Happy Friday!

Mercedes have officially stepped up their OEM customer racing program with this epic AMG GT2 race car 🚨

With more power and less aero than it’s GT3 counterpart, the AMG GT2 represents an unbridled front engine monster and Mercedes now joins the upper ranks of customer racing, like the Ferrari XX and Corse Clienti programs.

Now, if you’ve followed this newsletter long enough you’d know we’re fairly critical of many road cars in production today. That’s because we feel like cars are being made by a marketing team to satisfy the Excel spreadsheets of a finance team and everything has just lost it’s character.. But not in motorsport.

You can’t fake motorsport and you can’t use marketing to reduce your laps times. All you can do is push yourself to find your truth. To find where you can brake later and where you can commit to throttle and where you can be better..

So let the road cars go electric and autonomous.. It just means the surviving automotive ecosystem will shift a lot more to motorsport - and that’s a win for us all.

Formula 1

Las Vegas really rolling the dice on this one 😅

If you haven’t already heard, ticket prices are plummeting for the Las Vegas Grand Prix - but it’s not just that..

Restaurants, hotels and casinos that were expected to be fully booked (because we’re only one week away!) have also had to reduce prices to attract the very few people buying tickets..

From grandstands to hospitality to VIPs.. The bet on Vegas is looking pretty rough right now. Some say that Max Verstappen having already won the title takes away some drama from the event, and thus takes away some value from attending..

Hah.. Funny that, Max Verstappen ruining an event…… 😅

Next race: Sunday, November 19th @ 1am EST (Las Vegas GP)

Paddock Auctions

Coming Soon

Bidding is Now Live on this 1999 Ferrari 360 Challenge! Don’t hesitate to reach out to John from Team Stradale for full details.

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Quick Bites

📚 Founder and CEO of Baseline Driver Training, Tommy Schröter, discusses positioning when braking

🏆 The importance of race driver confidence

♽ Finding motorsport talent the sustainable way

News Racers Can Use

Sim Racing to Real-Life Program Racing Prodigy Crowns their First Champion

Racing Prodigy’s first ever Prodigy week concluded with the crowning of Gustavo Ariel as the first-ever Racing Prodigy winner.

Prodigy Week wasn’t just about digital racing; it was an all-encompassing experience. The sim racers were put through a rigorous training regimen, covering a wide range of disciplines, including fitness, on-camera interviews, skid pad handling, autocross challenges, kart racing, data performance reviews, and, ultimately, competing in Radical SR1s on the main racetrack. Over the course of the event, they completed an astounding total of more than 850 laps, equivalent to more than 1,700 miles. These aspiring racers had the privilege of being coached and trained by a remarkable lineup of motorsport legends, including former F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR driver Max Papis, NASCAR and Indy 500 driver Boris Said, racing icon Randy Pobst, race car driver and engineer Andrew Carbonell, NASCAR driver Jesse Iwuji, NASCAR driver Connor Zilisch, and pro driver champion Kenton Koch.

Gustavo Ariel, reflecting on his strategy for the final race, said, “My strategy going into the final race was to warm up my tires quickly and do a fantastic lap one to close that gap and consistently race throughout.” Ariel was not only a champion on the track but also the first Prodigy Pass winner on iRacing during the first part of Season 1. He added, “It’s been a great experience this week, so I would encourage sim racers to join Racing Prodigy as I wish when I was younger I had opportunities like this to compete on this level. I can’t wait for the draft.”

The event appears to be a success with coverage in mainstream publications such as Forbes and the announcement that there will be a second Prodigy Week in 2024 according to Winding Road Magazine.

“The exciting journey of these sim racers is far from over. Racing Prodigy has big plans for the future. They intend to host a second Prodigy Week in early 2024 to conclude Season 1 with a new class of Prodigy Pass winners, creating a pool of the world’s most talented drivers from which PRL teams will draft. These drafted racers will receive paid contracts to compete in PRL’s first real-world racing series in the United States, scheduled to launch in 2024.”

This is the dawn of new and innovative ways to find driving talent for the next generation of race drivers (See Quick Bites above). It will be exciting to see how this all evolves!

News Racers Can Use is written by Mark Boudreau from Motorsport Prospects