winner in 2020. And if 2023 was the swan song, it was not befitting of his talents.

But if it truly is a happy ending, then none of that really matters.

Fernando Alonso enjoyed one of the strongest seasons of his long Formula 1 career in 2023 - one he now ranks alongside 2012 as his personal best - and can pick out many highlights from the eight podium finishes he amassed. 

But there’s another race, to an unremarkable finish, that he feels belongs in his highlight reel.

Alonso places Bahrain, where he overtook Lewis Hamilton around his outside, Monaco, where only over-cautious strategy denied him a victory, Canada, where he held off Hamilton’s Mercedes for second, and Brazil, where Alonso somehow held off Sergio Perez’s faster Red Bull to finish third, in “my top four, top five of the year”, but to those he adds Monza - where he finished ninth, 46 seconds off the win. 

“I put Monza on purpose because it was a ninth place,” Alonso said. “And it was not a podium, it was nothing that people will remember.

“But probably we had the slowest car in Monza, or the second slowest, and to be in the points, it was one of those weekends that everything was very good.”

DOES ALONSO’S MONZA CLAIM STACK UP?

For Alonso to declare his Aston the slowest, or second slowest, car at Monza is veering into the sort of hyperbole that is characteristic of Alonso when he is bigging himself up to the media. 

Alonso was comfortably inside the top 10 during every practice and qualifying session of the 2023 Italian Grand Prix, and even if you largely credit this to Alonso’s virtuosity it’s difficult to argue the Aston was definitively a slower car at that event than the Haas, the Alpine or the Alfa Romeo.

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Although Lance Stroll was slowest of all in Q1, he had the excuse of missing virtually all of Friday practice. 

Valtteri Bottas and Nico Hulkenberg barely escaped Q1, and in Q2 were miles off Alonso’s pace.

The Alpines were so slow that weekend the team was mobilised into developing an aggressive low-drag upgrade solution in time for Las Vegas.

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The Aston was known to be one of the draggier of 2023’s F1 cars too, but by this stage of the season, although some unfortunate instabilities had been introduced, the car was improving slightly in terms of its high-speed performance.

Both AlphaTauri drivers felt they underperformed slightly in Q3 at Monza, and Alonso split the McLaren drivers - also suffering with a draggy aero package here.

The Red Bulls, Ferraris, Mercedes and the Williams (in Alex Albon’s hands) were unquestionably quicker than the Aston.

So, being generous to Alonso, he had probably the sixth best car at worst for Monza - meaning a ninth place was about the best he could hope for, given Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes filled the top six positions, Albon was seventh and McLaren’s Lando Norris was eighth.

Had Lewis Hamilton not driven into Oscar Piastri, that ninth place would probably have been 10th.

So, ninth for Alonso here was either a marginal over-achievement, given Yuki Tsunoda’s potentially quicker AlphaTauri broke down on the formation lap, or absolutely par for the course if you consider the Aston to have been marginally faster than the AlphaTauri around Monza.

IF NOT MONZA, WHICH WERE ALONSO’S BEST RACES?

Edd Straw ranked Alonso 9th of F1’s 20 drivers for his performance at Monza, saying Alonso “squeezed up against what appeared to be the ceiling of what he called a difficult car”.

But Bottas - who finished one placed behind Alonso in 10th - was ranked inside the top six, having driven an objectively worse car into the top 10, with a bit of help from others having messy races.

Certainly there were other grands prix in 2023 where Alonso was ranked better than ninth. 

But he was especially grumpy about Aston’s performance at Monza, and even said after the race that he would remember this weekend because of how difficult it was. In that, at least, he has remained consistent in what he says.

Perhaps the stark contrast with Canada - another high-speed, low-drag circuit punctuated by chicanes - is what made Monza stand out so much in Alonso’s mind.

Canada is the race Scott Mitchell-Malm would pick for Alonso’s best of 2023, saying: “Boring as it is to pick one of Alonso's joint-best results of 2023, it's hard not to. 

“Canada stands out because it was an all-round strong performance, both in qualifying in awkward conditions and in the race when he had to re-pass Hamilton. 

“To finish so close to Verstappen [within 10s] was one thing, but to hammer team-mate Stroll by nearly a minute showed this was not all about the car.”

Mark Hughes opted for one of the other two races where Alonso finished second to Verstappen.

“Don't know if it was his best, but Zandvoort was my favourite,” Hughes said. 

