Mühlner Motorsports has announced its plans to enter the 2026 Rolex 24 At Daytona, the first entry for the Belgian-American team since 2022.
Bernie Mühlner’s team will enter the No. 123 Porsche 911 GT3 R (992.2) in the GTD class with a lineup headlined by newly-crowned Porsche Carrera Cup North America Champion Ryan Yardley.
New Zealand-born Yardley, who won the PCCNA title in his third season after a close fight with 2023 PCCNA champion Riley Dickinson, will share the No. 123 Porsche at Daytona with father-and-son duo Dave Musial Sr. and Jr., along with Peter Ludwig.
The Musials each ran part-time across the IMSA VP Racing SportsCar Challenge, Ferrari Challenge North America, and Porsche Sprint Challenge North America, while Ludwig primarily raced in Germany, in the Porsche Endurance Trophy Nürburgring series.
Mühlner Motorsports last competed at the Daytona 24 Hours with a pair of Duqueine D08 LMP3s, one of which finished second in class for the Motul Pole Award 100 qualifying race held the week before the Rolex 24, while the other finished sixth in class at the Rolex 24 itself.
“We have been preparing this project for several years and we’re incredibly proud to finally go racing with this car and such a strong driver combination. Returning to Daytona in GTD is a big moment for us,” said team founder and CEO Mühlner.
While preparing for its IMSA return, Mühlner Motorsport plans to enter the 24H Series Middle East Trophy 6H Abu Dhabi on 10 January and the 24H Dubai on 17 January, using a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup (992). Following Daytona, Mühlner plans to take its new Porsche 911 GT3 R to compete in the Nürburgring 24 Hours in May, and the 24 Hours of Spa in June.
The team is also evaluating plans to run in additional GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup events as the year progresses.
“First we focus on the next races. Having our 992 cars in Abu Dhabi and Dubai while we’re also heading to Daytona is a huge challenge for the whole team,” Mühlner said of the team’s busy January plans. “Luckily, we’ve built a broad infrastructure over the years that allows us to handle programs like this successfully.
Looking ahead of its confirmed endurance racing efforts, Mühlner Motorsports is also targeting additional projects for 2026 and beyond.
“We’re in close talks with several organizations and partners, and we’re planning a few surprises. It’s very likely that we’ll return to a European paddock that has been close to our hearts in recent years—with a fantastic project,” he added.
Off the back of a much-improved 2025 campaign which yielded a comfortable fifth place in the Formula 1 world constructors’ standings, Williams is now a team that is looking up rather than over down.
Over the past 18 months the Grove-based squad harvested bountiful low-hanging fruit that was holding it back, and that meant that while its aerodynamic development has largely been focused on 2026 and beyond, it still found ways to improve its performance level with the FW47, guided by its experienced driver line-up of Alex Albon and Ferrari hire Carlos Sainz.
But while Williams’ trajectory has been likened to that of world champion McLaren three or four years ago, when the Woking-based squad was embarking on a similar rebuild, Vowles is also the first to admit Williams remains a work in progress and is not ready for life at the very top of F1 yet.
That’s why he sees 2026’s wholesale regulations changes as a big opportunity for Williams to take the next steps in its large-scale overhaul rather than the final exam of whether his team has succeeded.
“I think it’s harder within the current regulations set to be finding performance relative to others, when you’re constrained by perhaps a way of thinking or a construct you’ve had before, whereas 2026 really is just a clean sheet of paper, so you’re able to approach it a very different way,” Vowles explained to Motorsport.com in an exclusive interview.
“But I don’t think it’s an acid test. I think it’s just a continuation of the journey. I think, if anything, the opportunity to scrap a few things and start again gives us a bit of a leg up.”
Williams took two podiums with Carlos Sainz in Baku and Qatar as part of a much-improved 2025 campaign
Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images
That journey has involved plenty of ups and downs, including the humiliation of not being able to field two cars in 2024’s Japanese Grand Prix due to a lack of spare chassis. At the time Williams was fighting to produce two cars that were on weight and on the same specification, an uncomfortable situation that it fully addressed for 2025.
It is just one public example of how its many behind-the-scenes changes have addressed some of the structural issues Vowles identified after joining from top team Mercedes, and the other is a – very limited – upgrade programme that showed the Grove factory was operating much more efficiently than before. But Vowles suggested the general lack of 2025 aero development was also an opportunity to focus on other areas, giving the team the freedom to use the 2025 season to experiment.
“We’ve only put a couple of weeks of aerodynamic development into the 2025 car during the year,” he said. “But what we’ve been working on instead is: ‘Do we have the right balance? Do we have the right way of working the tyres? Do we have the right way of communicating with the drivers? Do we have the right differential tools? All those are zero cost. They’re just about using a product in a different way to what we had before.
