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Companies at the forefront of AI would naturally like to stay at the forefront, so it’s no surprise they want to stay close to smaller startups that are putting some of their newest advancements to work.
Last month, for example, Neo, a startup accelerator founded by Silicon Valley investor Ali Partovi, announced that OpenAI and Microsoft have offered to provide free software and advice to companies in a new track focused on artificial intelligence.
Now, another Bay Area outfit — House Fund, which invests in startups with ties to UC Berkeley — says it is launching an AI accelerator and that, similarly, OpenAI, Microsoft, Databricks, and Google’s Gradient Ventures are offering participating startups free and early access to tech from their companies, along with mentorship from top AI founders and executives at these companies.
We talked with House Fund founder Jeremy Fiance over the weekend to get a bit more color about the program, which will replace a broader-based accelerator program House Fund has run and whose alums include an additive manufacturing software company, Dyndrite, and the managed app development platform Chowbotics, whose most recent round in January brought the company’s total funding to more than $60 million.
For founders interested in learning more, the new AI accelerator program runs for two months, kicking off in early July and ending in early September. Six or so companies will be accepted, with the early application deadline coming up next week on April 13th. (The final application deadline is on June 1.) As for the time commitment involved across those two months, every startup could have a different experience, says Fiance. “We’re there when you need us, and we’re good at staying out of the way.”
There will be the requisite kickoff retreat to spark the program and founders to get to know one another. Candidates who are accepted will also have access to some of UC Berkeley’s renowned AI professors, including Michael Jordan, Ion Stoica, and Trevor Darrell. And they can opt into dinners and events in collaboration with these various constituents.
As for some of the financial dynamics, every startup that goes through the program will receive a $1 million investment on a $10 million post-money SAFE note. Importantly, too, as with the House Fund’s venture dollars, its AI accelerator is seeking startups that have at least one Berkeley-affiliated founder on the co-founding team. That includes alumni, faculty, PhDs, postdocs, staff, students, dropouts, and other affiliates.
There is no demo day. Instead, says Fiance, founders will receive “directed, personal introductions” to the VCs who best fit with their startups.
Given the buzz over AI, the new program could supercharge House Fund, the venture organization, which is already growing fast. Fiance launched it in 2016 with just $6 million and it now manages $300 million in assets, including on behalf of Berkeley Endowment Management Company and the University of California.
At the same time, the competition out there is fierce and growing more so by the day.
Though OpenAI has offered to partner with House Fund, for example, the San Francisco-based company announced its own accelerator back in November. Called Converge, the cohort was to be made up of 10 or so founders who received $1 million each and admission to five weeks of office hours, workshops and other events that ended and that received their funding from the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Y Combinator, the biggest accelerator in the world, is also oozing with AI startups right now, all of them part of a winter class that will be talking directly with investors this week via demo days that are taking place tomorrow, April 5th, and on Thursday. | AI Startups |
Presented by American Edge Project
Happy Friday, and welcome to the latest edition of our Future In Five Questions. This week I spoke with former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, now co-chair of the centrist Forward political party, which is advocating for ranked-choice voting and non-partisan primaries. Yang is also calling for a federal agency to regulate artificial intelligence, and said he remains hopeful Congress can stay ahead of the curve on AI despite failing to regulate tech for the last 25 years. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
What’s one underrated big idea?
People are underestimating the effect that AI will have on genomic sequencing and therapeutics. I talked to teams who are making rapid headway on treatments for everything from Alzheimer’s to different forms of cancer, to some of the signs of aging. This is an area that some of my friends expect rapid advances in — not all at once, but there will likely be a handful of significant breakthroughs in the coming months and years.
Medical researchers use AI to build sophisticated models that they can test things out on more quickly, ruling out various compounds and formulating new ones. They’re speeding up their iteration cycle very significantly, applying AI and computation to some of the compound and drug research projects that might have taken years before some of the more recent developments. Now it gets shortened to months or weeks.
What’s a technology you think is overhyped?
I just think it’s tough to get someone to wear a VR/AR headset for a particular period of time. I remember when I was seeing all the ads come out on TV and it made it seem like something a casual mom would enjoy, but it’s just a tough form factor. There are some people in my network that are curious and buy it, but don’t really use it regularly. So there’s a tough set of hurdles to overcome. People want to be comfortable in real life. People want to not look awkward in real life. It might be a context where you need to leap-frog goggles and move toward something more comfortable like contact lenses, but then you open up an entire regulatory can of worms.
What book most shaped your conception of the future?
I will call out Erik Brynjolfsson, who wrote a couple of books on automation and innovation that I found to be forward-thinking. He’s a Stanford professor and he’s the co-author of books that I thought were powerful, including “The Second Machine Age.”
I also have high regard for Martin Ford, who wrote the “Rise of the Robots,” which detailed some of the impacts of automation on workers in a way that I hadn’t seen prior.
What could the government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t?
Ranked-choice voting and nonpartisan primaries, which you can regard as a form of technology. Right now, the reason so many technology issues are falling by the wayside is that our leaders’ political incentives are unrelated to making good policy. If you were to have ranked-choice voting and nonpartisan primaries, you would unite the public interest and politics to a much higher degree. That’s the single biggest thing we could do that might improve the formulation and implementation of effective policy on technology, and other matters.
In terms of technology itself, I believe we need a dedicated agency for AI. There’s a wave of both innovation and application coming via AI and it’s going to develop extraordinarily quickly. Having a sluggish bureaucratic agency response is going to be a real problem.
I unfortunately joke that D.C. has been on a 25-year tape delay, because of the fact that we have a gerontocracy and the politics are so divorced from the policies. We saw the total absence of intelligent regulation of social media. Decades later we’re seeing the effects of that. I don’t think the feds are going to be asleep at the switch for 20 years where AI is concerned, but you want a nimble, dedicated set of regulators that are directly in touch with the technologists and firms, and companies that are deploying these tools and developing them.
What has surprised you most this year?
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the relevancy of the resilience of the economy. I talked to a lot of folks in different industries, and their concern level was high at the beginning of the year. It could be that we’ve just been fortunate that a recession hasn’t come yet, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
The U.S.’s thus-far slow-and-steady approach to AI regulation has earned plaudits from one of the industry’s biggest players.
POLITICO’s Brendan Bordelon writes in today’s Morning Tech newsletter that Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, told reporters in Washington yesterday that “Sometimes it’s not terrible to be a little incremental — to see exactly how it’s developing in society, what risks are manifesting and what benefits are out there, and how do we tweak and adjust,” praising a proposed bill that would set up a Congressional blue-ribbon commission to investigate AI risks.
Walker said he didn’t see a “huge amount of daylight” between that bill and the nascent effort by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to put forth a Congressional AI framework. And he certainly compared it favorably to Europe’s proposed AI Act, saying “the race should be for the best AI regulations, not the first AI regulations.” — Derek Robertson
Is the high tech industry losing steam as a driver of the U.S. economy?
A study from the Economic Innovation Group claims that’s the case when looking at economic dynamism — or companies’ ability to start up and grow — which shows a steady decline over the past 20 years. (They use a scholarly definition of “high tech” that includes industries in which STEM jobs comprise five times more than the national average.) They also found that workers are moving between companies less frequently, and those companies are concentrating in already-large metropolitan areas.
That means that the industry theoretically driving the future looks… a lot like the present, or even the past. “The High Tech sector was formerly shielded from such phenomenon [sic], serving as an enclave where disruption and constant change persisted,” the authors write. “Yet now it appears that this sector–which employs much of the economy’s most prized scientific and technical talent–looks increasingly similar to the rest of the economy on these measures.”
You might recall that last year’s CHIPS and Science Act allocated some of its funding for “Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs” across the country, but the debt ceiling deal called into question how many of them will actually be given money by Congress. — Derek Robertson
- Take a closer look at exactly what Apple means by “spatial computing.”
- Palau is offering regulation-skirting “digital residencies.”
- Meet Bloomberg’s top 10 AI startups.
- Meredith Whittaker says AI is already being deployed as surveillance.
- How much labor does it actually take to build massive AI tools?
Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([email protected]); Derek Robertson ([email protected]); Mohar Chatterjee ([email protected]); and Steve Heuser ([email protected]). Follow us @DigitalFuture on Twitter. | AI Startups |
VC firm Sapphire Ventures says that it plans to invest more than $1 billion in AI-related enterprise startups, demonstrating the strong appetite among investors for cutting-edge AI tech.
Reuters reports that the $1 billion in capital will come from Sapphire’s existing funds, which have $10 billion under management and about $3 billion waiting to the deployed. The majority will be in the form of direct investments in AI startups, while some will go to early-stage AI-focused venture funds through Sapphire’s limited partner fund, Sapphire Partners.
Sapphire co-founder and CEO Nino Marakovic says that Sapphire will focus primarily on business-to-business software companies that “make AI easily accessible” by “leveraging data to better predict outcomes.” Beyond this, the firm will back AI and machine learning startups improving business incomes for specific verticals, like manufacturing and healthcare.
“AI represents a profound technology shift, and our $1 billion commitment reflects our conviction in the opportunity,” Marakovic said in a canned statement. “We believe companies are only beginning to see the benefits of AI and GenAI, specifically. Soon, we expect there to be a massive, AI-driven productivity boom that will benefit workers at every level and create value throughout the global economy. We’re eager to back the next wave of enterprise innovators driving this evolution.”
As a part of the $1 billion push, Sapphire also intends to create an “AI Community” as a part of its Sapphire Communities platform for portfolio company CEOs and executives. And it will continue to implement AI across its internal workflows and incorporate AI tools across job functions to “help drive efficiencies,” Marakovic said.
AI startups, supercharged by the hype around generative AI, continue to perform exceptionally well relative to the broader market — collectively raising $15.5 billion this year, according to PitchBook data. Deal pace has remained steady, and the median post-money valuation for AI firms is up 109.8% from last year.
Should the rosiest predictions come true, the investments could pay dividends. AI has the potential to contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, a recent PwC report found, while the generative AI market alone could add as much as $4.4 trillion to the economy annually, according to McKinsey. (That’s assuming that the job losses resulting from AI’s adoption don’t outpace the productivity gains, of course — which is far from a guaranteed thing.)
Austin, Texas-based Sapphire, whose AI investments include Clari, DataRobot, Moveworks and ThoughtSpot, isn’t the only firm betting substantial cash on AI ventures. Corporate arms are becoming increasingly leveraged in the sector, as well, chasing after the enormous potential windfall.
Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce’s VC division, plans to pour $500 million into startups developing generative AI technologies. Workday recently added $250 million to its existing VC fund specifically to back AI and machine learning startups. OpenAI, the company behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT, has raised a $175 million fund to invest in AI startups. Last month, Dropbox launched a $50 million AI-focused venture fund. And AWS a few weeks ago said that it aims to put $100 million into a program to fund generative AI initiatives. | AI Startups |
- Apple has never talked much pre-release about development of products and services, and that's led to concerns that in the case of artificial intelligence it is falling behind rivals.
- However, Apple has acquired dozens of AI startups in recent years, and embedded software in updated smartphones, computers, watches, apps, operating systems and Vision Pro VR headset.
- Apple's biggest advantage is its installed base of over two billion users in the iOS ecosystem, and that may continue to be the largest opportunity for Cupertino to leverage machine learning.
Since 2015, Apple has acquired more than two dozen artificial intelligence companies. They're hardly household names, among them Emotient, Laserlike, Drive.ai, AI.Music and WaveOne. But Apple engineers have embedded the procured technologies into the company's continuously upgraded smartphones, computers and watches, streaming music and television services, operating systems, and myriad mobile applications, as well as the Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, scheduled for release next year.
Cupertino-based Apple doesn't talk publicly about AI acquisitions and has generally been tight-lipped about its overall strategy in the space, including its longstanding internal R&D in AI, even as big tech competitors — Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon — are loquacious in promoting their generative AI chatbots and large language model (LLM) platforms.
"That's the DNA of Cook and Cupertino. They tend not to talk until they release," said Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives.
Publicity is not the only difference to glean from Apple's AI approach to date and the future impact on its consumer-centric business model.
While its rivals are focused on building stand-alone generative AI models, Apple has targeted machine learning infrastructure.
"Apple looks at acquisitions of leading teams of talent in each domain that can bring the machine-learning techniques to particular consumer products," said Brendan Burke, an emerging technology analyst at research firm PitchBook, which has tracked 30 AI acquisitions by Apple over the past eight years. "That's led the acquisition strategy to focus on consumer applications of AI primarily, but also operational techniques for machine-learning deployment and edge devices, as well as limited bets on the future of deep learning and more horizontal technologies," he said.
Apple, which is scheduled to report earnings Thursday, did not respond to requests for comment.
When Apple does talk about its AI ambitions, it is more circumspect, whether that was when CEO Tim Cook appeared on "Good Morning America," or in an earnings report call with analysts and investors in August. On that call, Cook said, "We view AI and machine learning as core, fundamental technologies that are integral to virtually every product that we build. And, of course, we've been doing research across a wide range of AI technologies, including generative AI, for years," he said. "We're going to continue investing, innovating and responsibly advancing our products with these technologies, with the goal of enriching people's lives. We tend to announce things as they come to market, and that's our MO, and I'd like to stick to that."
To that point, the latest iPhone and Watch models showcase Apple's AI prowess. The iPhone 15 features several AI technologies, such as personal voice, which lets users synthesize a voice like their own so they can speak words they type in FaceTime and phone calls, and live voicemail, a real-time transcription of messages. The upgraded camera uses machine-learning AI to tell the difference between a person and an animal in the frame. The Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 incorporate AI into the double-tap feature to more easily perform tasks, a brighter display, smarter Siri and advanced health monitoring.
AI will also be built into Vision Pro, especially its integration with FaceTime, Apple said in announcing the headset, which it calls a spatial computer. Users will be able to create avatars of themselves via machine-learning techniques, allowing them to do things together like watch a movie, browse photos or collaborate on a presentation.
Still, the progress app by app and device by device has not protected Apple from criticism that it's already late to the game.
Laura Martin, a tech analyst at Needham, is among those who say Apple is "far behind" its big tech rivals. "The future is generative AI and Apple isn't doing that," she said. Even so, Martin added, "I'm not sure it matters, because they have an ecosystem, an economic model" that is geared toward machine-learning. "Apple's ecosystem is fine and will keep growing," she said.
The early edge in generative AI is paying off for rivals, as was evidenced by Microsoft's recent earnings report. But the one advantage Apple has that its tech rivals don't: the world's most monetized installed base, more than two billion users running its iOS operating software on devices.
That's why bullish analysts don't see the competition for Apple as being straight up against the generative AI platforms being pursued by Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Comparisons being made today to the first wave of cloud adoption – and generative AI ecosystems now being referred to by some as Cloud 2.0 – are a good place to look at why it may be less a race than parallel development process. Even as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and to a lesser extent Google Cloud, gobbled up market share as more enterprises migrated to cloud-based computing, Apple made no play for that market.