“His awesome off-line passes on the first lap were the foundation of a result which flattered the car - and even the way he stalked Verstappen on the restart was so smart.”

HOW GOOD WAS ALONSO’S SEASON OVERALL?

Certainly this has to rank among Alonso’s best seasons in Formula 1. 

To finish fourth in the drivers’ championship, ahead of both Ferrari drivers, Lando Norris and George Russell, was a fine achievement in a car that started the season as clearly the second best but was also very clearly out-developed by Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren.

The Race rated Alonso F1’s second best driver of 2023, behind Verstappen, while Alonso himself rates this season as on par with his 2012 title near-miss for Ferrari against Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull - a campaign he now considers alongside 2023 as the equal best of his long career.

“I’m happy. And with the personal personal performance, I think, together with 2012 [this] is the best season for me,” Alonso said. 

“Personally, I rate [2023] the best season in my my driving, and I was happy with with everything - I was motivated, I was fit, I was performing, in difficult conditions sometimes. 

“Bahrain, Monaco, Canada, Monza, and Brazil will be my top four, top five of the year.”

Alonso was asked specifically about Zandvoort, where he finished second to Verstappen in the wet, but Alonso declared the car “very good there” so refrained from adding that one to his personal list of favourites.

He did, however, agree “100%” with the suggestion his own motivation had increased thanks to Aston Martin’s uptick in performance.

“Always motivation comes with results,” Alonso added. “You cannot hide this fact.

“Even if you are very motivated, even if you are very determined to achieve things, if the results are not coming in a medium [to] long term, this is impossible to keep up always.

“So, to be competitive, to feel the speed again, and to arrive to the weekends knowing that you need to do everything perfect, because there is a possibility we win a race, that obviously gives you a very different approach and a very different love for the things you do.”

Formula 1's traditional launch season is again set to take place in February, when the teams will unveil their challengers ahead of the February 21-23 pre-season test and the March 2 season opener - both in Bahrain.

It will be the each of the 10 teams' third car under the current regulations cycle, which runs until the end of 2025.

This page will be updated as teams make their launch plans public.

Red Bull

TBC

Mercedes

TBC

Ferrari

February 13

The Scuderia will showcase its new car one day earlier than it had in 2023 - but hasn't yet specified the details of its launch.

Its 2023 car, the SF-23, made its public debut with a launch that was twinned with a live shakedown at Ferrari's test track Fiorano.

McLaren

TBC

Aston Martin

TBC

Alpine

TBC

Williams

February 5

Williams will hold a 'season launch' for 2024 on February 5.

The team is hoping to build on the progress it made in 2023 where it finished seventh, one year on from finishing 10th and last in the constructors' championship.

Second Red Bull team (name TBC)

TBC

Sauber

February 5

Sauber will debut its new identity during its 2024 car launch on February 5 ahead of its penultimate season before it becomes Audi's works team in 2026.

Haas

TBC

As The Race reflects on the 2023 motorsport season - one that featured a record-equalling Formula 1 schedule, no fewer than 39 MotoGP races, and no shortage of on- and off-track drama in IndyCar and Formula E - we’ve asked our writers to recount their standout motorsport memories or feelings from the past 12 months.

To kick off our countdown to the New Year, we're starting that celebration with a poignant entry from our American Editor Jack Benyon.

Get ready for an emotional journey. This story contains a tale of tragic loss, but also what I hope is a really happy ending!

Just over two years ago now, my brother, Ben, passed away from a heart attack before he'd even reached his 40th birthday. It was a horrendous time. I'll be forever grateful to my colleagues at The Race for their help then, and ever since.

On the first anniversary of his birthday since his passing, I was able to combine a perfectly timed trip to the Road America IndyCar race with a visit to Lambeau Field, the stadium of Ben's favourite NFL team, the Green Bay Packers. It was a wonderful way to mark the occasion.

For the second anniversary, I wasn't in a fantastic place mentally and didn't really know what to do. I'd always wanted to go to the Nashville IndyCar race the anniversary coincided with, and didn't want to miss it and then potentially spiral further.

I made the commitment to go, even though it felt in some way like I was not doing Ben's memory justice by not doing something about him to mark the occasion - as I don't think it would be a stretch to say he hated racing. Especially as it would have been his 40th birthday.

However, at Nashville, in the most unlikely place in the world, I encountered a fan named George wearing a Newcastle United football shirt. That was Ben's team, and I explained to George the sheer coincidence of seeing that shirt, thousands of miles away from Newcastle, on Ben's birthday, just over two years after he'd gone. What are the chances? Unbelievable.

