Red Bull pinpointed the Spanish GP as a potential Championship-defining moment, with the Austrian team optimistic the new flexi-wing directive would turn the tide in the favour.

Christian Horner and Helmut Marko, to varying degrees, were vocal about their optimism heading into Barcelona.

Ultimately, this conviction was misplaced – as McLaren maintained an advantage over the rest of the field.

Thanks to a crafty three-stop strategy, Red Bull managed to put the papaya duo under pressure.

This hard work was undone after the Safety Car, which triggered a sequence of events that culminated in a 10-second penalty for Verstappen after intentionally hitting into George Russell.

Helmut Marko admits he does not have an explanation for the Dutchman’s decision-making.

Helmut Marko cannot understand Max Verstappen “thought process” during Russell clash

There are few people with greater confidence in the abilities of Max Verstappen than Helmut Marko.

The 81-year-old was instrumental in the 4-time Champion’s progression into Formula 1 and later ascension to Red Bull.

Because of this, Marko is typically one of the most vocal to praise and, in other cases, defend Verstappen from race to race.

Last weekend was an exception, though, with the Austrian offering no defence for his driver’s incident with George Russell.

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Marko has provided some insight into why Red Bull initially asked Verstappen to give Russell the place back – and his reaction to the collision:

“The internal discussion was that it was 50-50,” he told ServusTV, per motorsport.com.

“Since it happened right after the Safety Car period, the impact of a 10-second penalty it much greater than if it happens mid-race.

“So, that was one thing.

“Max didn’t want to give the position back, but he was instructed to do so. He did it under protest.

“Max lifted off the throttle, so we all assumed he was letting Russell through.

“And then suddenly he accelerated again. I don’t know what kind of misjudgement or thought process was going on inside him.

“And then, as they say, all hell broke loose.”

A pivotal moment in the Championship

For all the emphasis on the flexi-wing regulations, the impact of these changes was minimal.

To some extent, it could be argued that Red Bull were competitive enough to put McLaren under pressure throughout the race.

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Even taking into account their bold strategy, Verstappen was still contending for the victory until the final stages.

At the same time, there is no evidence to suggest this was directly because of the FIA’s clampdown on front wings.

The reigning Champion has already claimed two race victories in 2025.

Regardless of the technical directive’s impact, Spain was still host to a pivotal moment in this season’s title race.

Max Verstappen dropped from 3rd at the restart to 10th after his penalty was applied – a significant 14 point loss.

This has allowed both Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris to create a sizable buffer in the Championship.

Even if the Red Bull driver had managed to cling into the podium, the task of defending his title would have been difficult.

After losing so many points, however, this challenge is far more unlikely.

Unless additional upgrades to the RB21 can arrive quickly and deliver instant performance, Red Bull will be reliant on Verstappen producing some heroics (alongside some blunders from McLaren) to reassert themselves in the title race.

Main photo: Mark Thompson/Getty Images (via Red Bull content pool)

Carson Hocevar continues to make a ton of noise on the racetrack. After his latest on-track incident with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. during Sunday’s race at Nashville Superspeedway, FOX Sports analyst Kevin Harvick questions Hocevar’s place within the garage.

“I don’t think he has the respect of the garage right now, personally,” Harvick said on Tuesday’s Happy Hour podcast.

Hocevar has ruffled the feathers of several drivers in the garage throughout his brief NASCAR tenure. Sunday, it was Stenhouse who took issue with Hocevar. Stenhouse went for a spin through Turns 3 and 4 on Lap 106 in Stage 2. Hocevar, riding behind Stenhouse in the corner, clearly got in the back of Stenhouse’s No. 47 Chevrolet. 

The interesting part of this is that Hocevar, to this point, has avoided extreme trouble coming back his way. On top of that, he’s fast. He finished P2 at Nashville, his second runner-up finish of the season. The more Hocevar runs with the Cup Series’ best, the more he’s going to continue ruffling feathers, Harvick said.

“They’re going to like him less because he’s faster than them and that sometimes in itself without running over people, pisses people off because he’s going to take someone’s spot. He’s not going anywhere because he’s going faster than they are,” Harvick said. “His ability to drive the car fast and apparently, relate that to his team guys, is making those cars faster. Having that cornerstone in a company is important, but companies also look for the fastest guys.

“The fastest guys will learn how to manage all that stuff. Now, the competitors will stir it all up and say he’s a hack or whatever it is, but in the end, he’s faster than most of you.”

Kevin Harvick reacts to Carson Hocevar controversy at Nashville, future payback

This is hardly the first time Hocevar has been involved in conflict with another driver. He’s not the first driver to go through this. But Harvick is blown away by Hocevar’s ability to block out the noise and keep pushing.