"They wont look at AI from the outside looking in. They will be big player in AI even though the perception is they are late to the game," Ives said. "We believe they are on the cusp of what will be the introduction of an AI App Store over the next year," he said.
The billions being spent on AI
Last week, Bloomberg reported that in a race to "catch up" Apple would spend $1 billion a year on generative AI. Ives says he believes that's a significant under-estimate of the amount Apple will spend, and already has been spending, on AI. He expects Apple to spend as much as $5 billion a year on AI and says it already has spent $10 billion on AI research & development in the past few years to create the foundation for developers to build AI apps – a level that would be comparable to Microsoft's spending. "That's the holy grail for them, the AI App Store. That's where they can monetize in a historic way," Ives said.
It's a growth opportunity that would leverage what's been one of the most important aspects of the Apple story in recent years, the growth of its services business, which is now a $100 billion revenue stream on its own. Within an AI App Store, the opportunities can range far beyond core Apple offerings like Music, to a wide variety of health and fitness apps, for example, and in the end offer an additional $5 billion to $10 billion a year in services revenue, by Ives' count.
Cook's single mention of generative AI to analysts helped fuel speculation as to just what Apple will — or won't — do in that highly competitive field, led by Microsoft's involvement with OpenAI and ChatGPT and its own Bing AI chatbot, Google's Bard bot and Meta's LLM-based virtual assistant, Meta AI.
In July, Bloomberg reported that Apple was working on AI tools to challenge those bots with its own LLM, dubbed Ajax, and has created a chatbot, Apple GPT, for internal use.
In August, the Financial Times reported that Apple was "bulking up its expertise in generative AI" by hiring dozens of people in California, Seattle, Paris and Beijing to work on LLMs. In fact, Apple's careers website invites job-seekers to "join a team of researchers and engineers with a proven track record in a variety of machine learning methods," including generative AI models.
There is a downside to its ecosystem, however, which adheres to data privacy and design excellence, and might be an obstacle for whatever Apple does in generative AI, Burke said, or in the least, explain why it may debut at a slower pace. "Apple only wants to release products that are safe, privacy-focused and meet internal quality standards, so that limits their speed of deployment," he said. "So I think Apple will wait to release any platform technologies until they are really additive to its ecosystem."
In the meantime, Burke said, it is reasonable to assume that Apple will continue to invest in AI, either with more acquisitions of startups or partnerships with developers, and deals being struck by competitors won't go unnoticed. Referring to Amazon's recent up-to-$4-billion investment in Anthropic, a startup that's launched an AI chatbot called Claude 2, he said, "Apple could feel similar pressure to work with leading startups to supplement its internal R&D efforts," he said. "Particularly as startups continue to achieve state-of-the-art results with LLMs and incorporate new image- and video-based features that could be relevant to Apple. That could be a valid complement to what it's doing."
Correction: Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic. An earlier version of this story misstated the terms of the investment. | AI Startups |
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In January 2023, ChatGPT, the now ubiquitous chatbot from OpenAI, reached 100 million active monthly users, outpacing TikTok by seven months as the fastest platform to reach this milestone.
The chatbot’s ubiquitous presence and popularity have renewed a decades-long debate about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI).
Google search trends for AI have soared since the service launched, and companies are rushing to lap up domains from Anguilla, population 15,000, looking to benefit from its .ai domain registration.
At the same time, investors are pouring money into generative AI startups, hoping to catch lightning in a bottle and capitalize on this technology to find the next big tech breakthrough. As one AI investor recently told the New York Times, “We’re in that phase of the market where it’s, like, let 1,000 flowers bloom.”
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Today, the hype cycle is so hot that even companies without legitimate AI credentials are trying to align themselves with the technology, prompting the Federal Trade Commission to issue a terse warning to companies: “If you think you can get away with baseless claims that your product is AI-enabled, think again.”
The hype cycle can be so ludicrous that Axios reporter Felix Salmon recently explained, “When a company starts talking loudly about its AI abilities, the first question should always be: “Why is this company talking loudly about its AI abilities?”
To be sure, this isn’t the first rodeo for AI speculation. The technology is more than half a century old, and it’s been through many boom and bust cycles that yielded significant technological advances but have continually failed to fully live up to the hype.
In other words, developing AI products and services that are repeatable, scalable and sellable has historically been difficult and often prohibitively expensive. However, by looking at the ways AI is already making the most significant impact, we can paint a clearer and possibly more accurate picture of what it will look like moving forward.
Here are three ways AI is impacting our world today, which can provide a useful roadmap for how it might actually change the world tomorrow.
1. Helping people make better decisions
In our data-saturated digital-first world, AI is helping people make better decisions. It can sift through billions of data points, synthesizing key insights and equipping people to make pivotal decisions.
In this way, AI is a tool to empower people, sharpening their intuition and enabling them to make more informed decisions. It’s not a substitute for human discernment but a powerful aid that enhances our ability to make better real-world choices.
Take the security industry as an example.
It’s difficult to find a physical space that isn’t monitored by at least one camera. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that installed surveillance cameras grew by 50% between 2015 and 2018, exceeding 70 million cameras by the decade’s end. Monitoring the footage is an entirely different story, and tasking humans with watching endless uninteresting camera feeds is a recipe for boredom and inattention.
That’s where AI steps in, acting as a vigilant and tireless sentinel. By filtering out the mundane, such as rustling trees or passing cars, AI zeroes in on the most pertinent information. It’s a whiz at detecting anomalies, like unexpected activity in a deserted parking lot. Even so, there is a meaningful difference between identification and discernment.
This is where human judgment swoops in. Security personnel or other trained experts can review the camera footage and assess and address accordingly any suspicious behavior. In this tandem of AI and human expertise, we witness the birth of a comprehensive and effective security system, reaping the benefits of both worlds.
Simply put, AI is a catalyst, powering more efficient and effective decision-making across myriad domains. From interpreting earnings reports to bolstering security intelligence, AI amplifies our capacity for sound judgment but never replaces it.
2. Analyzing risk to enable better safety solutions
Rising concerns over cybersecurity and physical security threats have led many individuals and businesses to prioritize their safety. AI plays a vital role in improving both physical and cyber protection by assessing risks and streamlining user experiences, ultimately enhancing safety for everyone.
One example is companies’ growing adoption of two-factor authentication (2FA) to safeguard user accounts and network access. While this may cause some inconvenience, it significantly bolsters security for all users. Banks, too, have implemented 2FA for more secure transactions.
Consumers find it incredibly annoying and chafe at the extra friction it imposes on their online experiences. AI enables us to surpass basic 2FA by introducing more advanced authentication methods that do not sacrifice user experience.
This principle also applies to physical security. For instance, fans attending sporting events often face long lines and security checks at venue entrances, which can negatively impact their overall experience, so venues are using AI-powered security solutions to better serve and protect their patrons.
Regardless of the scenario, AI allows companies to analyze risk to enable better security solutions that elevate customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Personalizing and enhancing consumer experiences
A compelling customer experience is key to long-term business success. More than half of consumers say they will abandon a brand after a single bad customer experience.
AI’s remarkable potential to generate deeply customized and improved consumer experiences across diverse sectors is undeniably transformative. By evaluating user data, preferences and behaviors, AI enables digital platforms to offer recommendations, services and products tailored to each person’s requirements and preferences.
The entertainment industry is already experiencing a revolution through AI-driven personalization. Streaming platforms such as Netflix and Spotify use AI algorithms to examine user preferences, viewing history and listening patterns, creating individualized playlists or film suggestions.
This approach is quickly becoming ubiquitous across sectors as it enhances users’ engagement and satisfaction, making it more likely that they will continue to use the service and recommend it to others.
Real-world AI matters most
The transformative power of AI is evident in its ability to reshape industries and improve various aspects of our daily lives.
From empowering individuals to make better decisions to providing advanced safety solutions and delivering personalized consumer experiences, AI has proven its potential to bring about game-changing advancements.
The AI hype cycle is far from over. However, as we contemplate the technology’s incredible advancements, we can look to existing use cases and implications to better understand its future impact and potential.
Peter Evans is CEO of Xtract One Technologies.
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Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2017, Redwood City, California-based Airkit was created by Adam Evans and Stephen Ehikian, who sold a previous big data startup called RelateIQ to Salesforce for $390 million in 2014.
In its original guise, Airkit was a self-serve customer engagement platform that allowed businesses to integrate data silos and help with use-cases such as onboarding new users. But last month, the company relaunched as Airkit.ai and launched its first out-of-the-box integrated product, a GPT-4-based platform that allows companies such as OpenTable and ShipBob to build specialized customer service chatbots that can deal with queries around order status, refunds, product information, and more.
Airkit.ai’s connection with Salesforce doesn’t stop at the founders’ previous startup. The duo launched their new company in 2020 with $28 million in funding from investors including Accel and Salesforce Ventures, which also invested in follow-on rounds taking Airkit.ai’s total funding to $68 million in its six-year history.
And then last year, Airkit also landed on Salesforce’s enterprise cloud marketplace, AppExchange.
The hype spurred by ChatGPT and the broader generative AI movement is palpable, with investors falling over themselves to back the next big thing. Thus, a generative AI startup with such strong connections to Salesforce already was always going to be an attractive proposition, particularly given that Salesforce had recently pledged to invest $500 million in generative AI startups,
When the deal closes, expected by January, 2024, Salesforce says that Airkit.ai will be merged into its customer service platform Service Cloud, with Evans continuing to lead the business. | AI Startups |
Qualtrics, the cloud-based platform for managing online customer experiences, intends to spend $500 million on AI over the next four years.
The company made the announcement this morning alongside the launch of its new AI-integrated platform, XM/os2 (an unwieldy name, to be sure), which offers generative AI solutions tailored to enterprise experience management use cases.
“For the very first time, we’re bringing the power of generative AI to every part of our platform,” Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin said in a press release. “It’s the most important innovation in experience management since we launched the category in 2017.”
The details of Qualtrics’ investment, which amounts to $125 million per year over the next four years, are exceptionally vague. It’s unclear how the tranche will be divided among the company’s business divisions — and which specific internal efforts it’ll fund, for that matter. We’ve asked for clarification.
But assuming it happens, Qualtrics’ investment is the latest example of a tech giant pouring huge amounts of capital into the exploding generative AI category.
Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce’s VC division, plans to funnel $500 million to startups developing generative AI technologies. VC firm Sapphire Ventures has set aside over $1 billion for enterprise AI startups. Workday recently added $250 million to its existing VC fund specifically to back AI and machine learning startups. And AWS a few weeks ago said that it aims to put $100 million into a program to fund generative AI initiatives. | AI Startups |
It’s that time of year again: the week when startups in Y Combinator’s latest batch present their products for media — and investor — scrutiny. Over the next two days, roughly 217 companies will present in total, a tad smaller than last winter’s 235-firm cohort as VC enthusiasm a slight slump.
In the first half of 2023, VCs backed close to 4,300 deals totaling $64.6 billion. That might sound like a lot. But the deal value represented a 49% decline from H1 2022 while the deal volume was a 35% dip year-over-year.
In a bright note, one segment — driven by equal parts hype and demand — is wildly outperforming the others: AI.
Nearly a fifth of total global venture funding from August to July came from the AI sector, according to CrunchBase. And the voraciousness is manifesting in this winter’s Y Combinator cohort, which features over double (57 versus 28) the number of AI companies compared to the winter 2022 batch.
To get a sense of what AI technologies are driving investments these days, I dove deep into the winter 2023 batch, rounding up the YC-backed AI startups that appeared to me to be the most differentiated — or hold the most promise. .
AI infrastructure startups
Several startups in the Y Combinator W2023 cohort focus not on what AI can accomplish, but on the tools and infrastructure necessary to build AI from the ground up.
There’s Shadeform, for example, which provides a platform to enable customers to access and deploy AI training and inferencing workloads to any cloud provider. Founded by data engineers and distributed systems architects Ed Goode, Ronald Ding and Zachary Warren, Shadeform aims to ensure AI jobs run on time and at “optimal cost.”
As Goode notes in a blog post on the Y Combinator website, the explosion in demand for hardware to develop AI models, particularly GPUs, has resulted in a shortage of capacity. (Microsoft recently warned of service disruptions if it can’t get enough AI chips for its data centers.) Smaller providers are coming online, but they don’t always deliver the most predictable resources — making it difficult to scale across them.
Shadeform solves for this problem by letting customers launch AI jobs anywhere, across public cloud infrastructure. Leveraging the platform, companies can manage GPU instances on every provider from a single pane of glass, configuring “auto-reservations” when the machines they need are available or deploying into server clusters with a single click.
Another intriguing Y Combinator startup tackling challenges in AI operations is Ceralyze, founded by ex-Peloton AI engineer Sarang Zambare. Ceralyze is Zambare’s second YC go-around after leading the AI team at cashier-less retail startup Caper.
Ceralyze takes AI research papers — the kind typically found on open access archives like Arxiv.org — and translates the math contained within into functioning code. Why is that useful? Well, lots of papers describe AI techniques using formulas but don’t provide links to the code that was used to put them into practice. Developers are normally left having to reverse engineer the methods described in papers to build working models and apps from them.
Ceralyze seeks to automate implementation through a combination of AI models that understand language and code and PDF parsers “optimized for scientific content.” From a browser-based interface, users can upload a research paper, ask Cerylize natural language questions about specific parts of the paper, generate or modify code and run the resulting code in the browser.
Now, Ceralyze can’t translate everything in a paper to code — at least not in its current state. Zambare acknowledges that the platform’s code translation only works for a “small subset of papers” right now and that Ceralyze can only extract and analyze equations and tables from papers, not figures. But I still think it’s a fascinating concept, and I’m hoping it’ll grow and improve with time — and the right investments.
AI dev tools
Still developer-focused but not an AI infrastructure startup per se, Sweep autonomously handles small dev tasks like high-level debugging and feature requests. The startup was launched this year by William Zeng and Kevin Lu, both veterans of the video-game-turned-social-network Roblox.
“As software engineers, we found ourselves switching from exciting technical challenges into mundane tasks like writing tests, documentation and refactors,” Zeng wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. “This was frustrating because we knew large language models [similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4] could handle this for us.”
Sweep can take a code error or GitHub issue and plan how to solve it, Zeng and Lu say — writing and pushing the code to GitHub via pull requests. It can also address comments made on the pull request either from code maintainers or owners — a bit like GitHub Copilot but more autonomous.
“Sweep started when we realized some software engineering tasks were so simple we could automate the entire change,” Zeng said. “Sweep does this by writing the entire project request with code.”
Given AI’s tendency to make mistakes, I’m a little skeptical of Sweep’s reliability over the long run. Fortunately, so are Zeng and Lu — Sweep doesn’t automatically implement code fixes by default, requiring a human review and edit them before they’re pushed to the master codebase.
AI apps
Transitioning away from the tooling subset of AI Y Combinator startups this year, we have Nowadays, which bills itself as the “AI co-pilot for corporate event planning.”