Anyway, I'm quite averse to sharing my brother's story online as it sometimes feels like social media can be a superficial competition of who can grieve the first and/or loudest, but I share it now because I have taken a big lesson from this Nashville experience which I hope inspires you, too.

That is: get to a race track!

There's so many reasons not to go to a circuit these days, whether it's cost, the fact that so much information is available to you at home, and TV coverage is generally so great now.

But there's still so much to love about being trackside.

The track and event at Nashville was absolutely spectacular, easily one of the all-around best racing events I've been to.

I almost didn't go, and it would have been fine not to, but I was reminded of how great getting to a track can be and rewarded for my choice.

I know the cost of living generally is so high at the moment, so my Christmas wish to you all is to celebrate with the family you have, and that Father Christmas brings you some tickets to a fine racing institution - preferably Oulton Park, but I'm biased - for 2024.

The 2023 MotoGP season had at least three realistic title contenders, 10 race winners if you count sprints, eight polesitters (three of whom weren't even race winners), and 15 grand prix podium finishers.

So picking and ranking the top 10 riders was not an easy task when Simon Patterson, Valentin Khorouzhiy, Matt Beer and guest pundit Glenn Freeman joined forces to do so on The Race MotoGP Podcast. Unsurprisingly there were some very different positions suggested for many riders.

Take a listen to the full debate in a bumper episode to round off our season.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

“Are we world champions?” asks Mercedes technical director James Allison, with a smile, in response to a question about whether the wrong decisions were made when it came to designing the “truculent” W14.

It’s a rhetorical reply, not from someone who finds the plight of his team amusing but from a hugely competitive character who subscribes to the idea that second place is just the first loser. Mercedes wasn’t victorious and axiomatically that means at least some of the choices underpinning the car were incorrect.

Mercedes didn’t win a race in 2023, let alone the world championship. Therefore, by definition something has gone wrong. And Allison, who returned to the technical frontline mid-season, is unafraid to confront those fundamental mistakes. To understand the full context of why Mercedes got it wrong, he looks back to the troubled 2022 car.

“If you take last year’s car, we were very hampered at the beginning by horrible porpoising,” says Allison. “We hadn’t imagined that would be a problem and it was caused by having too much downforce too near the ground in a way that produced an aerodynamic instability that was very difficult to understand and took us a while to get rid of it.

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“Over the course of that first year, we developed a car that had plenty of downforce near the ground that we turned out not be able to use because of the porpoising we didn’t see coming, but the downforce would drop away quite quickly when you raised the car.

"Later in the year, we fixed the porpoising with some changes to the floor geometry, but were left with a car which didn’t have as much downforce near the ground as it used to have. And still the downforce dropped away quite steeply when you went higher."

"Although that was OK at tracks like Barcelona, it was utterly hopeless at other places where you needed to have the rear ride height higher. So you could be OK at Barcelona and then lousy at Monaco the next week.

"The rest of that season was [about] expanding the range of downforce, finding more downforce at higher rear ride heights.”

FAILING TO EXPLOIT 2023 RULE CHANGES

Given Mercedes made a respectable recovery in 2022, it continued in a similar direction with the W14 rather than transforming the concept. But there was a curveball in the form of the rule changes introduced to tackle concerns about the physical toll porpoising took on drivers.

A curveball, it should be noted, Mercedes was a instrumental in creating the conditions for by lobbying hard for action to tackle porpoising.

Allison characterises the increase in the floor-edge height by 15mm as coming “quite late in the day”, but acknowledges it meant the cars would bounce less. The question was, how to respond to that?

“There was a big debate internally,” says Allison. “Should we cash in that 15mm and drop the car down, operate the car in a window that is 15mm smaller, because the cars will be less bouncy inherently? Or should we do more of what has done us well over the course of the year, which was force ourselves to keep looking for downforce where it’s difficult high up?

“These rules don’t reward you [with downforce] high up, it’s really hard to find, but that brought us some benefits over the course of last year. So the debate raged internally for a while. The logic was it’s very hard to predict because the tools are not especially good for this, anyone’s tools, not just ours. They are not very good for predicting exactly where bouncing is going to be incurred.

“It’s much harder to back yourself out of having driven off the edge of a cliff and finding yourself bouncing than it is to be too high, not bouncing and then lower yourself towards it. So the outcome of our internal debate was let’s err on the cautious side, let’s keep trying to find downforce where it’s hard and if it turns out we’ve been too cautious we will spend the months that follow working quickly to recover that.

