Sami Pajari beat his Toyota team-mate by 26.7 seconds for his second win in two weeks, and the number underneath it is Finland’s 200th in the championship. With Kalle Rovanperä away in Super Formula, a 24-year-old just extended the Flying Finn line, and Ari Vatanen was at the stop line to hand it over.

The round grew from a two-hour, forty-minute sprint into a six-hour Michelin Endurance Cup race, and the debut ran nine full-course cautions and ended under yellow after the two cars fighting for second crashed. Whether adding hours to a fast, narrow circuit tests endurance or just widens the window for contact is the question the change assumed away.

With Helmut Marko gone, Red Bull handed its junior programme to Gwen Lagrue, the Mercedes scout who signed Kimi Antonelli at eleven. Hiring the eye that built the driver now leading the championship is how an academy gets rebuilt as a role rather than one man’s judgement.

The runaway Moto3 leader will step up with the same Aspar team next year, a deal signed while he still holds a 104-point lead he has not yet converted. The seat landing before the trophy is what a settled career path looks like from the inside.

Four penalties in three weekends, the last a pit-lane overshoot at 80.1 km/h that cost him a place to his own team mate. Leclerc, same car and same circuits, has stayed out of the stewards’ room. The variable is execution, and Ferrari narrated the error itself.

LMDh hands every team a shared chassis and a shared hybrid, so the engine is the one place left to build something of your own. Ford fired up its 2027 endurance V8 for the first time on July 16, built in Dearborn on the block that powers the road Mustang.

The FIA swapped Barcelona and Monza in for Qatar and Bahrain to close 2026, forced by the conflict in the Middle East. Trading two rounds worth 1.5 times the points for standard six-hour races dropped the drivers’ points still on offer from 130 to 104, and the arithmetic favours whoever is already leading.