Anna Sun and Amy Yan co-founded the company in early 2023. Sun was previously at Datadog, DoorDash and Amazon while Yan held various roles at Google, Meta and McKinsey.
Not many of us have had to plan a corporate event — certainly not this reporter. But Sun and Yan describe the ordeal as arduous, needlessly tiring and expensive.
“Corporate event planners are bombarded with endless calls and emails while planning events,” Sun writes in a Y Combinator blog post. “Stressing over tight schedules, planners are paying for full-time assistants or tools that cost them over $100,000 a year.”
So, Sun and Yan thought, why not offload the most painful parts of the process to AI?
Enter Nowadays, which — provided the details of an upcoming event (e.g. dates and the number of attendees) — can automatically reach out to venues and vendors and manage relevant emails and phone calls. Nowadays can even account for personal preferences around events, like amenities near a given venue and activities within walking distance.
I should note that it isn’t entirely clear how Nowadays works behind the scenes. Is AI actually answering and placing phone calls and returning emails? Or are humans involved somewhere along the way — say for quality assurance? Your guess is as good as mine.
Nevertheless, Nowadays is a very cool idea with a potentially huge addressable market ($510.9 billion by 2030, according to Allied Market Research), and I’m curious to see where it goes next.
Another startup trying to abstract away traditionally manual processes is FleetWorks, the brainchild of ex-Uber Freight product manager Paul Singer and Quang Tran, who formerly worked on moonshot projects at Airbnb.
FleetWorks targets freight brokers — the essential middlemen between freight shippers and carriers. Designed to sit alongside a broker’s phone, email and transportation management system (TMS), FleetWorks can automatically book and track loads and schedule appointments with shipping facilities that lack a booking portal.
Typically, brokers have to reach out via phone or email to drivers and dispatchers for loads that aren’t being tracked automatically for updates on shipment statuses. Simultaneously, they have to juggle calls from trucking companies interesting in booking loads and negotiate on the price, as well as set appointment times for unscheduled loads.
Singer and Tran claim that FleetWorks can lighten the load (no pun intended) by triggering calls and emails and pushing all the relevant information to the TMS or email. In addition to sharing load details, the platform can discuss price and book a carrier, even calling a driver and updating account teams on issues that crop up.
“FleetWorks helps freight operators focus on high-value work by automating routine calls and emails,” Singer wrote in a Y Combinator post. “Our AI-powered platform can leverage email or use a human-like voice to make tracking calls, cover loads, and reschedule appointments.”
If it works as advertised, that sounds genuinely useful. | AI Startups |
Microsoft held a press event on Tuesday where it announced new AI-powered updates to its Bing search engine and Edge browser.
Bing, specifically, is getting a large update that allows you to chat with it to get more detailed answers to search queries. You can ask Bing to plan a trip, for example, and then ask it how much that trip will cost. A preview version of the new Bing launches on Tuesday.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the stage momentarily during the event to confirm that Microsoft is using its GPT technology to power some of its new software, which seems similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT AI.
Here's what Microsoft announced:
The new version of Bing launches today on desktop in limited preview. Mobile version also coming
Microsoft said the new AI-powered Bing search and Edge browser will launch on Tuesday for desktop in a limited preview. That means users will get a limited number of queries to search during the initial period.
The company said a waitlist will be available for the full version and said it will be available to millions of people in the coming weeks. Microsoft also plans a mobile version of Bing.
Later, during a Q&A session with reporters, the company said that it plans to eventually bring its AI-powered chat features to all browsers, though it's starting with Microsoft Edge first. Edge will also have some unique features that won't be offered on competing browsers.
-- Jordan Novet
OpenAI's Sam Altman confirms Microsoft is using its GPT AI to power these tools
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed that Microsoft incorporated some of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 language technologies into Bing to improve its capabilities.
So, there you have it. Microsoft is using OpenAI's GPT technologies to supercharge the new and improved Bing. But not the ChatGPT tool itself, which has taken the world by storm. Still, the functions seem quite similar.
"I feel like I've been waiting for this for 20 years so I'm very happy it's here," Altman said.
-- Jonathan Vanian
Microsoft announces new AI-powered Bing homepage that you can chat with
Microsoft just announced a new AI-powered Bing homepage, with an expanded chat box that can answer more than just factual questions.
The new Bing can:
- Answer questions with lots of context similar to the way ChatGPT does.
- Create itineraries for trips. So, for example, you can ask it to "Plan a five-day trip to Mexico."
- You can continue to ask it more questions. So, if you use the example of planning a trip, you can then follow up with additional questions like "How much will this trip cost us?" or "Can we add or change something in the itinerary?" --Ashley Capoot
Nadella promises a 'new paradigm for search'
Nadella discussed some of the work the company is doing with AI, specifically referring to search.
"And so we want to show you some of this innovation starting with how it's going to reshape the largest software category on planet earth, which I've been working on for a long time and which we are very excited about, search."
'"It's a new day in search, it's a new paradigm for search, rapid innovation is going to come," Nadella added.
Nadella talked about a "new copilot" experience, which refers to the ability of AI tools like to help perform tasks on behalf of workers with "an all-new Bing search engine and web browser."
-- Jonathan Vanian
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is on stage
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is on stage. He's talking about ChatGPT's launch last year and how it was "the only thing anybody in your family wanted to talk about throughout the holidays. It's just crazy."
"I think this technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category," Nadella added. --Jordan Novet
Microsoft's event is starting now
Operating on short notice, Microsoft managed to corral about 70 journalists into a room before its presentation, which is getting underway. Media outlets from the U.S. and abroad have representation. —Jordan Novet
We're here at Microsoft's campus
We're here!
It's a typical overcast rainy February morning in Redmond, Washington, and there's construction on Microsoft's campus as the company executes a broad campus refresh. Before the Covid pandemic, Microsoft had said new buildings would be complete by 2022. The company now expects the whole project to be complete by 2025.
Microsoft's Connect shuttle buses are ferrying employees into offices, while other employees drive themselves to work. Some employees are still working from home, after getting the okay from management.
We should be getting started in about 15 minutes or so. —Jordan Novet
AI wars between Microsoft and Google are heating up
Not to be outdone by OpenAI, Google parent Alphabet debuted on Monday its own ChatGPT-like tool called Bard, confirming earlier reporting by CNBC.
Google chief Sundar Pichai said in a blog post that the company plans to incorporate some of Bard's cutting-edge AI features into its core search tool. This means that, like ChatGPT, future versions of Google Search will summarize complex topics to users.
Soon after Google announced Bard, the company sent a memo to employees urging them to provide feedback on the new software.
"Next week, we'll be enlisting every Googler to help shape Bard and contribute through a special company-wide dogfood," Pichai said in the employee memo that was viewed by CNBC. --Jonathan Vanian
What is ChatGPT?
OpenAI's ChatGPT produces text-based answers to prompts. It's an example of generative AI, a kind of artificial intelligence technology that's the latest craze in Silicon Valley.
Products like ChatGPT are built on top of generative AI software capable of producing stunning imagery that can look like paintings sketched by real humans or, as is the case with ChatGPT, essays that read like they were written by actual college students.
Investors are pouring billions of dollars into startups that specialize in generative AI. Microsoft, for example, announced a new multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI in late January. Meanwhile, Khosla Ventures, Craft Ventures, Sequoia, Entrepreneur First and Lux Capital are the top venture capital firms investing in generative AI startups, according to deal-tracking firm PitchBook.
Stability AI, another popular generative AI-focused startup, said in October that it received $101 million in funding from Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and O'Shaughnessy Ventures. Stability AI built an open-source project called Stable Diffusion that garnered a lot of attention from people who were captivated by its ability to dream up images based on written prompts. -- Jonathan Vanian
Bank of America says to expect ChatGPT integration into Bing search
Bank of America analysts said Microsoft's event will likely focus on ChatGPT's integration into Bing search, as well as the company's broader partnership with OpenAI.
"The AI race is clearly on for the tech sector," the analysts wrote in a Monday note. They added that speed will be important for scale as the AI models are learning.
There's already competition brewing between Microsoft and Google on the AI front. Google will hold an event on Wednesday to talk about its new Bard AI product. Google announced Bard on Monday and said it will roll out in Google Search in the coming weeks.
-- Ashley Capoot
OpenAI's ChatGPT might pose data-security risks
OpenAI's buzzy ChatGPT service knows a lot about the world after being trained on loads of online data. Big technology companies are concerned about the risks that it poses around data security.
That reportedly includes Microsoft, which supplies cloud-computing services to OpenAI in order to run ChatGPT.
In January, a Microsoft engineer said in an internal online discussion that Microsoft employees should not tell ChatGPT any sensitive corporate information, according to Insider, which reviewed the warning. OpenAI could use the information in the course of training future models, the engineer wrote. From there, it could theoretically be possible for someone to receive confidential information while conversing with a version of ChatGPT that's relying on a more up-to-date language model.
Insider also reported that an Amazon attorney advised staff members not to send ChatGPT any confidential information, including source code. — Jordan Novet
People can't get enough of ChatGPT
Since the hybrid AI research firm OpenAI released ChatGPT in November, people can't seem to get enough of the chat-generating software.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said via Twitter that, within 5 days of debuting ChatGPT — which is still in a so-called beta, or experimental version — the software "crossed 1 million users!"
People have found a number of users for the tool, from helping technologists organize research notes for lectures to generating software code on behalf of developers. ChatGPT has become so popular that some schools across the nation have banned students from using the tool as a new "homework assistant."
Check out this CNBC documentary on the rise of ChatGPT and its potential to shake up the business world. -- Jonathan Vanian | AI Startups |
As a part of an ongoing White House initiative to make software more secure, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to launch a two-year contest, the AI Cyber Challenge, that’ll task competitors with identifying and fixing software vulnerabilities using AI.
In collaboration with AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as Microsoft and Google, the AI Cyber Challenge will have U.S.-based teams compete to best secure “vital software” — specifically critical infrastructure code — using AI. With the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Security Foundation (OSC) serving as a challenge advisor, $18.5 million in prizes will be awarded to the top contestants.
DARPA says that it’ll also make available $1 million each to up to seven small businesses who wish to participate.
“We want to create systems that can automatically defend any kind of software from attack,” DARPA program manager Perry Adams, who conceived of the AI Cyber Challenge, told reporters in a press briefing yesterday. “The recent gains in AI, when used responsibly, have remarkable potential for securing our code, I think.”
Adams noted that open source code is increasingly being used in critical software. A recent GitHub survey shows that a whopping 97% of apps leverage open source code, and that 90% of companies are applying or using open source code in some way.
The proliferation of open source has led to an explosion of innovation. But it’s also opened the door to damaging new vulnerabilities and exploits. A 2023 analysis from Synopsys found that 84% of codebases contained at least one known open source vulnerability, and that 91% had outdated versions of open source components.
In 2022, the number of supply chain attacks — attacks on third-party, typically open source components of a larger codebase — increased 633% year-over-year, a Sonatype study found.
In the wake of high-profile incidents like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that shut down gas and oil deliveries throughout the Southeastern United States and the SolarWinds supply chain attack, last year, the Biden-Harris Administration issued an executive order to improve software supply chain security, creating a cybersecurity safety review board to analyze cyberattacks and make recommendations for future protections. And in May 2022, the White House joined The Open Source Security Foundation and Linux Foundation in calling for $150 million in funding over two years to fix outstanding open source security problems.
But with the launch of the AI Cyber Challenge, the Biden Administration evidently believes that AI has a larger role to play in cyberdefense.
“The AI Cyber Challenge is a chance to explore what’s possible when experts in cybersecurity and AI have access to a suite of cross-company resources of combined, unprecedented caliber,” Adams said. “If we’re successful, I hope to see the AI Cyber Challenge not only produce the next generation of cybersecurity tools in this space, but show how AI can be used to better society by here defending its critical underpinnings.”
While much has been written about AI’s potential to aid in cyberattacks — by generating malicious code, for example — some experts believe that AI advances could help to strengthen organizations’ cyber defenses by enabling security professionals to perform security tasks more efficiently. According to a Kroll poll of global business leaders, over half say that they’re now using AI in their latest cybersecurity efforts.
Teams in the AI Cyber Challenge will participate in a qualifying event in Spring 2024, and the top scorers — up to 20 — will be invited to a semifinal competition at the annual DEF CON conference in 2024. Up to five teams will receive $2 million prizes and continue to the final phase of the competition, to be held at DEF CON 2025. And the top three in the last round will receive additional prizes, with the first-place winner receiving $4 million.
All of the winners be asked — but not required — to open source their AI systems.
The AI Cyber Challenge builds on the White House’s previously announced model assessment at this year’s EF CON, which aims to identify the ways in which large language models along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be exploited for malicious intent — and, with any luck, arrive at fixes for those exploits. The assessment will measure, in addition, how the models align with the principles and practices recently outlined in the Biden-Harris administration’s blueprint for an “AI bill of rights” and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI risk management framework. | AI Startups |
The most recent cohort from Y Combinator features more than 200 startups. The S23 batch stands out for several reasons. More than half of these startups focus on AI applications, highlighting a dominant trend we can expect in the coming years. It’s also remarkable for at least one more reason: only one startup from the batch hails from India/Southeast Asia, according to YC’s official directory.
The declining participation of Indian and Southeast Asian startups in Y Combinator is slowly becoming a trend. The previous batches showed a steeper presence with 10 startups in the batch prior, 20 in S22, 37 in W22, 33 in S21, and a peak of 44 in W21. (Some Indian startups are registered in the U.S. and might not always identify as distinctly Indian, adding a layer of complexity to the analysis.)
In a statement to TechCrunch, a YC spokesperson attributed the drop to shift back to in-person events by the storied venture accelerator firm that necessitates founders to relocate to the U.S. for a quarter of a year.
“We’ve found that there’s no replacement for being in person with other founders and investors for the three months of YC. One impact of that however is that we’ve seen international founders struggle to participate because of their inability to get visas,” the spokesperson said.
The US government has intensified visa scrutiny, particularly for countries with high visa overstays in recent years, due to national security and illegal immigration concerns. Visa slots for Indian citizens have also been reduced.
“The founders of GigaML, for example, are world class researchers who trained Llama2 to beat Anthropic Claude 2. But the founders had to do office hours over Zoom because their visas were denied twice by US Immigration. Founders want to come to the US but can’t. We need policy change,” the YC spokesperson added.
Many founders and investors in India agree with YC’s assessment, but some point that the U.S. giant nonetheless needs a broader focus in the region or else it risks losing its appeal. (The investors and founders spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid upsetting their peers.)
Rival seed-focused program from Peak XV is also increasingly vowing local entrepreneurs, offering more favorable terms and resources tailored to the local context.
A high-ranking executive at one of the high-profile VC firms additionally emphasized that YC’s drive for Indian startups to register in the U.S. is becoming a liability for many of these entities.
The recent situation involving Silicon Valley Bank adversely affected those Indian companies that were U.S.-registered and relied on the now-controversial bank with their finances. Furthermore, as many seasoned Indian startups realign their operations back to India, they face significant tax repercussions, which isn’t ideal.