“Quite a bit of performance that was locked away has been coming out of that, and that’s what I’ve been focused on.
“It’s what I like about our sport. You constrain yourself in one way by not putting any more development in this car, but I give you the freedom every weekend to go out there and try something different. As long as it is backed up by logic and has a data-driven mechanism behind it, then I’m fine to support it and try it. And that’s what we’ve been doing, and it’s working. You could see across the year how, despite the car not changing, we were moving forward.”
More “honest” Williams ready for more change
That kind of approach is only possible within a transparent organisation. One of the biggest changes Vowles has had to make since taking over at Grove is stamping out the team’s previous blame culture and providing the “psychological safety” for departments to be brutally honest rather than fool itself.
“It’s very easy for you to produce a report that says I’ve added two tenths of performance this week through X, Y and Z – not validated, not backed up, not checked,” he explained.
Alex Albon, Williams
Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / LAT Images via Getty Images
“And actually, what we do now is very robust, peer reviewed checks on what performance we’re adding, how it’s adding, and it’s what I call honest, correct accounting. In aerodynamics, all too often you have something called drift, and there’s two ways to deal with drift. You can just go: ‘That’s our new benchmark’. Or you go: ‘No, I’ve lost a point, and I’m going to get that point back.’
“And we’re very good here at doing what I think is honest accounting because of the psychological safety and belief in the culture to do so.
“I’m giving you a lot of detail, but actually the biggest change is we have a culture that is ready for more. We know we’re not at a championship level yet, but that scrutiny we apply to ourselves allows us to be stronger.”
Any change is difficult at first, but the results Vowles’ approach has been yielding means the Williams’ organisation has become much more amenable to it.
“As an organisation the first change you make is hard, but then you become more agile and more accommodating to it as you see that the change is net beneficial,” he explained. “So I’d actually say globally, we’ve changed more in 2025 than we did in 2023 and 2024, but the business is also ready for it.
“And now we have a really interesting situation where the business is going: ‘Okay, what next? What else do we do? Let’s go.’ It’s great. And now we have to move faster than we did before.”
F1 2026 rules ‘in a good place’
Quite how that will pan out for Williams in 2026 is anyone’s guess right now, and it will likely take several races into the new campaign to have a clear picture of F1’s new world order.
James Vowles, Team Principal, Williams Racing
Photo by: Shameem Fahath / Motorsport Network
“This is just guesswork,” Vowles said. “But clearly, we won’t see the same gaps we had in 2025 where a few tenths separates a few cars. But conversely, it won’t be anywhere near 2014 where there’s like three and a half seconds, it’ll be somewhere between the two.
“That said, there’ll be a couple of teams who have now done a power unit for the first time, have done a car for the first time. It really is hard and competitive now. Let’s be completely blunt, that’s why we fell back to 10th for a period of time.
“I think the gaps will be a couple of seconds front to back, but I still think you’ll have competition at the sharp end, which is a good point. And the sport has understood that we need competition, so therefore we will close the regulations up in a way that will create that.”
He added: “I think the regulations are in a good place now. I’m sure we’re going to see overtaking, it just won’t be in the places you normally expect it to be, because it is an electrical energy chess game that you’ll be playing.
“But I think it’s worth saying the regulations from where they were when we were talking in Montreal in 2024 [when they were first revealed by the FIA] to where they are today are quite different, and it’s produced a much better package.”
Alex Bowman may not have stockpiled wins like his teammates Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, or William Byron, but he has shown quite a consistency in both speed and progression across various types of tracks. His quantum leap into Hendrick Motorsports traces directly back to Dale Earnhardt Jr., who first spotted his potential.
In 2016, when Junior’s injuries sidelined him for an extended stretch, he pushed Bowman’s name forward to drive his No. 88 HMS machine. Bowman subsequently filled in for Jeff Gordon to secure his No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports seat. During a recent conversation with HOT ROD Pod, Bowman credited Dale Jr. for opening doors at Hendrick Motorsports, while acknowledging his good fortune.
His Cup Series tenure dates back to 2014, though his first campaign saw him piloting a No. 23 Toyota for BK Racing, a smaller outfit. The following season brought a shift to Tommy Baldwin Racing. Neither stint produced meaningful results, leaving Bowman searching for traction.
Reflecting on that watershed moment, Bowman recounted the sequence of events. “I qualified next to Dale at like Richmond, I think, and we were riding around the truck pre-race together, talking about I was trying to get in some good Xfinity cars at the end of that year and have some good races cuz running for small teams was definitely rough.”