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“And if we’re lucky and others cash in the 15mm – and without tools that prove to them everything will be fine, I remain of the view it was a gamble - then they’ll all bounce and we'll be the smart ones for having taken the cautious approach. So that was the route.

“Now, as it turns out it was too cautious - it was possible to cash in the 15mm. We would have been better placing our chips on that part of the roulette wheel, then we’d have got much sooner to the performance we’re at now.”

DITCHING 'ZERO-PODS' HURT PACE INITIALLY

Publicly, the team admitted it was in trouble after qualifying for the Bahrain season-opener. Team principal Toto Wolff said that evening that “we thought we could fix it by sticking to this concept of car and it didn’t work out”.

But that wasn’t the day when Mercedes realised how far off it was. As Allison says, “it was pretty obvious in winter testing”.

Changes were already in the works, but it wasn’t until the sixth race of the season at Monaco in May that Mercedes introduced an upgrade that represented the first step in a new direction. The car was very obviously transformed thanks to the disappearance of the narrow sidepods, but Allison stresses this did not prove the so-called ‘zero pod’ design was a problem.

There was far more to the upgrade than just bodywork changes, with floor modifications and new front suspension with a higher mounting point for the forward leg of the top wishbone to increase the anti-dive angle. There were also tweaks to the tunnel inlet fences, a widening of the bodywork at the top of the 'Coke bottle' section where the bodywork narrows and new winglets in the lower rear corner.

“The laptime that came with the Monaco update was not remotely from the things that were visually different, apart from the wishbones,” says Allison. “The change to the sidepod fronts were [a case of] ‘let’s just not have that as a thing to worry about for the future’.

“Actually, the decision to go to that new sidepod front probably took about two tenths of a second off the update package we put on the car. From a pretty torrid 14 months, we took that off the table as a variable, but actually that particular change on that particular day was slower than what preceded it.

"The things which brought performance were all underneath the car, and rear brake drums and ducts, front wing. Subsequently, you work with what you’ve got then and just iterate from that point. This car long ago left that 0.2s deficit behind it and away we go.

“The conceptual change was all about undoing the conservative decision about ride heights. It’s nevertheless true that along the way, as we sought to find downforce in a different part of the ride height map, you get different geometry under the car as a result.”

The changes that could be made to the Mercedes were always limited by the architecture of the car. The 2024 machine is the chance to correct the limitations of the monocoque design and the rear suspension and gearbox.

What hits the track next February will be the culmination of the understanding Mercedes has built of the design characteristics needed to produce the most competitive car under these regulations and the direction change that started in Monaco.

A BIG SOURCE OF HAMILTON'S FRUSTRATIONS

Lewis Hamilton has been vocal in his criticisms of the car and one of the problems he’s highlighted is the seating position, which he felt was too far forward and therefore made it harder to feel the rear end.

Allison interprets this differently, focusing on what the first-order problem rather than what he regards as a symptom of it.

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He characterises it as a fundamental lack of rear stability, meaning that the cockpit position would be more trivial were this to be eliminated.

That said, he also believes that Hamilton’s complaints about this last year were not correctly acted on primarily because it was felt the bouncing was causing the instability. And, of course, it wasn’t. Or, at least, not entirely.

“When we were completely and utterly stuck in the bouncing hell, all we could do was fix that because that was the number one, two and three problem,” says Allison.

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“We were not good enough at listening to the fact that they [the drivers] were telling us something else in parallel, which is that they didn’t like the turn-in instability of the car.

"And we said ‘well, it’s bouncing, what do you expect?’ But it isn’t that.

"They didn’t like the turn-in instability later when it wasn’t bouncing and they didn’t like the turn-in instability of the car this year whether it was bouncing or not. That has been a common thread with our car throughout.

“Lewis’s way of expressing that is in talking about his seating position. George [Russell] doesn’t ever talk about his seating position, but he describes exactly the same ugliness to the car.

"If we can fix that properly, the only part of Lewis’s seating position that he would still dislike is that he sees a bit less of the corner apex because it’s a bit nearer the tyre than if he’s a bit further back.

“But the actual seating position itself is not giving rise to a perceptual issue that makes it hard for him to detect how to handle the car.

"Possibly, if he were sitting exactly where he wanted he might be able to drive a truculent thing with slightly more precision, but the issue there is get rid of the truculent thing, not optimise the seating position to handle something that isn’t good.