Additionally, as TechCrunch has previously pointed out, India currently has a limited depth in AI startups, which might have also played a role in the decline. | AI Startups |
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday show, where we sit down with a guest, talk about their work and dive deep into the rest. This week, we had Nathan Baschez, the CEO and founder of Lex on the show. Lex is an AI-infused online writing tool, and Alex covered the company when it recently raised capital.
Alex really liked his last conversation with Baschez so we decided to have him on the podcast to talk through a few key topics that have been top-of-mind in recent months:
- How many AI-powered writing tools can the market support?
- How far into the generative AI moment are we, and how much we should anticipate the technology to improve?
- We also discussed the nuts and bolts of pricing an AI-powered service and other financial matters related to building a service today that leans on the tech.
That last question is not simply idle musing. Not too long ago, back in 2020, investors could be observed discussing the economics of AI startups, with the perspective at the time indicating that while the cohort might have more difficult early economics, their numbers (gross margins) would improve over time. But what about when a startup is using, say, an OpenAI API for its core AI work? Will similar efficiencies bloom?
Equity is back into its regular groove now that Disrupt is behind us — there’s more to come!
And before we go: Check out the UpFlip Podcast where they unravel how great businesses are built, how they are run behind the scenes and how their success can be replicated. We think you’ll love episode 79 where they featured this guest who transformed his passion for gardening into a $7.3 million-a-year venture. You can find the podcast on Youtube or where ever you listen to podcasts.
For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.
Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! | AI Startups |
Investors are throwing money at AI startups (perhaps not as much as you might think), so it’s no wonder that we’re starting to see them leaning on the technology to leverage their most precious resource: Time.
In an effort to reduce bias and capture a more diverse group of founders, Kentucky-based Connetic Ventures has developed a piece of software that acts as its top-of-funnel. Called Wendal, the platform assesses founders according to 13 entrepreneurial traits to determine if a meeting will prove fruitful or not for investors. The test takes 15 to 20 minutes, and the fund promises to give founders a decision within three days.
Wendal’s genesis was sparked during an idea-storming session for angel investors who wanted to find and support startups across Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio efficiently and effectively.
“In San Francisco or New York, you can raise money, hang a sign up and have enough deal flow to support an actual fund,” said Chris Hjelm, partner at Connetic.
Outside of these major funding hubs, you have to be more discerning. The question was how. Knowing that the team is at the center of any startup, the fund went down what Hjelm described as a “behavioral psychology rabbit hole” and sought the help of an industrial psychologist to define the optimal entrepreneurial behavioral profile. They then built Wendal.
I tried the platform out myself, and my fictional company (based heavily on my real company that failed spectacularly) was recommended to the investment team.
Wendal’s not all that’s unique about this firm: it also has no carry component. Unlike most VC firms that get to keep 20% of the money they generate for their LPs, Connetic wants to make itself available to retail investors through financial advisors. It charges a 1.9% fee instead of a direct upside on a startup’s success.
All of that had me curious about this venture fund, so I caught up with Hjelm to talk about the fund, the metrics that Wendal measures, how it plans to make its fund structure work, and more.
Equity in the machine
By taking the pitch and the human factors out of the equation, Connetic believes it has developed a much more equitable model to determine who should receive funding. But any AI system is only as good as its training data, so it’s logical to wonder about Wendal’s fairness or its capability to determine if a startup’s founder is right for a given market. But Hjelm believes the platform has been built to be equitable and that the data bears out this assertion. | AI Startups |
A computer scientist is urging the world to record their elderly parents and loved ones as he predicts consciousness could be uploaded onto a computer this year.
Dr Pratik Desai, who has founded multiple Silicon Valley AI startups, said that if people have enough video and voice recorders of their loved ones, there is a '100 percent chance' of relatives 'living with you forever.'
Desai, who has created his own ChatGPT-like system, wrote on Twitter: 'This should be even possible by end of the year.'
Many scientists believe the rapid advancements in AI, which ChatGPT is spearheading, are poised to usher in a new golden era for technology.
However, the world's greatest minds are split on the technology - Elon Musk and more than 1,000 tech leaders are calling for a pause, warning it could destroy humanity.
On the other side are other experts, like Bill Gates, who believe AI will improve our lives - and it seems other experts are on board with the idea it will help us live on forever.
Desai is on the side of Gates, believing we can recreate our dead loved ones as avatars living in a computer.
The process would include digitizing videos, voice recordings, documents and photos of the person, then fed to an AI system that learns everything it can about the individual.
Users can then design a specific avatar that looks and acts just like their living relative did.
The advancement of ChatGPT has progressed one company working on virtual humans.
The project called Live Forever creates a VR robot of a person with the same speech and mannerisms as the person it was tasked with replicating.
Artur Sychov, the founder of Live Forever, told Motherboard in 2022 that he predicted the technology would be out in five years, but due to recent advancements inAI, he expects it will only be a short time.
'We can take this data and apply AI to it and recreate you as an avatar on your land parcel or inside your NFT world, and people will be able to come and talk to you,' Sychov told Motherboard.
'You will meet the person. And you would maybe for the first 10 minutes while talking to that person, you would not know that it's actually AI. That's the goal.'
Another AI company, DeepBrain AI, has created a memorial hall that lets people reunite with their dead loved ones in an immersive experience.
The service, called Rememory, uses photos, videos, and a seven-hour interview of the person while still living.
The AI-powered virtual person is designed with deep learning technologies to capture the individual's look and voice, which is displayed on a 400-inch screen.
In 2020, a Korean television show used virtual reality to reunite a mother with her seven-year-old daughter, who died in 2016.
The show, 'Meeting You,' recounted the story of a family's loss of their seven-year-old daughter Nayeon.
The two could touch, play and hold conversations, and the little girl reassured her mother that she was no longer in pain.
Jang Ji-sung, Nayeon's mother, put on the Vive virtual reality (VR) headset and was transported into a garden where her daughter stood there smiling in a bright purple dress.
'Oh my pretty, I have missed you,' the mother can be heard saying as she strokes the digital replica of her daughter.
Desai did not provide many details about his idea of the technology, but former Google Engineer Ray Kurzweil is also working on a digital afterlife for humans - specifically to resurrect his father.
Kurzweil, 75, said his father passed when he was 22 years old and hopes to one day talk to him through the help of a computer.
'I will be able to talk to this re-creation,' he told BBC in 2012. 'Ultimately, it will be so realistic it will be like talking to my father.'
Kurzweil explained he has hundreds of boxes containing documents, recordings, movies and photographs of his father, which he is digitizing.
'A very good way to express all of this documentation would be to create an avatar that an AI would create that would be as much like my father as possible, given the information we have about him, including possibly his DNA,' Kurzweil said.
The scientist continued to explain that his digital father would undergo a Turing Test, which is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
'If an entity passes the Turing test, let alone a specific person, that person is conscious,' Kurzweil said.
Along with uploading memories from the dead, Kurzweil also predicts that humans will reach immortality in just eight years.
He recently spoke with the YouTube channel Adagio, discussing the expansion in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which he believes will lead to age-reversing 'nanobots.'
These tiny robots will repair damaged cells and tissues that deteriorate as the body ages and make us immune to diseases like cancer.
Kurzweil was hired by Google in 2012 to 'work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing,' but he was making predictions in technological advances long before.
In 1990, he predicted the world's best chess player would lose to a computer by 2000, and it happened in 1997 when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.
Kurzweil made another startling prediction in 1999: he said that by 2023 a $1,000 laptop would have a human brain's computing power and storage capacity.
He said that machines are already making us more intelligent and connecting them to our neocortex will help people think more smartly.
Contrary to the fears of some, he believes that implanting computers in our brains will improve us.
'We're going to get more neocortex, we're going to be funnier, we're going to be better at music. We're going to be sexier', he said.
'We're really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.'
Rather than a vision of the future where machines take over humanity, Kurzweil believes we will create a human-machine synthesis that will make us better.
The concept of nanomachines being inserted into the human body has been in science fiction for decades. | AI Startups |
New AI Startup Accelerator Will Partner With OpenAI, Microsoft
Neo, founded by investor Ali Partovi, will get free software, mentoring for budding companies in its AI track
(Bloomberg) -- Neo, the startup accelerator founded by Silicon Valley investor Ali Partovi, is forging a partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft Corp. to give free software and advice to companies in a new track focused on artificial intelligence.
Companies accepted to Neo’s AI cohort will receive credits to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud as well as OpenAI’s GPT language generation tool, Dall-E image creation program and other tools, the companies announced Tuesday. The startups also will get access to researchers and mentors at Microsoft and OpenAI.
Since OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot in November, as well as its latest language model — GPT-4 — last week, interest has soared among startups and established companies seeking to build the technologies into their own products. Microsoft, which recently boosted its investment in OpenAI by a reported $10 billion, is widely testing a new Bing search engine that uses GPT-4 and is overhauling its Office software. Startups working in generative artificial intelligence — so called because the tools are used to create new content — saw funding hit $2.65 billion in 2022, a 71% increase from the prior year, according to CB Insights.
Partovi, Neo’s chief executive officer, was an early investor in companies including Facebook and Dropbox Inc., and in 1998 sold his startup LinkExchange to Microsoft, where he got his first taste of the technology industry as an intern in the early years of Windows. Partovi sees these new AI tools as having similar importance as the jumping-off point for other applications and companies.
“As impressive as these innovations are, their greatest potential lies in how they’ll enable the next generation of startups — the things that other people will build on top of them that we haven’t seen yet,” he said.
Read more: The Tech Behind Those Amazing, Flawed New Chatbots
Neo, which is also a venture firm, has invested 46% of of its capital to back CEOs who are women or members of underrepresented groups, Partovi said. That focus on diverse companies and founders will be critical for the development of AI.
“This is not just about an industry or about money — it’s about in many ways the future of humanity, and including diverse voices in that conversation is necessary for getting it right,” he said.
Partovi expects about 10 or 12 AI startups among the 20 companies that Neo will accept for the new track of its accelerator program.
One of them is run by Justin Fineberg, a co-founder who’s built a 250,000-person following on social media by talking about how businesses can use AI. Fineberg’s company, which is about a month old, is called CassidyAI. It’s working on software tools that let customers build AI assistants for their specific company without having to know how to write programming code.
“When you’re an early stage startup in the AI space and you’re able to work directly with the biggest names — Microsoft and OpenAI — that really gives you a pretty competitive advantage,” Fineberg said.
(Companies correct the tools available in the second paragraph.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | AI Startups |
Not content to sit on the sidelines of the generative AI race, Dropbox today launched Dropbox Ventures, a new $50 venture fund focused on startups in the AI space.
The company’s first venture arm, Dropbox Ventures will provide mentorship in addition to financial support to build AI-powered products that “shape the future of work,” Dropbox said in a press release.
VCs have steadily increased their positions in AI over the past few years, spurred recently by the growth in generative AI. According to GlobalData, AI startups received over $52 billion in funding across more than 3,300 deals in the last year alone.
Corporate initiatives are a major source of that funding. For example, Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce’s VC division, plans to pour $500 million into startups developing generative AI technologies. Workday recently added $250 million to its existing VC fund specifically to back AI and machine learning startups. And OpenAI, the company behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT, has raised a $175 million fund to invest in AI startups.
New AI-powered features
Putting its money where its mouth is, Dropbox today announced new AI-powered additions to its flagship cloud storage product.
The first, called Dropbox Dash, is a “universal” search bar can canvas across tools, content and apps from third-party platforms including Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce and Notion. Designed to help find and organize various types of content, Dash will “learn, evolve and improve” the more customers use it, Dropbox says.
“Soon, Dash will be able to pull from your information and your company’s information to answer questions and surface relevant content using generative AI,” the company wrote in a blog post. “You won’t need to sift through all your company’s internal links and pages to find out when the next company holiday is — you’ll just be able to ask Dash and get an answer, fast.”
In addition to surfacing content, Dash can create collections — Stacks — for links, offering a way to save, organize and retrieve URLs. Stacks are accessible from the new Start Page, which also hosts shortcuts to recently-accessed work in Dropbox and the Dash search bar.
Dropbox’s other new AI innovation is Dropbox AI, which summarizes and extracts information from files stored in a Dropbox account.
Dropbox AI can review and generate summaries from documents as well as video previews. And it can answer questions in a chatbot-like fashion, drawing from the contents of research papers, contracts, meeting recordings and more.
At launch, Dropbox AI works with file previews. But it’ll soon expand to folders and entire Dropbox accounts.
Given AI’s tendency to go off the rails, one might wonder about the accuracy of Dropbox AI’s summaries. Are they consistent? Can they be trusted?
To allay concerns, Dropbox reaffirmed its commitment to building AI technologies “so that they’re as fair and reliable as possible.” Of course, the words of a corporation don’t carry the same weight as, say, an independent audit, but take them for what they’re worth.
“In this next era of AI, it’s more important than ever that we protect our customers’ privacy, act transparently, and limit bias in our AI technologies,” Dropbox wrote.
Dropbox Dash is currently available in English to select customers in beta. Dropbox AI for file previews is in Alpha, and available in the U.S. to all Dropbox Pro customers ahead of a rollout to select Dropbox Teams. | AI Startups |
Hype or not, the potential of AI has tech companies enamored, and businesses large and small have begun betting heavily on efforts that leverage AI in some fashion to spur their growth to new heights.
These wagers have come in many forms. Firms like PwC and Accenture have promised to spend heavily on the sector, while others are creating new AI-focused capital pools and directly investing in AI-focused startups. A large number of tech companies today are also tapping their operating cash flow to add AI to their existing products and services.
There’s an all-out race to leverage AI to add more utility and value to products, and to reap a portion of the resulting demand in AI-powered products and services.
It appears this sector is resilient to the broader macroeconomic headwinds that have been affecting dealmaking and fundraising in the tech world. If trends in dealmaking continue, this year could go on to see the third-highest number of deals completed by AI startups in the expansion stage, according to Deloitte’s latest Road to Next report.
Investors are paying attention, too, and nearly every tech company’s quarterly results conference call has been full of analysts asking how the company in question will find growth or operating leverage with AI-related tooling.
TechCrunch wrote earlier this year that a tech company’s AI posture was among the most important measures of their present worth. That has only become more true since.
This afternoon, we’re sorting through major promises, investments and some product news to underscore how broad the AI push has been in the larger enterprise software space.
Is the current AI boom a startup story? Yes. It is a Big Tech story? Yes. Are we seeing an entirely new generation of software being built and sold? Yes. Let’s get our heads around just how broad the AI moment truly is.
Big checks, big bets
Today, it seems nearly pedestrian that Microsoft in 2019 put $1 billion into OpenAI for licensing its tech and built a custom supercomputer in the Azure cloud. The figure was later dwarfed by $10 billion arrangement between the companies, but Redmond did help set the tone for how much capital was going to flow – and perhaps how much the sector would need – into AI-related work. | AI Startups |
AI startup Hugging Face has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round, as first reported by The Information, then seemingly verified by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on X (formerly known as Twitter). The tranche, which had participation from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures, values Hugging Face at $4.5 billion. That’s double the startup’s valuation from May 2022 and reportedly more than 100 times Hugging Face’s annualized revenue, reflecting the enormous appetite for AI and platforms to support its development.