“He had some openings at JRM the end of that year that I was able to get into. Kind of took off from there.” The stars aligned when Junior’s injury created an unexpected vacancy. “So obviously, crazy set of circumstances, with him getting hurt. I was driving the Sim for Hendrick at the time. Dale was a big supporter of mine and called me and kind of forced Hendrick to use me…”
“I feel like, because we all found out so late. But super fortunate to get to fill in for him and then share the car with some guy named Jeff Gordon for the rest of the year, which was wild to me. And somehow I’m still here.”
Bowman’s most recent Cup win came at the Chicago Street race in 2024, marking one and a half seasons since he last tasted victory. But across nine campaigns with HMS, he has missed the playoffs just once, in 2023, when a back injury sustained during a sprint car accident forced him to sit out three races.
Last season presented challenges as well. Though winless, the 32-year-old recovered a 13th-place finish in the final standings. His best performance last season came in Mexico, where he competed despite nursing injuries from a crash at Michigan International Speedway the previous weekend.
Racing at less than full strength in NASCAR’s inaugural Cup Series event in Mexico City, Bowman clawed from P29 on the grid to P4 at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, claiming his third top-five result of the year.
Gordon and the entire HMS operation maintain faith in Bowman’s abilities and ceiling. But only the upcoming season will bring answers to their confidence as Bowman adapts to the new Chevrolet body and higher horsepower.
The Chili Bowl Midget Nationals ended for one expected contender before it could even begin.
Buddy Kofoid has made the Championship Saturday main event five times in six attempts with Keith Kunz Motorsports but an illness is going to keep him away from the Tulsa Expo Center this week.
After winning 18 times in a 410 Sprint Car across numerous tours in 2025, and becoming the richest (in terms of winnings) driver in the discipline, Kofoid looked poised to challenge for a Golden Driller this week.
Instead, the No. 71W will not idle this week as Kunz told Motorsport.com at the Expo that there are ‘no plans’ to fill the seat despite making some calls when it became apparent that Kofoid couldn’t make it.
Kofoid has won prelims in 2022 and 2024. He finished second in the main event in 2024. He finished sixth in the main event last year. He is one of the most prolific drivers in the building.
Ultimately, it’s one less major contender for those hoping to lock in on Friday night.
Pretty standard day, but …
For everyone else, it was a largely procedural practice day, even if the track was not reflective of what it will be the rest of the week.
It was especially slick and tricky, as best articulated by USAC National Midget champion, and perennial contender Cannon McIntosh.
“You know, this track is very unique,” McIntosh said. “It’s small. We got the berm, which is, you don’t run a berm very often throughout the year, so just trying to time that right, you know.
“You can’t just go in there and just plow into it and that is a lot of people’s mistake is just going in there and hammering it. Everything has to be calculated and just trying to figure out the way the track is changing.
“You know, today was kind of strange in that the curb was kind of like a small ledge and then you could get above it as well. Just very, very different.”
In addition to the near moment above, it didn’t look procedural for Corey Day and Willie Kahne, who spent a good amount of time debriefing after the second session trying to make their car better than it was in 2025 after locking into the feature in 2024.
“You know, we wish we really knew,” Day said of the struggles last year. “We really don’t know. I think the track had a lot of grip in it last year compared to the year prior. Like, the curb was really thick and gripping. It would suck you in.
“Whereas, the year before it was kind of powdery and it would crumble and wasn’t completely that way. So, I think it’s like in the middle of both of those this year in practice day, but it could be way different come the prelim nights and all that. So we just are kind of trying to be ready for everything.”
Photo by: Bruce Nuttleman
Meanwhile, Nathan Crane rolled over and Ryan Bernal became the first flip of the week during the morning session.
Of Swindell Speedlab
Last year, in the pursuit of three consecutive Chili Bowl victories, Logan Seavey said he was ‘being annoying’ because every session included complaints about his throttle response. They won their prelim and finished seventh in the feature through it all.
At least on Sunday during practice, Seavey said they almost got it back, but wants a little more power put back into it.
Trial and error.
“I was pretty happy with it,” Seavey said. “We’ve changed a lot with our engines. We changed a lot last year because all I did was complain about how they throttled. The way they drive did not fit the way I wanted to drive the car. We changed a lot this year to try to help me out a little bit.
“We’re really close to where we need to be, I think. I’ve been really happy in both sessions.”
Swindell, the four-time race-winning driver said it’s a work in progress.
“We tried to do stuff to work on that more and what we did is better but they also kind of don’t run as clean as they should,” Swindell said. “It’s like, we calmed them down correctly, but it’s like we’re just not balancing something to offset the changes to get ‘em exactly right.”
Swindell has four cars this year with defending Wednesday winner Emerson Axsom, Jett Barnes and Kyle Cummins joining Seavey.