“Our focus has been on making it less horrid and I would say the Austin upgrade was a mild step forward in that regard. With a bit of luck next year’s car will bring a load more.”

IS MERCEDES LOOKING IN THE RIGHT PLACES?

While that Austin upgrade preceded Hamilton’s exclusion from second place for plank wear, he was probably happier with the feel of the car there than on any other weekend.

That reflects the fluctuations of the season, when the Mercedes could swing from relatively benign to being all over the place – and sometimes managed to exhibit such extremes across the two sides of the garage.

After two seasons grappling with its problems, Mercedes' hope is that the all-new 2024 car will banish such capricious characteristics to history. And that’s all about getting the conceptual detail of the car right, which as Allison says is about far more than what shape your sidepods are.

“Whether by good fortune or enormous skill, the cars that are the quick ones are the ones that have conceptual strength,” says Allison. “The execution of that concept will be more or less elegantly done depending on the quality of your drawing office staff. What makes the thing work or not work is what you value, what will bring me laptime.

“Everyone says downforce will bring me laptime? OK, where? Do you want downforce at 80mm or do you want downforce at 30mm off the ground?

"Do you want the car to be good in crosswinds? Well, OK, but is that one-degree crosswind, 15-degree crosswind? How much importance are you going to give to 15 degrees versus five, versus zero?

"These are all conceptual choices. Not 'concept' as in sidepod concept, much deeper conceptual choices about what you choose to place value upon. Once you set out your stall for what you place value on – the 'where is the treasure buried?' analogy – your factory, the efficiency of you factory will dig that out of the ground for you, but only if you are looking in the right places.”

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The key question now is whether Mercedes is looking in the right places and fully understands how to achieve the delicate balance between aerodynamic and mechanical characteristics required to make the most of these rules.

Much has been learned from the trials and tribulations of 2022 and ’23 and a well-resourced team full of hugely accomplished people, battle-hardened tools sharpened during this process and headed by a technical director in Allison who is as competitive as they come, has everything it needs to make a big step forward next year.

But similar things were said 12 months ago. As Allison has laid out, there were reasons for the failure to turn things round immediately and weaknesses went undetected because all of the problems were laid at the door of porpoising.

It’s impossible to judge fairly from the outside whether that was an unavoidable mistake or reflected an arrogant myopia when it came it the idea the car was fundamentally sound if the porpoising could be taken out of the equation and the prodigious downforce numbers produced when the car was close to the ground could be fully realised.

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The reality will be somewhere in between, and it’s worth noting that Allison has also talked about the team’s “fragmented” reaction to its troubles needing to be pulled together.

Whether there are any false assumptions or hidden problems underpinning the new direction and the choices made will dictate how well the 2024 car works.

That doesn’t mean having to win immediately given there’s a long way to go to catch Red Bull. If Mercedes is on the right track, it’s all going to be about good, old-fashioned development rate relative to Red Bull and the rest. If not, a third year of frustration awaits.

As for the conventional wisdom that things close up in the second season of a regulations shift and the question of why they didn't, at least as far as Red Bull’s advantage was concerned, Allison has a characteristically caustic response when it is mentioned.

“I think you can probably point at the rest of us and say ‘come on, sort yourself out’.

“Maybe it’ll take one year longer than it should have done and you’ll all have something to write about again…”

The launch of Ducati's new motocross project for 2024 will have a major impact on its MotoGP team, with the departure of veteran Ducati Corse sporting director Paolo Ciabatti to take on a new role as general manager of the new off-road division.

Ducati will contest the Italian motocross championship next year before taking on the premier MXGP series in 2025.

Ciabatti has been one of the factory’s triumvirate management structure since 2014 to become sporting director, working closely alongside both chief engineer and Ducati Corse general manager Gigi Dall’Igna (a 2014 arrival from Aprilia) and long-time Ducati racer and employee Davide Tardozzi, who will remain as team manager.

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Ciabatti has been a Ducati employee on and off for nearly three decades, first joining the factory in 1997 before taking control of the World Superbike project a year later.

Spending 10 years in that role, he took a brief break to head up the production bike racing series as sporting director for then-owner Infront before returning to Ducati in 2013 first as MotoGP project director and then as the overall sporting director.

One of the key figures in the firm's return to competitiveness in the premier class since then, his tenure began with the team develop its bike into a title contender again with Andrea Dovizioso as its lead rider before Ciabatti brought in now-double world champion Pecco Bagnaia and expanded Ducati's grid presence to an unheard-of eight bikes.