Hugging Face offers a number of data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like hub for AI code repositories, models and datasets, as well as web apps to demo AI-powered applications. It also provides libraries for tasks like dataset processing and evaluating models in addition to an enterprise version of the hub that supports software-as-a-service and on-premises deployments.
The company’s paid functionality includes AutoTrain, which helps to automate the task of training AI models; Inference API, which allows developers to host models without managing the underlying infrastructure; and Infinity, which is designed to increase the speed with which an in-production model processes data.
“AI is the new way of building all software. It’s the most important paradigm shift of the decade and, compared to the software shift, it’s going to be bigger because of new capabilities and faster because software paved the way,” co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue told TechCrunch via email. “Hugging Face intends to be the open platform that empowers this paradigm shift.”
Delangue, a French entrepreneur, launched Brooklyn-based Hugging Face in 2016 alongside Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. The trio originally built a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. But after open sourcing the algorithm behind the app, Hugging Face pivoted to focus on creating a platform for creating, testing and deploying machine learning.
The company has 10,000 customers today, it claims, and more than 50,000 organizations on the platform. And its model hub hosts over 1 million repositories.
Contributing to the growth is the strong, sustained interest in AI from the enterprise. According to a HubSpot poll, 43% of business leaders say they plan to increase their investment in AI and automation tools over the course of 2023, while 31% say AI and automation tools are very important to their overall business strategy.
Much of what Hugging Face delivers falls into MLOps, a category of tools for streamlining the process of taking AI models to production and then maintaining and monitoring them. The MLOps market is substantial in its own right, with one report estimating that it’ll reach $16.61 billion by 2030.
But Hugging Face dabbles in other areas, too.
In 2021, Hugging Face launched BigScience, a volunteer-led project to produce an open source language model as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-3, but free and open for anyone to use. It culminated in Bloom, a multilingual model that for more than a year has been available to tinker with on Hugging Face’s model hub.
Bloom is but one of several open source models to which Hugging Face has contributed development resources.
Hugging Face collaborated with ServiceNow, the enterprise software company, to release a free code-generating AI model called StarCoder (a follow-up model, SafeCoder, debuted this week). And the startup made available its own free version of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, in partnership with the German nonprofit LAION.
Hugging Face’s team-ups extend to major cloud providers, some of which are strategic investors.
Hugging Face recently worked with Nvidia to expand access to cloud compute via Nvidia’s DGX computing platform. It has a partnership with Amazon to extend its products to AWS customers and leverage Amazon’s custom Trainium chips to train the next generation of Bloom. And Hugging Face collaborated with Microsoft on Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure, a way to turn Hugging Face-developed AI models into scalable production solutions hosted through Azure.
With this latest investment, Delangue says that Hugging Face plans to “double down” on its supportive efforts in many domains, including research, enterprise and startups. It has 170 employees, but plans on recruiting new talent over the coming months.
Hugging Face has raised a total of $395.2 million to date, placing it among the better-funded AI startups in the space. Those ahead of it are OpenAI ($11.3 billion), Anthropic ($1.6 billion), Inflection AI ($1.5 billion), Cohere ($435 million) and Adept ($415 million). | AI Startups |
Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that has launched the likes of Instacart and Airbnb, has broadened its investing lens in recent years, backing companies all over Africa and India, and beyond. As the tech downturn has continued, though, Y Combinator has shrunk its cohort size, stepped back from late-stage investing, and brought on a new chief executive: entrepreneur and co-founder of Initialized Capital, Garry Tan.
In many ways, it’s a new era – but in some, it’s a return to the accelerator’s former geographic roots.
Y Combinator’s winter 2023 batch has 282 startups – and 86% of the founders lived in San Francisco for the duration of the batch. This compares to 30% of founders living in the Bay in the batch prior.
“Hayes Valley truly became Cerebral Valley this year — San Francisco will continue to play a big role in the future of technology and will continue to bring together some of the smartest minds in the world,” Tan said, kicking off Y Combinator’s newest Demo Day. “The SF Bay Area is still a place for dreamers and doers to try their hand at their own future. and we have so much work to do.” The firm is throwing a summer conference later this June in Palo Alto, and conducted a series of dinners – as well as a kick off event – across the Bay for this cohort.
Tan declined an interview request by TechCrunch.
The accelerator says it is still remote-friendly – for example, it still only has a virtual demo day – but the return to the Bay Area also means a step back from international investments. Just 21% of startups in the winter 2023 batch are based internationally, compared to 42% in the batch prior. While this is the first batch that is launching on Demo Day with Tan at the helm, the accelerator says founders were interviewed months before his first day.
This is the first year in the recent past that YC hasn’t flexed the geographic breakdown of its startups in its blog post. Last batch, India topped the charts as the most represented country within the cohort, home to 21 companies, beyond the United States. This batch, India’s presence has nearly been cut in half, with only 11 companies coming from the country. There are only 3 startups from Africa in this batch, down 88% from a year ago, and continuing a retreat that began last year.
The Bay area’s philosophical return as a startup hub has partially been chalked up to its emergence as an artificial intelligence hot spot. Thanks to hacker homes and word of mouth, Hayes Valley has been dubbed by entrepreneurs and investors alike as “Cerebral Valley,” which many see as the convergence of aspiration and opportunity (too much, even).
The accelerator’s return to the Bay Area is likely not disconnected to AI’s boom: a third of the companies in this cohort are building in AI, and a fifth – or 54 total – are specifically building generative AI startups.
Y Combinator isn’t alone. 500 Global just had a Demo Day based in San Francisco, although its class of startups came from all over the world. Techstars, one of the largest pre-seed investors in the world, just launched a new accelerator in Oakland, California. And earlier this week, Amazon announced a generative AI accelerator, with a demo day culminating in San Francisco. | AI Startups |
Slash_Account_Dot writes: An artificial intelligence company, whose founder Forbes included in a 30 Under 30 list recently, promises to use machine learning to convert clients' 2D illustrations into 3D models. In reality the company, called Kaedim, uses human artists for 'quality control.' According to two sources with knowledge of the process interviewed by 404 Media, at one point, Kaedim often used human artists to make the models. One of the sources said workers at one point produced the 3D design wholecloth themselves without the help of machine learning at all.
The news pulls back the curtain on a hyped startup and is an example of how AI companies can sometimes overstate the capabilities of their technology. Like other AI startups, Kaedim wants to use AI to do tedious labor that is currently being done by humans. In this case, 3D modeling, a time consuming job that video game companies are already outsourcing to studios in countries like China.
The news pulls back the curtain on a hyped startup and is an example of how AI companies can sometimes overstate the capabilities of their technology. Like other AI startups, Kaedim wants to use AI to do tedious labor that is currently being done by humans. In this case, 3D modeling, a time consuming job that video game companies are already outsourcing to studios in countries like China. | AI Startups |
- An AI engineer says most people don't understand what AI can really do and what it can't, yet.
- Those working in AI understand when startup claims are realistic and when they're mostly hype.
- He shares how he evaluates which startups he would use, invest in or work for, and which to avoid.
This essay is based on a conversation with an AI engineer who currently works for an AI legal startup and asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak about his work experiences. Insider has verified his employment.
Generative AI is just way, way overhyped right now and that means that many of the AI startups getting VC funding today are going to fail. This is going to be similar to what happened in crypto. There are going to be selective applications from startups that work well and can build businesses, but maybe 70-80% of them are going to die in the end.
Even OpenAI has been experiencing declining usage lately, which may indicate that generative AI chatbots won't take over the world.
I've been working on AI systems for almost a decade and can tell you that we've seen all of this before. This is what happened to the self-driving car industry.
As good as ChatGPT is at chatting, or Dall-E is at creating art, what these programs are doing is mimicking information they have ingested from the past.
Today's AI can't really do what so many startups say their apps can do because AI can't reliably predict things.
How we got here: three waves of machine learning
There's been, so far, three waves of machine learning in AI development and each of them created a lot of startups. The three waves are: supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforced learning.
Supervised is when you are teaching the AI model how to do something like identify a pen. You hire a bunch of people to manually label photos of pens (and startups were born to do this) and you are training the model to answer the question, is this a pen or not?
Unsupervised is when you are writing a rule in an algorithm and telling AI to detect what the object is. An example is pixel detection to identify colors: red, green, yellow, etc.
Reinforced learning is when you are training it to identify, for instance, an apple, and then reinforcing if it got it right or not. Is this an apple? Yes. Okay, great. Is this an apple? No, you got it wrong.
Then AI engineering got into this steep learning curve based on all of it. It was reinforced and unsupervised combined together.
What I'm trying to get people outside the AI community to understand is that this is really essentially just a probability game. Like what is the highest probability that something will occur in the future? For instance, a self-driving car uses a bunch of deep learning models. When the model notices "oh, here's a human to the right of us. One second before I get to a nearby position, I need to predict if this person is going to move across the street or if this person is going to stay still."
And so it calculates all that based on postures: like if they're on their phone just standing still, most likely that person is not going to move. The probability of this person moving across the street is like maybe, 0.001%.
But accidents end up occurring.
So that's what deep learning is: it's like a probabilistic prediction centric thing. And this is the day that we live in today. People say, "Hey, we're creating something new." But all that is, even for something like OpenAI, is that they are feeding it so much data and then they're basically saying, replicate it and create something based on the previous information.
What you can and can't rely on AI to do
Yes, if you use that kind of AI correctly, it's super powerful. But AI wholly depends on the information fed to it. The information could be biased, or spitting out something that isn't creative but basically plagiarized, or based on old and outdated information.
So, how can you tell if an AI startup's technology will work or if it and the company will likely fail? If what it's doing is reusing static information and doesn't rely on having to predict an outcome, it's on safer ground. Like routing a map in a controlled environment for warehouse robots. Unlike self-driving cars, warehouse robots work in a controlled environment, right?
Or call center triage: so anything that comes into the call center for an identified reason, machine learning can analyze that and route it to the correct person.
But startups that require heavy prediction will struggle to achieve their claims, just like most of the self-driving car startups from the last decade have not become big businesses (and we aren't all being driven around in them).
In this bucket are startups with tech that relies on people changing their behavior to trust a machine instead of another human being like, for instance, virtual human apps: AI assistants that are supposed to replace a human to manage an executive's office, or AI bots that are supposed to replace salespeople. Another category is anything that requires strategy, like in the legal world, developing a defense. And another category is anything that requires the AI to understand and predict what people are feeling, like a concierge service.
So how can we bridge the gap between today's limited AI and a day when we can totally rely on it? Well, there is an intermediate solution. We can use AI today to do consistent, repetitive work – let's call that "prework" – and include human beings in the process.
But there's a catch even for this because you also need to account for the true cost of AI adoption. Take, for example, Amazon Go. As of June, Amazon closed its ninth Go store, including flagship stores in San Francisco, Seattle, New York. Who were they up against? They were trying to provide a better user experience by replacing a $20/hour laborer (about what Whole Foods cashiers make) with smart tech.
But that involved paying for expensive engineering talent, building proprietary technology, and then paying for the ongoing support costs for complex, vision-driven computer networks – not to mention the cost of maintaining and retraining their models, which is seriously expensive. Self-checkout ended up being a much more cost-effective way for other retailers like Costco, Walmart, grocery stores and still solved the same issue of improving the efficiency of checkout. No AI required.
So, if you are removing repetitive, predictable administrative tasks, that's a good use for generative AI. But if you are trying to create something that requires predicting something that's going to happen in the future? How does that technology work? That's the shiny new thing. And I would not work for, or invest in, that company today. | AI Startups |
Accel Bets On AI Startups In India Accelerator Program Revamp
Venture capital firm Accel is refocusing its India accelerator program on artificial intelligence startups, seeking to identify promising companies in the fast-growing field.
(Bloomberg) -- Venture capital firm Accel is refocusing its India accelerator program on artificial intelligence startups, seeking to identify promising companies in the fast-growing field.
The firm will choose as many as half a dozen early stage startups to fund and mentor, starting this month, it said Wednesday in a statement. It’ll also target companies that use technology to make conventional industrial processes more efficient.
Investors the world over are rushing to back AI companies as products such as ChatGPT are quickly gaining popularity. Accel is betting India’s large talent pool and technological expertise will make it fertile ground for AI innovation.
“We researched possible themes that’ll matter in the next decade,” said Barath Shankar Subramanian, an India-based partner at the venture firm. “We are looking at companies that can build AI solutions that are globally relevant.”
Accel and its Silicon Valley peer Sequoia are among the largest investors in early-stage startups in India. Each has invested in dozens of local companies, including Walmart Inc.-backed retailer Flipkart and food and grocery delivery startup Swiggy. A $650 million fund announced last year is among Accel’s investment vehicles targeting the region.
“The rise of AI is as pivotal as the inventions of electricity, the internet and the cloud,” the firm said in its statement.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | AI Startups |
As first reported by The Information, then seemingly verified by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on X (formerly known as Twitter), AI startup Hugging Face has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round.
The tranche, which had participation from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures, values Hugging Face at $4.5 billion. That’s double the startup’s valuation from May 2022 and reportedly more than 100 times Hugging Face’s annualized revenue, reflecting the enormous appetite for AI and platforms to support its development.
Hugging Face has raised a total of $395.2 million to date, placing it among the better-funded AI startups in the space. Those ahead of it are OpenAI ($11.3 billion), Anthropic ($1.6 billion), Inflection AI ($1.5 billion), Cohere ($435 million) and Adept ($415 million).
“AI is the new way of building all software. It’s the most important paradigm shift of the decade and, compared to the software shift, it’s going to be bigger because of new capabilities and faster because software paved the way,” co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue told TechCrunch via email. “Hugging Face intends to be the open platform that empowers this paradigm shift.”
Delangue, a French entrepreneur, launched Brooklyn-based Hugging Face in 2016 alongside Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. The trio originally built a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. But after open sourcing the algorithm behind the app, Hugging Face pivoted to focus on creating a platform for creating, testing and deploying machine learning.
Today, Hugging Face offers a number of data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like hub for AI code repositories, models and data sets as well as web apps to demo AI-powered applications. Hugging Face also provides libraries for tasks like data set processing and evaluating models in addition to an enterprise version of the hub that supports software-as-a-service and on-premises deployments.
Hugging Face’s paid functionality includes AutoTrain, which helps to automate the task of training AI models; Inference API, which allows developers to host models without managing the underlying infrastructure; and Infinity, which is designed to increase the speed with which an in-production model processes data.
Hugging Face has 10,000 customers today, it claims, and more than 50,000 organizations on the platform. And its model hub hosts over 1 million repositories.