“Here’s the thing about Carson: Carson’s fast and is, to me, he’s able to keep making these mistakes and not let it mentally bother him. Not all people are like that way. When Ross Chastain — we saw everything that happened with Rick Hendrick — it slowed him down for a while,” Harvick said. “It has not slowed down Hocevar up until this point. And he’s got the speed to be able to back up what he does on the racetrack, and he’s got the speed to overcome these types of scenarios.

“But he’s got the mental ability to just let it go. It didn’t bother him the rest of the race. It isn’t the first time that this has happened this year or last year and it is going to ruffle some feathers along the way.”

In this episode of The Creative Drive, host Taro Koki sits down with the one and only Larry Chen.

Larry is one of the most iconic and influential automotive photographers and content creators in the world today. Known for his unmistakable style, relentless work ethic, and deep love for car culture, Larry has become the go-to visual storyteller for some of the biggest names in motorsports and the aftermarket world.

Starting from humble beginnings shooting cars on the streets of Los Angeles, Larry turned his passion into a career by mastering the craft of automotive photography — capturing not just cars, but the spirit behind them. His work spans every corner of the car world: from grassroots drift events to the global stage of Formula Drift, from SEMA builds to Pikes Peak, from classic JDM icons to electric hypercars.

He is the official photographer for Formula Drift, a Canon Explorer of Light (one of the most prestigious honors in the photography world), and a creative force behind brands and countless OEM and aftermarket brands. If you’ve seen a jaw-dropping rolling shot, an epic drift angle frozen in time, or a SEMA build immortalized before it hit the floor, chances are, Larry Chen was behind the lens.

Campbell crossed the finish line third, fading after an adjustment on the final pit stop of the event.

“The car drove really good in practice. After the first red, right before we got tires, I figured it would be us and the 71 sailing off. The car was good. We obviously made a little bit of an adjustment, so we slipped back to third. All in all, a good finish. I’m really proud of these guys and we represented Berlin Raceway really well.

Erik Jones, another former winner of the event now on the NASCAR circuit, finished fourth. The Byron, Michigan native qualified on the pole and started eighth following the invert. However, passing proved much more difficult for Jones as he wrestled with the balance on his car.

“You know, it’s a new car for us and we just kind of struggled with the balance,” said Jones. “It had speed, there with the pole, but just really free in the first segment. We put tires on and it got pretty tight at the end. We just kind of missed that adjustment, over-adjusted a little bit.

“Build a notebook, try to get better for the [Battle of Berlin] 250. I feel like we learned about this car, and need to button it up and get a little bit better.”

Tyler Rycenga finished fifth, with Terry Senneker crossing the line sixth. Chase Burda, who led the race’s first 36 laps after starting second, finished seventh, with Joe Bush, Dylan Stovall and Michael Atwell rounding out the top 10.

The next event on the UARA National schedule is the Motor Mountain Masters 150 at Jennerstown Speedway. That race is scheduled for Thursday, June 19.

-Photo credit: Matt Prieur

When the No. 77 Spire Motorsports team unloads Carson Hocevar’s chariot for the upcoming race weekend at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez in Mexico City, the Chevrolet race car will have a very different look.

Totalplay, Mexico’s leading telecommunications provider, has landed a partnership with the team, which will see it serve as the primary sponsor for Hocevar and the No. 77 team. As a result, Hocevar will carry a bold and bright race car around the 17-turn road course all weekend long.

Hocevar, who will race at his home track, Michigan International Speedway, this weekend, is excited to compete in the first internationally contested NASCAR Cup Series event since a series of offseason exhibition events that were contested in Japan from 1996 to 1998.

“We’ve seen a lot of growth for the sport over the last several years, and because of that, I think it’s time that we have an international race and give that a try,” said Hocevar. “This car has put on a good race on the road courses and it will be interesting to see how it does on a track where we see other high-level motorsports series compete.”

The 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Rookie of the Year, who finished third at Watkins Glen International a season ago, is excited to see where his team stacks up at the road course in Mexico.

“I’m looking forward to seeing how we unload in Mexico. The No. 77 team has put in a lot of effort to improve and find consistency from week to week, no matter what type of course we’re racing. We finished 2024 with a strong finish at Watkins Glen and had made a lot of progress overall with our road course program,” Hocevar explained. “I expect we’ll have speed, and since everyone is on an even playing field to start, we should have a good shot at a decent starting position. From there, we’ll just learn with every lap and hope to be fighting for the win.”