While it marks a sensible move to use the 66-year-old to spearhead the launch of a whole new division of Ducati's racing interests - especially given Ciabatti’s love of off-road racing - it will be a significant adjustment in how the MotoGP race team will operate next season.

He will be replaced by current marketing and sponsorship director Mauro Grassilli, who will add the role of sporting director to his title for 2024.

Grassilli will likely make his first appearance in front of the media alongside Ciabatti’s first big announcement in his new role too, when Ducati unveils its 2024 racing efforts at the Campioni in Pista event on January 21-22 at Italian ski resort Madonna di Campiglio.

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Ciabatti will not fully leave the world of circuit racing behind, and will also retain responsibility for coordinating Ducati's sporting activities in the main national production racing championships in America, the UK, Japan, Australia and Italy.

The news is unlikely to significantly disrupt Ducati's plans to defend Bagnaia's MotoGP crown in 2024, given the structure it's built in previous years.

Ciabatti's role in recent years has largely been preparing the team for going racing rather than taking an active role in managing it on a day-to-day basis, and while he's likely to be most missed when it comes to negotiating new contracts for 2025 and beyond, the fact that he will remain a key part of Ducati's racing efforts means that Grassilli is likely to have a willing mentor on hand to smooth the process.

Amid the blockbuster news that Alex Palou wasn’t going to join McLaren after all, and the lawsuit that followed, McLaren’s scramble for a replacement IndyCar signing and the choice it eventually made may have gone somewhat under the radar.

McLaren was very complimentary about its 22-year-old pick David Malukas, who has two years of IndyCar experience despite his age and a pair of podiums with Dale Coyne Racing - the team that catapulted Palou himself to the Chip Ganassi seat he has won two titles in three years with.

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However, no matter how complimentary, any way you dissect this move, it’s a story of McLaren not getting the original driver it wanted, and ending up with a back-up option or a 'Plan B'.

That doesn’t matter to Malukas, though. He's ready to fight and defend this seat with every fibre of his being.

“They're not really making me feel like I was just kind of like some sort of last-minute option, or that I don't belong there,” Malukas tells The Race, fresh off being dropped in at the deep end with his new team.

He’s been embedded at the factory and drove James Hunt's and Bruce McLaren's Formula 1 cars at the McLaren-backed Velocity event at Sonoma last month around his settling-in period.

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A post shared by Arrow McLaren (@arrowmclaren)

The real trouble in trying to evaluate Malukas or how he will fare at McLaren is that his impressive rookie campaign was followed up by a Coyne team finally feeling the brunt of years of its best talents - its best drivers, mechanics and engineers - being plundered.

It was almost rudderless to start 2023 and while it improved through the season, that really meant - along with Malukas having a poorly performing rookie team-mate in Sting Ray Robb - that it’s hard to get a read on where Malukas is at and how he might perform in his big opportunity.

On the exterior, Malukas is the happiest of beings, always ready to have fun and enjoy every aspect of his life as an elite racing driver. It’s no surprise to see McLaren has heavily leaned into that already and is making use of its young star - a gaming aficionado with a social media output that reflects his jovial spirit.

All David wanted was this moment. 🧡🍫 pic.twitter.com/wBKeS7kjFo

— Arrow McLaren IndyCar Team (@ArrowMcLaren) November 1, 2023

I do wonder if that will mean Malukas is underestimated or not taken as seriously as other drivers because of this. It’s something Lando Norris had to manage in his early years in F1, and there are certainly parallels between the two starting out and how they were/are.

Norris is an excellent blueprint as he’s perhaps toned down the frivolity but still shows plenty of personality in a manner that never calls his focus or concentration into question.

However, like with Norris, there’s a steely determination and a desire in Malukas - perhaps even a thirst - for knowledge and understanding. Malukas is from Chicago but is moving to Indianapolis to be close to the McLaren shop and has pledged to be there all hours in his quest to adapt.

He’s been blown away by the “unlimited resources” as one of the first things you note when joining McLaren, but he’s already got a plan there: to use the team’s new sporting director Tony Kanaan to shortcut getting the most out of a vast team with endless amounts of information.

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Another reason why it’s hard to assess how Malukas will fare is because outgoing driver Felix Rosenqvist joined McLaren as a well-respected talent with a diverse resume, but it took him a long time to deliver the kind of performance expected - even then he couldn't do it constantly enough to beat team leader Pato O'Ward.