Contributing to the growth is the strong, sustained interest in AI from the enterprise. According to a HubSpot poll, 43% of business leaders say that they plan to increase their investment in AI and automation tools over the course of 2023, while 31% say AI and automation tools are very important to their overall business strategy.
Much of what Hugging Face delivers falls into MLOps, a category of tools for streamlining the process of taking AI models to production and then maintaining and monitoring them. The MLOps market is substantial in its own right, with one report estimating that it’ll reach $16.61 billion by 2030.
But Hugging Face dabbles in other areas, too.
In 2021, Hugging Face launched BigScience, a volunteer-led project to produce an open source language model as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-3, but free and open for anyone to use. It culminated in Bloom, a multilingual model that for more than a year has been available to tinker with on Hugging Face’s model hub.
Bloom is but one of several open source models to which Hugging Face has contributed development resources.
Hugging Face collaborated with ServiceNow, the enterprise software company, to release a free code-generating AI model called StarCoder (a follow-up model, SafeCoder, debuted this week). And the startup made available its own free version of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, in partnership with the German nonprofit LAION.
Hugging Face’s team-ups extend to major cloud providers, some of which are strategic investors.
Hugging Face recently worked with Nvidia to expand access to cloud compute via Nvidia’s DGX computing platform. It has a partnership with Amazon to extend its products to AWS customers and everage Amazon’s custom Trainium chips to train the next generation of Bloom. And Hugging Face collaborated with Microsoft on Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure, a way to turn Hugging Face-developed AI models into scalable production solutions hosted through Azure.
With this latest investment, Delangue says that Hugging Face plans to “double down” on its supportive efforts in many domains, including research, enterprise and startups. It has 170 employees, but plans on recruiting new talent over the coming months. | AI Startups |
There’s still plenty of cash to go around in the generative AI space, apparently.
As first reported by Forbes, Inflection AI, an AI startup aiming to create “personal AI for everyone,” has closed a $1.3 billion funding round led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and new investor Nvidia. A source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch the tranche, which brings the company’s total raised to $1.525 million, values Inflection at $4 billion.
CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who previously co-founded the Google-owned AI lab DeepMind, says that the new capital will support Inflection’s work to build and design its first product, an AI-powered assistant called Pi.
“Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes. This is truly an inflection point,” Suleyman said in a canned statement. “We’re excited to collaborate with Nvidia, Microsoft, and CoreWeave as well as Eric, Bill and many others to bring this vision to life.”
Palo Alto, California-based Inflection, which has a small team of around 35 employees, has kept a relatively low profile to date, granting few interviews to the media. But in May, Inflection launched the aforementioned Pi, which is designed to provide knowledge based on a person’s interests and needs. Available to test via a messaging app or online, Pi’s intended to be a “kind” and “supportive” companion, Inflection says — offering “friendly” advice and info in a “natural, flowing” style.
Inflection recently peeled back the curtains on Inflection-1, the AI model powering Pi, asserting that it’s competitive or superior with other models in its tier — namely OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and Google’s PaLM-540B. According to results the company, Inflection-1 indeed performs well on various measures, like middle- and high school-level exam tasks and “common sense” benchmarks. But it falls behind on coding, where GPT-3.5 beats it handily and, for comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 smokes the competition.
It has the cash to do so now, one would presume. With the closing of the latest tranche, Inflection sits behind OpenAI (which has raised $11.3 billion to date) as the second-best-funded generative AI startup — edging out Anthropic ($1.5 billion). Well behind it are Cohere ($445 million), Adept ($415 million), Runway ($195.5 million), Character.ai ($150 million) and Stability AI (~$100 million).
Despite the difficult macroeconomic environment, money’s still pouring into generative AI startups, indeed. According to Pitchbook, roughly $1.7 billion was generated across 46 deals in Q1 2023, with an additional $10.68 billion worth of deals announced sometime in the quarter but not yet completed. | AI Startups |
(Bloomberg) -- Hugging Face Inc., a startup that makes artificial intelligence software and hosts it for other companies, said it has been valued at $4.5 billion after raising $235 million in funding.
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc., Nvidia Corp., Intel Corp., Salesforce Inc. and others participated in the funding round, the company said Thursday. Hugging Face now has raised a total of $395 million, Chief Executive Officer Clement Delangue said in an interview.
The deal reflects investors’ enthusiasm for pushing money into AI startups and rising interest from across the tech community in open source and freely available AI software. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face’s platform is a popular place for companies and individuals to share AI models that others can use, including from Google, Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. The startup also builds its own AI tools and models, such as IDEFICS, which can generate text based on short written prompts and images.
The company plans to use the cash in part to add more people to its team, Delangue said. Hugging Face had 170 employees as of late August.
Some details of the funding round were previously reported by The Information, and Salesforce Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff confirmed his company’s participation in a post on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.
Hugging Face said it hosts more than 500,000 AI models and 250,000 datasets. The company lets users post models and datasets and access those added by others for free. It makes money by charging for features such as access to computing power and higher levels of customer support. Delangue said Hugging Face currently has 10,000 paying customers.
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©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | AI Startups |
OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has closed its new funding round of over $10.3 billion, TechCrunch has learned.
VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global are in the round, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have put in just over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion – $29 billion. This is alongside a big investment from Microsoft announced earlier this year, a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch. The size of Microsoft’s investment is believed to be around $10 billion, a figure we confirmed with our source.
If all this is accurate, this is the closing of the round that the Wall Street Journal reported was in the works in January. We confirmed that was when discussions started, amid a viral surge of interest in OpenAI and its business.
While Microsoft’s investment comes with a strong strategic angle — the tech giant is working to integrate OpenAI’s tech across a number of areas of its business — the VCs are coming in as financial backers.
From what we understand, the term sheets have been signed by investors and the money’s been transferred; still to come is countersigning from OpenAI. The plan was to make this investment public next week.
Altogether, outside investors now own more than 30% of OpenAI.
According to PitchBook data, it appears that Peter Thiel had already been a backer but it seems this is the first time Founders Fund will be investing; K2 Global, a firm with just one partner, Ozi Amanat, and Thrive are also first-time backers of the startup. From PitchBook data, it looks like Sequoia, A16Z and Tiger Global had been earlier investors in the company but they’d sold stakes; this latest investment would bring them back in.
A number of firms, including Tiger and Sequoia, have had some knocks as a result of the financial crisis the tech sector has seen in the last year; in general, a number of VCs have massively slowed down their investing pace, sitting on so-called “dry powder” waiting for a better climate, and maybe better opportunities.
So at a moment when investors are on the hunt for interesting AI startups to back, OpenAI is likely seen as the kind of opportunity that looks good right now.
“They’re probably trying to use this [funding] to say hey, look, we found a golden apple,” a source said of the decision to back OpenAI here and now. “Venture is a very strange place where anything can happen. You can go big to broke to big again, at any time.”
OpenAI has an army of technical teams working across a range of areas, but the area that has attracted a lot of attention of late is GPT, short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is OpenAI’s family of large language models used by third parties by way of APIs.
There is also ChatGPT, the generative AI service that OpenAI released at the end of November 2022 based on GPT that lets anyone type out a natural question and get a cogent, detailed answer. ChatGPT has been a certifiable hit, with more than 1 billion visitors to its website in February, says SimilarWeb — and that’s not including those using that tech via third parties.
Generative AI is very much all the rage right now, but OpenAI has its controversies, too, with many focused on that buzzy, consumer-facing ChatGPT product. People have questioned whether it lies, whether it is a “virus“, how it handles privacy, if it can be manipulated to be toxic, or commit libel; and in the wake of so many more rushing into AI development, even the very nature of how “open” OpenAI’s GPT branding will be longer term has come up for discussion.
In fairness, OpenAI has acknowledged the work that still needs to be done, and meanwhile it’s continued to develop services and iterate. In February, the startup introduced a paid version of ChatGPT, called ChatGPT Plus with a faster user experience. It was upgraded with multimodal LLM GPT-4 in March.
Key to the proposition, OpenAI’s valuation, and the likely interest of investors is that, alongside the technology, there is also a rapidly developing ecosystem around that tech.
In addition to the hundreds of millions of people who have played around with ChatGPT, hundreds of businesses large and small have started deploying GPT and ChatGPT into their products and services. That has also been a fillip to other big tech companies speed up the roll out of their own efforts in generative AI. Google has launched Bard and Meta also introduced LLaMA to take on GPT with its proprietary LLM.
OpenAI, however, has some undeniable gravity amidst the competition, not least because of its singular focus on the AI space since its founding in 2015. That’s been even as it has gone through some significant changes — including shifting from its original non-profit model. We don’t really know if AI will precipitate the seismic shift that many say it will, but as one person put it: OpenAI may be the closest thing we have to a winner in the space right now.
“We’ve been working on it for so long, but it’s with gradually increasing confidence that it’s really going to work,” co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said at an AI conference earlier this month. “We’ve been [building] the company for seven years. These things take a long, long time. I would say by and large in terms of why it worked when others haven’t: It’s just because we’ve been on the grind sweating every detail for a long time. And most people aren’t willing to do that.”
In addition to ChatGPT, OpenAI has its AI-based image-generation tool called Dall-E that received a significant update in July last year. It also has speech recognition model Whisper AI.
Microsoft’s efforts have included integrating OpenAI’s APIs with its Azure infrastructure to support the computational requirements of the models. It also in March announced a GPT-4 integration to supercharge Bing, part of Microsoft’s longstanding efforts to make a dent in the dominance of Google’s search services.
We have reached out to the investors named here, as well as to OpenAI, for comment and will update this story as we learn more. | AI Startups |
Artificial intelligence has been a big theme in the world of health and medical research, and specifically in the area of drug discovery. Today, another hopeful in the space is announcing a funding round to expand its own contribution to the field. Causaly, a London startup that has built an AI platform to help researchers accelerate the development and testing of drugs, has raised $60 million, a Series B that will be going towards R&D and to continue building out its team.
ICONIQ Growth — the growth stage fund affiliated with the iconic investment firm of the same name — is leading the round, with previous backers Index Ventures, Marathon Ventures, EBRD, Pentech Ventures, and Visionaries Club also participating. The company has now raised $86 million in total and its not disclosing valuation.
Causaly is just over six years old, and Yiannis Kiachopoulos, the CEO who co-founded the company with CTO Artur Saudabayev, said that it already works with 12 of the world’s biggest pharmaceuticals companies and some of the biggest names in medical research, including Gilead, Novo Nordisk, Regeneron, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
These organisations use its cloud-based platform to work across the different stages that go into developing drugs: identifying interesting targets for research and development; determining biomarkers that are specific to those targets; and aiding in pathophysiology to better understand a disease, in order to determine what might be fixed with the right pharmaceuticals and other therapeutics.
Kiachopoulos said that the use of Causaly’s platform can reduce the 10-15 years that it might typically take to take an idea from target to the end of trials, down to around six years — a major reduction in the budget that needs to be dedicated to the process.
Just as importantly, its platform — which enables faster modelling and computations based on different chemical permutations and how they work in different environments — aims to reduce the number of false starts and dead ends that characterize the process of drug discovery.
“For each drug to make it to the market there are 9 that failed,” said Kiachopoulos, working out to a 90% failure rate. Each of those drugs typically costing between $1 billion and $2 billion to develop, according to research from the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. “This gives us a real chance to accelerate and provide patient and societal benefits.”
The immense inefficiency in the biomedical research system is the classic kind of big data problem suits AI — which can not only crunch large, multifaceted calculations in real time, but be applied to read images to better understand results on cells and more — and that is one reason why it’s been a popular field not just among AI startups, but investors, too. Just yesterday, Recursion — an AI-based drug discovery startup that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding — announced its latest investment, a $50 injection from Nvidia that came with an important strategic partnership: Recursion would use Nvidia’s cloud platform to train its models on giant datasets.
That deal underscores the immense amount of money that is being pumped into the AI drug discovery space — overall there have been billions put into startups in the field — but interestingly it also highlights something else.
I asked Kiachopoulos if compute power was an issue for his startup as well, given that this is indeed one of the big themes among AI startups right now, biomedical or otherwise, and his answer was a surprising “no.”
“Only a very small fraction will go into compute resources,” he said. This was partly due to how Causaly was built, and partly because of its role in the ecosystem. “Six years ago, when we were starting the company, there were no large language models, so what we have built is not compute-power hungry. We were building natural language querying before Chat GPT, and so we didn’t need large language models now.”
He did say that it’s working on incorporating more of this into future products, but that this was not going to have a noticeable impact on its compute needs.
“With LLM it can get easier to query AI’s. That is true and we are working on that. But you don’t need to train an LLM from scratch so we can take and fine tune what there is, and and fine tuning is a lot less of a drain on compute resources.”
The other detail that this highlights is that Causaly itself is not in the business of drug discovery: it’s providing tools to others who are. This is also something that differentiates Causaly from other startups in the field.
“Our solution helps biomedical teams, but we are not developing our own therapeutics,” he said. “We are a SaaS based platform, training our scientists to get the most out of our AI. We have very strong partnerships and not competing, nor do we have plans to.”
With this round Caroline Xie, a general partner at ICONIQ Growth, is joining the startup’s board.
“The sciences are at a turning point driven by the adoption of AI, and we believe Causaly is a leader in delivering this power to scientists in a highly trusted and verifiable manner,” she said in a statement. “Causaly stands out to us as a uniquely powerful and user-oriented platform applying AI to drive significant productivity gains and commercial impact for many major pharmaceutical companies today. We are thrilled to support the entire Causaly team in their mission to revolutionize the way scientists find, visualize, and collaborate on scientific evidence across pharma, life sciences, and beyond.”
“Causaly gives scientists the power to solve the world’s biggest challenges like never before. It is one of the clearest real-life applications of AI today,” added Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, a partner at Index Ventures. “Already rolled out by some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Causaly is actively accelerating biomedical research now. We’ve been truly impressed with the level of adoption by leading research organizations, who continue to rapidly expand spend on Causaly, underlying the impact the technology is already having on R&D.” | AI Startups |
You Can Now Customize Your ChatGPT
OpenAI is now letting users build custom versions of ChatGPT to accomplish specific personal and professional tasks as the artificial intelligence startup works to beat back competition in an increasingly crowded market.
(Bloomberg) -- OpenAI is now letting users build custom versions of ChatGPT to accomplish specific personal and professional tasks as the artificial intelligence startup works to beat back competition in an increasingly crowded market.
With the new option, users will be able to quickly create their own specialized versions of ChatGPT — simply called GPTs — that can help teach math to a child or explain the rules of a board game, the company said on Monday. No coding is required, the company said. OpenAI also plans to introduce a store later this month where users can find tailored GPTs from other users — and make money from their own — much as they might with apps in Apple Inc.’s App Store.
At its first-ever developer conference on Monday, OpenAI also said it’s introducing a preview version of GPT-4 Turbo, a more powerful and speedier version of its most recent large language model, the technology that underpins ChatGPT.