“So, we kind of swung at Emerson’s there at the end to go back to normal and it ran and then we kind of did half and half on Jett’s there (on) that last run to sort of see and I think it was okay,” he added. “So it’s like basically sitting around here trying to figure out if I’m gonna go all the way back to normal, go somewhere in between. Like Logan was happy, it just has like a little sputter crackle to it that’s not as clean as we would like it to be.
“But Logan almost asked for more motor basically today so I think we did the right thing. It’s just trying to find the kind of the happy medium to make sure it kind of takes off and does some things.”
Overall, this is where having four cars has helped the entire team.
“Today was is hectic, because we ran all four, and tomorrow we’re running three (with Race of Champions) but then it’s just one a night,” Swindell said. “So the prelim nights are not a big deal, and I can just babysit each one individually from there on out.
“Saturday, if you’re in good shape, you just throw them out there from how they were in their prelim. It’s just getting through these first two days of working on multiple cars each day.”
And, Swindell says he’s having fun, and that he really feels like a legitimate crew chief with this much volume.
“I needed my wife to go buy me an actual notebook,” he said with a laugh. “I had just been writing on cardboard and sheets of paper every time I needed to keep note of something today.”
Seavey says he likes having teammates too and it makes his car better.
“I feel like our car looks slightly different than everyone elses,” Seavey said. “So its weird to see it from the stand and watch our cars go around and the things I feel from inside the car.”
Meanwhile, quotes from Fred Vasseur suggest Ferrari are in no rush to take drastic measures in testing.
The 57-year-old points to the budget gap as a factor to consider when charting this year’s upgrade plan:
“If a team starts introducing four or five updates in the first races,” he told Gazzetta.
“Or if, for example, they have to send a new floor to a distant race like Japan or China – they’re burning through half their development budget at the start of the year.
“It will therefore be important to carefully evaluate step by step what to do, based on where we are.
“Whoever is ahead of everyone in Melbourne, at the first race, won’t necessarily have the winning car of the year.”
Fred Vasseur, Ferrari team principal, Ferrari Media Gallery.
Avoiding mistakes of the past
Ferrari know better than most teams about how deceptive the first races of the year can be. At the beginning of the 2022 regulations, for example, the Maranello team was flying high.
Two wins and one second place for Leclerc in the opening three rounds, alongside DNFs for Verstappen in Australia in Bahrain, painted a very positive picture for the season ahead.
Within a few months, however, Red Bull not only out-developed their Italian rivals, but also eliminated all reliability issues – whereas Ferrari suffered a series of devastating retirements in Spain and Baku.
Moreover, the last set of regulations showed the price of investing in the pursuit of a flawed concept.
Mercedes in 2022, Aston Martin in 2023 and even Red Bull in 2024 were headline examples of wasting resources on upgrades that were taking the car in the wrong direction.
Ferrari themselves faced this issue during the European leg of the 2024 season, with updates at the Spanish GP derailing the team’s progress that season.
Eager to avoid this fate over the next twelve months, Fred Vasseur has reason to exercise a measured approach. The question is whether the work fundamentals being developed at the factory in Maranello are strong enough to build upon.
AUGUSTA, Maine (WABI) – Those in Augusta this weekend was revving up their engines with all things motor sports related and beyond.
The 37th annual Northeast Motorsports Expo wrapped up Sunday at the Augusta Civic Center.
The event brings together many motor sport organizations as well as vendors from all over New England under a single roof. An award show also took place yesterday afternoon.
Motor vehicles highlighted this year included everything from short track and drag racing, go karts, dirt bikes and much more.
Organizer Stephen Perry says it’s also a great opportunity for fans to meet drivers before the start of this year’s motor sports season.
“At a race track it’s hard to get up close to talk to these drivers, because their doing their job that day. But here you can talk to them and ask them questions about their cars or a particular race that they’ve won. It’s a more laid-back atmosphere than at a racetrack,” says Perry.
In total, around 2,700 individuals from across New England were in attendance over the weekend.
Chris Knight has served as a senior staff writer and news editor for CATCHFENCE.com since 2001.
In his 20-plus years with CATCHFENCE.com, he has covered NASCAR’s top three national series, often breaking news and providing exclusive at-track content, including in-depth race weekend coverage.
He also offers insider coverage of the entire Motorsports platform, including the ARCA Menards Series.
In 2022, Knight became co-owner of CATCHFENCE.com.
In addition to his active duties at CATCHFENCE.com and other Motorsports-related endeavors, he is also a frequent contributor to SiriusXM Satellite Radio NASCAR Channel 90.
You can follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @Knighter01 or on Instagram, Snapchat, or Threads at @TheKnighter01.