A newcomer like Malukas could struggle with a car that maybe isn’t the easiest to handle on the grid and with a switch from Honda to Chevrolet power to boot.

That’s before you factor in his team-mates O’Ward and Alexander Rossi, who it seems apt to describe as polar opposites in how they want their cars set up. In a typically Malukas way, he sees that as a positive rather than a negative.

“It's perfect, because I get to look at both of their data and kind of add it to my style and to learn to get better,” Malukas says.

“Because at the end of the day, I'm still 22 and have a lot to learn. So from my side, it's been really good. And I think from a car standpoint, we're right about there, where we want the set-up to be.”

That’s after McLaren already threw Malukas into a crucial IndyCar hybrid runout, where he felt almost immediately at home in the car.

The road courses and street circuits will be the big test. There have been so many examples of Malukas qualifying or racing well on road and street circuits but whether it’s strategy, pitstops, bad luck or the odd mistake, his results don’t reflect the speed he has been capable of.

That - coupled with an almost-immediate knack for ovals - has fuelled the (I’d argue) misconception that Malukas isn’t as good on road and street circuits. But he’s already identified all of this, predictably, and knows what exactly it is he needs to improve.

“Ovals, I've managed to kind of click with them and find them out,” Malukas adds.

“I think from road courses, the actual performances of the races have been good.

“It's the qualifying that's kind of been lacking from my side, just trying to extract the absolute maximum out of the car just with the short time that you really have on alternates [the softer tyre compound] and just trying to time that one lap, make sure pressures are there and brake temps are there and just getting it all down for that one lap.

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“I think that's where it's been originating from. So that's the one area that I really want to work on.”

Luckily for Arrow McLaren, it knows Rossi is at least a solid back-up to O’Ward - maybe after getting his first season under his belt at the team, Rossi can do more in 2024 - so the pressure on Malukas is a bit lesser than it could have been.

Certainly he’ll start the season as the third driver with the focus of adapting as quickly as possible and not to worry too much about his results.

But by the halfway mark, typically the silly season will be in full swing and Malukas's future will no doubt be part of the discussion, given the team had been willing to shell out for a (now) double series champion before settling on a relatively inexperienced and, certainly compared to Palou, unproven fallback.

Malukas officially joined McLaren on a multi-year deal, but it strains credulity to suggest the team - which had all the leverage in signing him - wouldn't have had inserted some performance-related clauses in there to give itself a potential 2025 get-out.

Pressure, therefore, is inevitable. How will Malukas deal with that - and what does he think will be enough to stick around for the long term?

“At Arrow McLaren obviously the main goal is we need to be competitive, and they need to be at the top. The main goal right now and looking at previous seasons is trying to compete with Penske and Ganassi, and I'm very much going to be involved in that.

“And yeah, we need to win. We need to secure championships and we need to be there. And for my side, it's going to obviously be a very tough ask and a tough goal, but that's kind of what it's going to have to be, being a part of this team.

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"And I'm very excited because it has always been my goal ever since I joined the IndyCar paddock and to be a part of Arrow McLaren, the team that also has the same goals, we can both work together on achieving that. So it [the target] is very high.

“It's the kind of goals that we need to hit and coming from a McLaren team standpoint, I think that would obviously very clearly show that if the competitiveness is there, and I can compete, that'll be very much enough to keep the seat.”

Given that O’Ward and the team went winless in 2023, it would be a lot to expect Malukas to start racking wins up.

But he’s already fought with O’Ward while at Coyne in the two Gateway oval races and, with some tweaks in road and street course qualifying, he’ll hope and need to be scoring regularly and giving Rossi a hard time when it’s possible.

For now, there’s plenty to admire about Malukas. Judge him as a goofy joker at your peril, because underneath that there’s an intelligent driver who has realistic expectations and is driven by that fight-or-flight instinct when it comes to wanting to protect his place in a frontrunning McLaren outfit.

Whether he can do that or not is going to be a huge topic in the 2024 IndyCar season, but he's making the right noises and approaching this as a learning experience, which is the best way to tackle it.

When Jorge Martin broke his long-standing KTM ties and picked Ducati to step up from Moto2 to MotoGP, it was in large part a strategic decision to give him the best possible chance of fighting for first race wins and then a title.

Now the 2023 championship runner-up, he's proved that was the right choice to make.