Hocevar, who is coming off of a career-best tying runner-up finish at Nashville Superspeedway this past weekend, sits 17th in the NASCAR Cup Series championship standings with 12 races remaining in the regular season. Hocevar is only four points below the NASCAR Cup Series Playoff cutline entering this weekend’s FireKeepers Casino 400 at Michigan.

The NASCAR Cup Series Viva Mexico 250 from Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez is set for Sunday, June 15, and the event will be streamed live on Prime Video with coverage beginning at 3:00 PM ET.

Grand Canyon University Motorsports, the team on campus known for building racecars, just returned from the big Formula SAE competition in Michigan, and although it didn’t get the chance to race, it continues in its goal to cross the finish line of completing a vehicle cleared for competition.

The club, which got its start as a project of the campus’s chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, recently switched lanes to become a club sport. That move is huge, opening the doors to more opportunities for funding.

Another big change: Its home is no longer under the ramp of the university’s 33rd Avenue parking structure.

“How many times did I hit my head on the fire suppression (system)?” said Davis Wright, a junior mechanical engineering major.

It now operates out of the College of Engineering and Technology garage, which are three large shipping containers adjacent to Building 1.

Those are just a few of the strides the club took after attending Formula SAE Michigan recently in Brooklyn, Michigan, where 107 registered teams of university undergraduate and graduate students vied for a spot on the racetrack – the Michigan International Speedway – after spending the past academic year conceiving, designing, fabricating and developing small, formula-style racecars.

Despite not advancing past the preliminary rounds, the team beat other notable university teams in those early sessions; it was the furthest GCU Motorsports has progressed in the Formula SAE (formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers) competition.

Back from the big show in Michigan, “Now we can actually tackle the more nitty-gritty of the engineering side of these cars,” said Grant Garcia, a senior mechanical engineering major.

That means building a sturdy foundation, from setting a project management template, to establishing a system that enables new members to step into their roles more easily, to a detailed web design model.

“Once we make it to competition, it will help us move up in rank because we’ll be able to have a more presentable design presentation or a well-built cost report for cost competition,” Garcia said.

The GCU contingent, led by former president Tyler Palanuk, Wright (the powertrain lead) and Garcia (the incoming club president), had the chance to visit with more than 600 representatives from U.S. colleges and foreign countries at the Formula SAE event.

Judges examined each university team’s designs, which those teams support with data, simulations, and production and mass production cost estimates.

Wright and Garcia appreciated the support they received from judges and several universities, including Arizona State, to put the club in a better spot to succeed next year.

“All of us gain so much knowledge that now we have the ability to not just pass down this knowledge to people below us, but kind of build the foundation so we’re a lot stronger and more well equipped for the next year,” Wright said. “… I think our new goal is accomplishing all these other tasks so that now we can ideally start rising up in the ranking after we go through competition.”

Paul Lambertson, College of Engineering and Technology dean and GCU Motorsports’ supervisor, remembers some of the team’s challenges. He met several times with Palanuk to “try to restart the engine of a great team,” he said.

“When you think about how the team got through all of the technical challenges and was only a few minutes, maybe a few seconds, shy of getting actually through that last challenge and getting onto the racetrack, that’s huge,” Lambertson said. “And so looking at that, building on that this year, I see really great things happening for the team.”

Club leaders encourage team members to attend workshops that will help them use machinery and other equipment and allow them more access to working on the car. They’re also receptive to input from students with project management backgrounds.

“I can’t tell you how many people are in that club that don’t know about cars,” said Wright, who has worked as a professional mechanic for the last two years. “And that’s totally fine, because at the end of the day, you can boil these down to some basic engineering principles and then just kind of focus on those. And then through focusing on those, you start to learn how cars work.

“… Also, we don’t expect new members to hit the ground knowing exactly how to time an engine. I try to really divert my focus into teaching people how these basic systems of car work in the most simplest of form so they can try to have a baseline understanding of where they can pair that with some newly acquired engineering knowledge to help integrating themselves into whatever subsystem team they want – whether that’s electrical or powertrain or aerodynamics.”

There’s motivation from current members and incentive from prospective members hanging in the front of the College of Engineering and Technology Building. Hovering over the conference table in the front corner is last year’s race car structure, powder coated in GCU purple.

“Whenever I give tours, I point out that car,” Lambertson said.

Shining that spotlight on the racecar, built by students, is intentional.

Said Lambertson, “There’s all of this stuff that we’re trying to do to build momentum to help make the team successful.”

GCU News senior writer Mark Gonzales can be reached at [email protected]

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