ChatGPT was released to the public a year ago this month, kicking off a global frenzy around all things AI. Roughly 100 million people now use ChatGPT each week, the company said at the conference, and more than 90% of Fortune 500 businesses are building tools on OpenAI’s platform. But the ChatGPT maker is also confronting rival products from well-funded AI startups, tech giants and, most recently, Elon Musk, an early OpenAI backer.
For OpenAI, the conference represents a chance to show how much influence it wields over the developer community. Hosting a developers conference is also standard for leading tech companies, including Apple, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook. Often, these annual events offer a chance for tech companies to preview major software or product updates.
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman delivered a keynote presentation on stage at the event. He was joined at one point by Satya Nadella, CEO of OpenAI-backer Microsoft Corp. Nadella touted their partnership — even as the companies compete for business customers.
OpenAI said the Turbo version of GPT-4 was built with a trove of online data running through April of this year, giving it a greater awareness of current events. The original version of GPT-4 had access to data running through September, 2021, though the company rolled out a feature this year that enabled ChatGPT users to browse the internet to get up-to-date information.
“We are just as annoyed as all of you — probably more — that GPT-4’s knowledge about the world ended at 2021,” Altman said on stage at the conference. “We will try to never let it get that out of date again.”
OpenAI said the Turbo version of ChatGPT will be able to process and respond to novel-length prompts from users. By comparison, the company’s GPT-4 model has been limited to as much as about 50 pages worth of text. Turbo will also be cheaper for developers to use, the company said.
Founded in 2015, OpenAI has put out numerous AI models over the years. The technology has become more adept at what’s known as generative AI — software that can ingest a short written prompt and spit out content in response, whether it’s text that can mimic what’s written by humans or realistic-looking images.
Some people have already used OpenAI’s tools to write lyrics, draft emails, do homework assignments and create children’s books. But OpenAI and its rivals have also ignited a new wave of copyright concerns. On Monday, OpenAI said it would pay any costs users incur from copyright infringement claims. Microsoft and Google have previously taken similar steps.
OpenAI’s event was held just blocks from San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, which some have nicknamed “Cerebral Valley” for the growing number of AI startups based there. The venue, SVN West, is a multi-story event space that in past incarnations was a ballroom and, more recently, a Honda dealership.
(Updates with Altman comments in eight paragraph)
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | AI Startups |
The startup industry has been whistling a happy tune ever since the British chip designer ARM filed paperwork with the SEC late last month for an initial public offering. The growing expectation is that the hotly anticipated offering will force open the IPO window for many other offerings, too. But while ARM’s beleaguered owner, SoftBank, is likely to wring out a substantial return from ARM once it’s rolled out on the Nasdaq, one “blockbuster IPO” may have far less impact on the rest of the industry than many anticipate, says former operator, entrepreneur, and longtime VC Heidi Roizen.
We recently talked with Roizen — who has spent the last decade with Theshold Ventures — about the offering and what else is happening in the market right now. You can listen to that longer conversation here or read excerpts from it, edited for length, below.
TC: You have a new podcast and recently covered down rounds — a big topic this year. Is there any non-conventional wisdom for founders you can offer? VCs I’ve talked with throughout the year say it’s better to take a lower valuation than accept certain terms, or “structure,” in order to maintain an inflated valuation.
HR: Sure, venture capitalists will say, ‘Just take the lower valuation.’ But I think it’s one thing to tell people, ‘Terms are more important than valuation.’ It’s another thing to show someone, ‘Hey, you’re gonna walk away with 24% if you do this, but you’re gonna walk away with 48% if you do that.’ Entrepreneurs should run the math and make sure [they] understand that when [they’re] giving downside protection [to VCs], that’s probably going to come out of their own pocket. On the podcast, what I’ve tried to do is give them real examples.
“Participating preferred” is a term that no one heard for many years and which resurfaced this year. What else were many founders not exposed to previously and so are struggling with?
There’s a lot going on right now that entrepreneurs need to be aware of. The financing world is just one component. Compensation is another place where [founders] really have to look and say, ‘We need to right size.’ I’m also working on a future episode about secondaries.
Secondaries are interesting in that they were once seen as something shameful that you didn’t discuss, then it was fine to discuss them — you were actually smart taking money off the table. Then things really went haywire, with founders allowed to sell a lot of shares in their company — sometimes at sky-high prices — at the same time they were raising primary capital from investors.
It became Netflix documentary material.
Exactly! What did you make of a recent report that Tiger Global is nearing a sale of part of its stake in a very buzzy AI company called Cohere. According to The Information, it’s selling 2.1% of its stake and keeping 5%. Basically, it’s just pulling out the money that it put into the company and taking it off the table. Tiger is reportedly having liquidity issues, but doesn’t that kind of secondary sale also impact how the market sees Cohere?
I think it’s more of an indicator about Tiger than Cohere. It’s a very small percent [that it’s selling]. Tiger is purportedly in a cash crunch, and they’re portfolio managers. They look around at their holdings and they say, ‘Gee, we have a bunch that if we were to try to sell in a secondary, we’d have to take a loss. Meanwhile, we have Cohere where it’s even money, so we can book that and it doesn’t hit our books that bad. We return the money of the LPs and it’s kind of a wash.’ Part of those are psychological decisions. It’s very hard to sell your losers.
In separate AI news, Salesforce just led a big round in the AI startup Hugging Face, which is just the latest bet for Salesforce, which also has stakes in Cohere and Anthropic. As someone on an AI committee at Stanford, do you think relationships with strategic investors are any more important for today’s AI startups than other types of startups? It’s nice to have the muscle of a Salesforce or an Oracle behind you, but there are downsides as well.
Strategic investors are a huge part of the financial ecosystem for entrepreneurs. Something like 20% of all deals have a strategic investor in them. But as I once said to an entrepreneur, ‘When when I invest in you, I only make money if your stock goes up. But when a strategic invests in you, they also make money when their stock goes up.’ To me, that summarizes something really important. I understand Salesforce paid like 100 times revenue and to the best of my knowledge, there is no public company trading at 100 times revenue. Unless you’re planning to sell that stock sometime in the future, that’s a pretty aggressive price.
If you are also doing some sort of coincident biz dev deal that is going to allow you to leverage what [a startup has] into your customer base and into your technology and into your new market segments, that makes your stock go up. So we’re going to have to wait and see, but I would imagine that that’s how [Salesforce] justified paying a price like that.
In the meantime, everyone is waiting on this ARM IPO. The widespread thinking seems to be that this chip design company is going to worth anywhere from $40 billion to $80 billion and blow open the IPO window. Do you think so, too?
Every company that goes public is different. I’ve never understood this concept of, ‘Well, the market is closed, but you take one super big company, and you put it out there, and all of a sudden everybody gets to go public again.’ I personally don’t understand that. So, no, I don’t think it’s gonna blow the market open and that a whole line is going to march out there and we’re going to have 50 IPOs between now and December. | AI Startups |
Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, famously said in 1987 that you can see the computer revolution everywhere but in the productivity statistics. I predict 2023 is the year that finally changes, thanks to artificial intelligence. By the end of 2023, AI will be fast becoming one of the most important factors of production in the global economy.It’s true that the history of AI is largely a history of disappointment: hype followed by “AI winters,” in which both talent and funding abandon the discipline. But this time, thanks to the deep learning revolution, it really is different. In 2023, we’ll see ordinary people, everywhere, enjoy the power of AI at their fingertips. What might this look like? Let’s say you need to create a marketing brochure for a new geography that your company is entering. Trained on the data set of all the material your firm has ever created, your AI assistant creates three options for you within minutes—each beautifully written and illustrated. They’re not perfect, yet, but what used to be a weeklong project becomes the work of a couple of hours.That’s just an example, but the critical point is that AI is on the cusp of giving us all superpowers. You will have the ability to generate an email or memo in your own voice (or anyone else’s for that matter) in seconds. You will be able to create photorealistic art—or even video—with a few bullet-points of instructions. You will be able to answer arbitrary scientific questions by having the AI “read” entire corpuses of academic literature. You will be able to delegate your bookkeeping and accounts to an AI algorithm. Some of this innovation will come from the usual suspects, like DeepMind and OpenAI. OpenAI has already released GPT-3 (a program which generates natural language) and DALL-E (which creates images from text) in beta, but we can expect these tools to be widely available soon. Excitingly, though, there’s also a new generation of startups that are demonstrating that you don’t need a billion-dollar budget to get to the cutting edge of AI. Take Midjourney or Stability AI, applications which produce results that rival DALL-E, or Causaly (disclosure: I’m an investor), which allows scientists to find new causal relationships in life sciences with natural language questions. Then there is a growing list of new AI startups with impressive backers and more general ambitions, like Anthropic (an AI safety and research firm), Conjecture (which seeks to keep damaging factors such as racial bias out of AI), and Keen Technologies, which was founded by computer science legend John Carmack.This is not a prediction about artificial general intelligence, still less about AI “replacing” humans. It’s hard to overstate, though, the impact of freeing up billions of hours of human labor and making creativity and knowledge too cheap to meter. I fully expect this to unleash a huge wave of entrepreneurship. Just as the advent of the internet gave every startup a vastly scalable distribution engine, the era of AI superpowers will give every startup a vastly scalable production engine. Tech analyst Benedict Evans said in 2018 that one way of thinking about AI is that it it’s like giving every company infinite interns. In 2023, those interns will be world-class copywriters, illustrators, and more—perhaps scientists, data analysts, or even negotiators. What would you build with a million such “interns” in the cloud, available on demand, 24/7, and at close to zero marginal cost? In 2023, we can expect thousands of entrepreneurs to show us. | AI Startups |
As organizations rush to embrace AI, it's putting the cloud -- or clouds, rather -- under strain.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, facing an unprecedented spike in demand for the server chips that train and run AI-powered software, are limiting their availability for customers. Microsoft has been particularly candid about its struggles, warning of service disruptions if it can't get enough AI chips for its data centers.
Startups are feeling the pressure, too -- including CoreWeave, a GPU-focused cloud compute provider. After raising $221 million a Series B round in April and a $200 million extension to that round in May, CoreWeave has secured $2.3 billion in debt financing, the company says.
The credit facility, which was led by existing investors Blackstone and Magnetar Capital with participation from Coatue, DigitalBridge Credit and funds and accounts managed by Pimco and Carlyle, comes only weeks after CoreWeave's announcement that it plans to build a $1.6 billion data center in Plano, Texas. In a blog post provided to TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator says that the debt facility will provide "financial headroom and flexibility" to meet CoreWeave's goals of reaching 14 data centers by the end of the year.
"[We'll commit the loan] entirely toward purchasing and paying for hardware for contracts already executed with clients and continuing to hire the best talent in the industry," Intrator wrote. "No one was expecting this level of demand for GPU compute, but our strategic investments to increase capacity continue to pay off -- and we’re delivering where others cannot."
CoreWeave was founded in 2017 by Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee to address what they saw as "a void" in the cloud market. Venturo, a hobbyist Ethereum miner, cheaply acquired GPUs from insolvent cryptocurrency mining farms, choosing Nvidia hardware for the increased memory (Nvidia is an investor, unsurprisingly).
Initially, CoreWeave was focused exclusively on cryptocurrency applications. But it pivoted within the last several years to general-purpose computing as well as generative AI technologies, like text-generating AI models. CoreWeave's GPU might was conducive to this, as GPUs' ability to perform many computations in parallel make them well suited to training today's most capable models. (Nvidia's benefitted massively, briefly becoming a $1 trillion company.)
Fast-forward to today and CoreWeave provides access to over a dozen SKUs of Nvidia GPUs in the cloud, including H100s, A100s, A40s and RTX A6000s, for use cases like AI and machine learning, visual effects and rendering, batch processing and pixel streaming. CoreWeave applies its infrastructure to special projects, as well, like an "AI supercomputer" of over 3,500 H100s it unveiled in partnership with Nvidia last month.
It’s tough for any cloud provider to compete with the incumbents in the space — i.e., Google, Amazon and Microsoft. For perspective, AWS made $80.1 billion in revenue last year, while Google Cloud and Azure made $75.3 billion and $26.28 billion, respectively.
Those figures are multiples above CoreWeave’s valuation (~$2 billion), obviously, let alone its war chest ($576.5 million).
To drive the point home, according to a Statista report from the fourth quarter of 2022, AWS had a 32% market share, Azure had a 23% share and Google Cloud had a 10% share.
Making matters more precarious, as my colleague Ron Miller recently wrote, many companies are looking for ways to cut back on spending in an uncertain economy. In 2023, the market for cloud infrastructure slowed to 21% growth, a precipitous drop from the 36% growth in the year prior.
That's led to consolidation in the space. In July, DigitalOcean, the cloud hosting business, acquired Paperspace, a New York-based cloud computing and AI development startup, for $111 million in cash.
But that’s not to say it’s impossible for a smaller player to succeed -- see Scaleway, Clever Cloud and Vultr. And CoreWeave's wisely redoubled its efforts to build infrastructure supporting a red-hot sector: generative AI. According to Brian Venturo, CoreWeave's CTO, the company's newer data centers host as many as ~20,000 GPUs in one location -- well above what cloud providers have traditionally offered.
"The soaring computing demand from generative AI will require significant investment in specialized GPU cloud infrastructure -- where CoreWeave is a clear leader in powering innovation," Jasvinder Khaira, a Blackstone senior managing director, said in an emailed statement.
While tech giants invest in in-house supercomputers and AI chips to train their generative AI models, smaller outfits are turning to cloud providers like CoreWeave. And they have a lot of cash to burn. According to PitchBook data, about $1.7 billion was generated across 46 deals for generative AI startups in Q1 2023, with an additional $10.68 billion worth of deals announced in the quarter but not yet completed.
Inflection AI, an AI startup helmed by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, is one of those outfits. Inflection trained its AI assistant product, Pi, on CoreWeave's infrastructure. And it's working with Nvidia and CoreWeave to build an AI training cluster with 22,000 H100 GPUs.
Beyond infrastructure, CoreWeave attempts to differentiate itself with offerings like its accelerator program, which launched in late October. The accelerator -- which operates on an open-ended basis, with no deadlines -- provides companies compute credits in addition to discounts and other hardware resources on the CoreWeave cloud.
CoreWeave says it employs "just over" 115 people now -- up 150% in the last year or so -- thanks in part to its acquisition of cloud rendering platform Conductor Technologies in January. Intrator says that the plan is to keep hiring “throughout the year," bolstered by the debt facility. | AI Startups |
Introduction
In late 2022, OpenAI publicly released some of the most sophisticated deep-learning models – DALL-E and Chat GPT. These neural networks rely on machine learning to generate infinite amounts of unique textual and visual content for users anywhere on the planet. OpenAI may have been the first company to release its products to the public, but it is not alone in its development; companies like NVIDIA, Google, and smaller artificial intelligence startups are developing similar engines. These generative AI models allow users to input commands to create essays, music lyrics, simple code and more. In January 2023, OpenAI, the Stanford Internet Observatory, and Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology released a study that explored the possibility of these models being used in influence campaigns by both state and non-state actors through the production of disinformation. The disruptive potential posed by these generative AI technologies has led some to consider them “weapon[s] of mass disruption.”