But three seasons into his Ducati career and as he prepares to start the final year of his current deal with the firm, it’s looking more and more likely that his future will lie elsewhere for many of the same reasons that first took him to Ducati.

When Martin first made the jump to the premier class, it came at the expense of a career largely centred around KTM and its support.

He’s spoken openly in the past about how the Red Bull Rookies Cup - which he won in 2014 - essentially saved his career by giving him a chance to keep racing when his family could no longer afford to buy him rides, and he repaid the KTM partner for that multiple times over.

Though his 2018 Moto3 title came on a Honda, he rejoined KTM for his two seasons in Moto2 and paid it back for its earlier investment in his career by fighting for wins and podiums in his two years with the Ajo squad.

But, with the RC16 not then up to speed in MotoGP, it was instead Ducati that he elected to join for his big premier-class move - despite an offer to continue with KTM.

That move has, of course, worked out exceedingly well for him up to now. A pole position qualifier in only his second race, a race winner in his first season, and very nearly the first satellite team world champion in modern history in 2023, it’s been a massive success for him, his Pramac team and for Ducati since then.

But there’s one very obvious problem with Martin’s career trajectory so far that has the potential to colour his entire future. Despite an incredible 2023 featuring a title challenge that went all the way to the final race, four grand prix wins and nine sprint wins (nearly half the season), he will remain with Pramac Racing in 2024 rather than joining his title rival Pecco Bagnaia in factory red.

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It’s not a secret that Martin wants that coveted factory seat. He is one of the series’ most aggressive racers, and with that comes no small measure of ego - and he’s been bullish of late in telling the world that he believes that it should have been him, not current seat occupant Enea Bastianini, alongside Bagnaia for next year.

It’s a switch, it seems, that the pair’s factory Ducati contracts would have allowed for, with Martin recently revealing that a title win would have meant he was automatically promoted. Coming home 39 points behind Bagnaia wasn’t good enough to earn him the top tier seat he desperately wants.

And since the final round of the championship at Valencia a month ago, he hasn’t exactly been shy about telling the world that what he perceives as Ducati snubbing him means that he’s now more than happy to look elsewhere after next season.

“My 100% priority for 2025 is an official team,” he recently told Spanish newspaper AS. “My goal is the official Ducati team, because it is the factory I am with, I know the bike and I have a lot of projection in this factory, but if they don't want me or understand that I am not the best, I will look for something else.”

There are multiple stumbling blocks that could prevent Ducati offering him the ride he so desperately wants.

Firstly, there's the fact that Bastianini’s 2023 season was completely and utterly destroyed by injuries that left him wholly unable to show his true form - a situation that allowed Martin to look remarkable in comparison but which might not continue into 2024.

Then, of course, there’s the absolute wildcard of Marc Marquez. He's now a Ducati rider with Gresini, and factory management has already made it abundantly clear that he’s a target for the official bike in 2025 should he perform, adding yet another roadblock to Martin’s career plans.

And the reality is Martin won't lack opportunities to move, given the impressive season that he’s just come from and the fact that there’s likely to be more changes than ever to the MotoGP grid for 2025 once contract negotiations start in the new year.

The most obvious option should he want to go elsewhere is KTM.

He’s got a strong relationship with it, it's already pitched for his services once before and, with Jack Miller underperforming in his first season on the factory bike, it’s not exactly going to be a shock should KTM look elsewhere to find a new partner to team up with Martin’s former Moto2 team-mate Brad Binder.

There’s potentially also an opportunity at Honda, should the hints of a better RC213V that emerged at the post-season Valencia test mature into something more competitive. 2020 world champion Joan Mir’s contract expires at the end of 2024, and while he might be right now playing the role of team player, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if Honda looked elsewhere.

But the real wildcard opportunity for Martin might instead come at another Italian brand.

He's close friends with Aleix Espargaro (the pair often describe each other as brothers), and the veteran Aprilia team captain has been toying with the idea of making 2024 his last season.

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It would come as no surprise whatsoever should Espargaro recommend his best friend to take over from him on a bike that is closing the gap to Ducati’s dominant Desmosedici.

And while this might all be pie-in-the-sky thinking for now, especially with the 2024 season still months away, it’s far from unrealistic to imagine that we’ll see Martin on another machine by 2025.

One thing is absolutely certain: he won’t still be on a Pramac Ducati come hell or high water. So even if it's not clear where he will be, those Ducati obstacles make a move away look extremely likely - despite all they've just achieved together.

but what exactly the alternative is remains to be seen.