In the round-up: W Series ended its season early due to financial trouble, but is confident it can return in 2023.
In brief
W Series wants to keep F1 support status despite early season end
W Series announced on Monday the final two events of its 2022 season in North America would not take place due to financial concerns. But it is already talking of a 2023 comeback and its CEO Catherine Bond Muir still intends for the championship to continue to run in support of Formula 1 during grand prix weekends.
“Certainly we do want to still be on the F1 support bill, but obviously going forward, we need to be mindful of our costs,” she said. “It would be prudent to have more European races than we have and European races are somewhat of a scarcity with F1.”
Although W Series raced alongside F1’s other regular support series this year, it also picked up spots at events where Formula 2 and Formula 3 were not racing. With those series yet to reveal their 2023 calendars, there may be less space for W Series next year despite the F1 schedule expanding to 24 grands prix.
“We haven’t been told yet what races we have been offered. F1 come back to us and offer us certain races and then we go from there. The four European races that we had this year were the four European races that we were offered.”
AlphaTauri considered Red Bull’s F1 juniors before signing de Vries
AlphaTauri team principal Franz Tost says Red Bull’s junior drivers were considered to replace the departing Pierre Gasly next year before the team pursued IndyCar star Colton Herta and eventually settled on Nyck de Vries.
“All the Red Bull young drivers were taken into consideration,” Tost said. “There’s Liam Lawson, there’s [Ayumu] Iwasa, there’s [Dennis] Hauger in Formula 2, then [Isack] Hadjar in Formula 3, but they all still miss experience. They need to do another year or two in their categories and then we will see what the future will bring.”
The team’s strategy since being bought by Red Bull ahead of the 2006 season has been to promote the brand’s juniors into F1, and has rarely looked outside of that pool of talent when signing new drivers. However De Vries had no Red Bull affiliation before being signed and is already well established in professional motorsport, having won the Formula E championship last year.
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