Over the past decade, extremist groups have been adapting their propaganda to be more interactive. Extremist video games, social media content, and music have found their way onto a variety of internet platforms. Unlike the extremist propaganda of the past, these new digital media products allow extremist groups to interact with audiences in unprecedented ways. This Insight will focus on the emergence of new digital AI-generated extremist propaganda. By simulating a variety of extremist content using AI generative models, the authors predict that this emerging technology may enable and accelerate the production of a greater quantity and quality of digital propaganda manufactured by non-state extremist actors.
The Evolution of Digital Media in Extremist Propaganda
In recent years, extremist organisations have experimented with the production of new forms of propaganda content, transitioning from outputting simple videos and magazines to creating video games, social media content, and even music. Technological innovation over the last twenty years has allowed extremist organisations to access new tools such as sophisticated editing software, microphones, and cameras to produce Hollywood-style propaganda. Recently, terrorist organisations have been utilising newer forms of digital media for their propaganda that allow targets to interact directly with the content in new ways. For example, recently developed games by neo-Nazi groups encourage players to engage in violent behaviour towards minorities from a first-person shooter (FPS) perspective (Figure 1). Other extremist groups are even creating downloadable modifications (‘mods’) that allow for the alteration of existing games. By making changes to the geography, characters, and aesthetics of popular games such as Super Mario and Doom, extremist groups can export their ideologies and foster player identification with violent avatars in familiar products. Unlike the propaganda of the past where an audience engaged with extremist actors by witnessing violence through video recordings or images, newer forms allow audiences to engage in simulated acts of terror in a more ‘interactive’ way.
Video games are just one example of the new variety of extremist digital media appearing in online spaces. Extremist groups on platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and especially TikTok create viral posts to attract followers, promote fear, and rally their existing and potential recruits. In 2019, a variety of ISIS TikTok accounts were found posting violence-inciting content blended with catchy professionally-recorded battle hymns (i.e. nasheed) and emojis, in an effort to target the platform’s users and show off the group’s strength (Figure 2).
Jihadist groups are not alone in producing this content. A NewsGuard article found hundreds of videos that “allude to, show, or glorify acts of violence carried out by the Wagner Group,” a notoriously violent Russian mercenary group. Many of these videos spread Russian misinformation about the Ukrainian government (Figure 2). While users cannot engage directly with social media propaganda, the videos allow audiences to engage with pro-Russia content in a new interactive way. Through liking, reposting, commenting, and recreating trending media, consumers of extremist materials interact with content in more complex ways than what was previously possible with older forms of propaganda.
Music is another propaganda medium that extremist groups have been engaging with to create and provide material for target audiences. The Anti-Defamation League published a 2022 report identifying 40 white supremacist artists on Spotify. These bands produced a range of musical genres, gained thousands of followers, and pushed various xenophobic conspiracy theories including the ‘Great Replacement’ theory. Some of these songs directly promote Nazi ideology, with titles such as ‘Aryan Fury’ and ‘Reich Machine’. Bands also appeal to audiences through the creation of meme-like album covers featuring far-right symbols like the Red Pill, Pepe the Frog, and the Black Sun (Figure 3).
This issue extends beyond Spotify. In collaboration with the European Counter Terrorism Centre’s EU Internet Referral Unit, Soundcloud flagged more than one thousand pieces of extremist content on its platform. By packaging their narratives through song, right-wing extremists can convey their hateful messages in a new way, potentially increasing their appeal to a wider audience. The Islamic State has also been found experimenting with the use of nasheed. By repackaging familiar Islamic songs, the group can convey its apocalyptic violent narratives and viewpoints of the world with trendy tunes. Al-Qaeda has engaged in similar activities by featuring hip-hop music in the background of its online content. Through music, both ISIS and al-Qaeda are leveraging similar tactics to right-wing extremist groups. Music may allow these groups to transcend multicultural and transnational differences in order to export their violent ideologies to new and wider audiences.
AI Generative Models and Extremist Threat Ideation
While conventional forms of extremist propaganda like those mentioned above require trained personnel to plan, create, and disseminate these materials, the emergence of AI generative models may allow for a variety of extremist non-state actors to produce a greater amount of propaganda products that are significantly more sophisticated – with significantly less effort. Future generative AI models will transform the landscapes of both mainstream and extremist media production, including video games, digital content creation, and music and other audio content – meaning new audiences can be reached and potentially radicalised through new propaganda techniques.
AI for the Gamers
Through the emergence of these new technologies, video gamers will be able to develop their desired storylines, characters, and environments by inputting text that can be transformed into a fully developed video game product. Some commentators are discussing the possibility of AI-generated and entirely personalised games. By allowing gamers the freedom to develop their own products, these technologies also provide extremists with significant power to develop video games that could bolster their radicalisation and additional recruitment methods.
Extremist organisations will be able to rely on AI generative models to further their creative and technical skills. The less sophisticated artificial intelligence generative models available today convey the tremendous power of new propaganda products that could be leveraged and exploited by extremists. Currently, through ChatGPT, extremists are able to transport conspiratorial and violent narratives into complete video game storylines instantly (Figure 4). The ability to customise plotlines to resemble games like Call of Duty makes these technologies particularly dangerous; if these games are developed, they can be tailored to appeal to specific audiences by ensuring their products resemble popular games already on the market.
Extremists can also exploit these technologies by producing simple code (Figure 5) that could help facilitate the alteration of graphics in a variety of extant games for groups that do not desire to create completely new products. New generative models like Scenario and MidJourneyAI used in combination with ChatGPT can greatly aid the creation of three-dimensional items that can be inputted within video games as well as violent artistic promotional material for original, extremist-made video games (Figure 5). The ability to rapidly produce extremist video games may allow a variety of groups to more easily desensitise individuals to political violence and input real-world conspiracies into gaming narratives for the purpose of making extremist viewpoints more believable.
AI for the Content Creators
Additionally, these technologies will greatly enhance the ability of extremist groups to flood applications like TikTok and Instagram with customisable content that is both visually appealing and persuasive. ChatGPT can help facilitate the creation of scripts and short-form content and organisational techniques for specific audiences in seconds (Figure 6). While the current technology cannot generate entire videos, it is easy to imagine how combining ChatGPT with deepfake technology could enable the production of prolific amounts of artificially generated extremist content (Figure 6). By utilising the faces of popular influencers and viral trends, AI generative tools may allow for more propaganda products to penetrate mainstream audiences easily, thus facilitating purposeful misinformation of news events that can serve the interests of extremist actors.
AI for the Audio-Makers
Finally, artificial intelligence may revolutionise the production of audio content. Extremist groups could, in the future, weaponise these systems by outsourcing musical talent to create violent narrative-driven songs about core issues associated with their respective ideologies. This can be seen in a ChatGPT-generated heavy metal punk song intended to resonate with individuals who belong to skinhead hate groups. Google has recently previewed MusicLM which can translate text directly into musical sound with instruments that evoke specific moods (Figure 7). Attractive album artwork for a song can be generated instantly through MidjourneyAI. The rhythms and lyrics developed by these technologies recreate human vocal and instrumental rhythms. While the creation of extremist music may not seem like a threat, music allows extremist actors to disguise their violent messages and radical beliefs, which may have a radicalising effect over time.
The Status of AI Safeguards
OpenAI, among other tech companies, has taken significant steps to implement greater restrictions on the generation of extreme content. For example, when content related to Nazis is requested through MidJourneyAI or ChatGPT, users are now met with an error message (Figure 8).
Thus, action is being taken to improve content moderation on these platforms, and there are terms of service for each tool that users must abide by. However, malign actors find workarounds, and we are already seeing how certain actors are making alterations to the datasets available in AI content generative models in order to curate harmful content that would otherwise be banned, known as ‘mischief models.’ As AI generative models advance, so will the mischief; in the wrong hands, these technologies could further fuel distrust in online information sources and hinder global efforts to combat violent extremism.
Conclusion
New generative AI technologies have transformative capabilities and the potential to bring about a new wave of creativity and innovation. However, their capacity to accelerate violent extremist rhetoric and messaging should not be underestimated. Unlike the propaganda products of the past, these tools are much more effective for radicalisation, recruitment, and retention; sophisticated AI-generated extremist propaganda can now be adapted to appeal to previously out-of-reach audiences in new and engaging ways. Tech companies have recognised this threat as legitimate, and have expanded efforts to safeguard against extremist exploitation of AI tools. However, as long as these programs exist, malevolent actors will adapt these programs to develop ‘mischief models’ capable of generating harmful content for a variety of extremist groups.
There are certain AI startups that are attempting to prevent the misuse of their products by developing alternative programs to help identify patterns that can indicate whether images, texts, videos, or sounds were produced with generative models. These programs could one day be integrated into social media platforms, music streaming services, and even gaming platforms, which could hinder artificially generated content used for malicious purposes from finding its way out of the dark corners of the web. Furthermore, it is critically important that the AI companies discussed in this Insight expand their Trust and Safety teams. These teams can ideate the worst uses for features of these programs, and then implement rules and plans in case of their misuse. This Insight posits that while there are important steps being taken to prevent the misuse of AI generative models, there are clear vulnerabilities that can be easily exploited by extremist actors.
Mary Bennett is an analyst at More in Common, a nonpartisan research nonprofit, and a researcher with the Prosecution Project. Her research primarily focuses on violent misogyny and extremist visual propaganda content. | AI Startups |
Softbank Group-owned chip designer Arm is targeting a $52 billion IPO in September.
The launch is set to draw big investment from tech giants like Apple, Nvidia, Samsung, and Google.
The debut is expected to be the largest of 2023, and it could mark a turning point for the sluggish IPO market.
Arm, the Softbank Group-owned chip designer, could see a valuation as high as $52 billion in its initial public offering on Nasdaq, according to an updated filing Tuesday.
Softbank will offer 95.5 million American depository shares, and will target a sale price of $47-$51 per share for about 10% of the total shares outstanding.
The company is looking to raise up to $4.87 billion, but even on the lower range, it's set to be the biggest US IPO of the year. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, people close to the deal say they expect strong demand during the run-up to the IPO could push the price higher.
Not since Rivian in late 2021 has another company come close to this size in its public-market debut.
The British company, which designs chips used in most of the world's smartphones, was previously listed in both London and New York before Softbank's acquisition in 2016 for $32 billion. The new target valuation is lower than the $64 billion last month at which Softbank took over a 25% stake from its own Vision Fund, the Saudi-backed investment arm it manages.
After going public, Softbank will retain control of about 90% of Arm's shares, the filing showed.
Final pricing as well as its trading debut on the Nasdaq exchange is set for next week. It will list under the symbol "ARM."
A-list tech titans want in
Arm's roster of IPO investors include a handful of the world's most recognizable names in tech, and they are poised to scoop up a total of $735 million in stock for the IPO. Samsung, Google, Apple, Nvidia, and Intel are among those that could participate as "cornerstone investors," the Tuesday filing said.
Other top investors include TSMC and Advanced Micro Devices, as well as other chip names MediaTek, Cadence, and Synopsys.
The wave of big-name interest suggests Wall Street and industry leaders have high hopes for Arm in the fast-budding artificial intelligence market that this year helped propel chip giant Nvidia to a trillion-dollar market cap and sent tech shares soaring on a wave of enthusiasm around the budding technology.
Lead underwriters for Arm's IPO include Goldman Sachs, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, and Mizuho Financial Group.
A revival of IPOs
It's possible that the blockbuster stock launch marks a turning point for what's been a relatively muted IPO market since 2022. Arm could help pave the way for other tech firms and startups who's plans for an IPO have stalled through the downturn.
Bloomberg data shows that the US IPO market has been in its deepest trough since 2009, with a historically-low number of companies going public on domestic exchanges since March of last year.
"On the heels of what has arguably been the slowest IPO market in 20 years, investors are hungry for new ideas and VCs are getting impatient," Rob Wotczak, chief executive of boutique investment bank Freedom Capital Markets, told Insider. "We see evidence of this in the increased number, and nature, of calls we are receiving and the type of due diligence we are currently undertaking."
As for Softbank, the IPO gives it a chance to gradually sell down its position in Arm, and any early momentum from the stock launch could provide fresh capital for separate investments in up-and-coming AI companies. In a sign of the huge interest in that space, The Information reported that AI startups comprised over 60% of Y Combinator's latest class of early-stage companies.
Plus, should Arm's trading debut prove successful, it could furnish Softbank founder Masayoshi Son with profits to cushion last year's $30 billion in losses in its Vision Fund.
"We are aware that a good number of companies have been waiting on the sidelines and we expect that, all things being equal, Instacart will also test the market later this month," Wotczak said. "Other high-profile companies, like Stripe and DataBricks, will be watching closely and so we believe that getting Arm successfully out of the IPO gate could proof the market for these players."
Read the original article on Business Insider | AI Startups |
An obscure 1974 set of postal standards allotted each country a URL suffix (like .com). Today, some tiny countries - like Tuvalu, with its .tv domain - are funding a significant chunk of their annual national budgets by selling their highly prized suffixes to startups.
Twitch.tv. Discord.gg. Github.io. Three memorable addresses for three major websites that all have something in common: Their domain name URLs come from small island nations and territories.
The three platforms use the domain suffixes that were originally intended for websites located in Tuvalu, Guernsey, and the British Indian Ocean Territory. But, to their great good fortune and classic examples of the law of unintended consequences, the country codes also represent other powerful meanings: TV has long stood for television, gamers use “gg” as an abbreviation for “good game,” and I/O is a common technical term. Hardly surprising, therefore, that these small island states (amongst others) are selling off their memorable web addresses to the highest bidders.
Take Anguilla, for instance. It's a British territory in the Caribbean with fewer than 20,000 residents. It doesn’t seem like the sort of place that would benefit from the artificial intelligence wave sweeping the tech world - except Anguilla’s country code top-level domain is .ai, an irresistible address for AI startups with cash to flash.
The rewards from selling web addresses are considerable: Vincent Cate, president at DataHaven.Net Ltd, which handles sales of the .ai domain for the Anguilla government, estimates the revenue generated by the island’s .ai domain is around $3 million per month. Amazingly and very handily, this covers roughly a third of the government’s monthly expenditure. With AI going the way it is, revenues will surely continue to rise.
Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, tiny island nation Tuvalu (with its 11,000 residents) is estimated to me making $10 million per year from its .tv domain - a whopping one-sixth of its GDP. That revenue has allowed Tuvalu to pave its roads, expand electricity access for its residents, and even pay its first annual United Nations membership in 2000. | AI Startups |
- An array of Big Tech companies just contributed to a $235 million round for AI startup Hugging Face, which creates tools for artificial intelligence developers to share and test their work openly, similar in spirit to GitHub for programming.
- Backers included Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm.
- The company is named after the hugging face emoji — a smiley face framed by two open hands — and stems from the company's origins making a chatbot app for iPhone.
Hugging Face, an AI firm based in New York, has raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation from some of technology's biggest companies.
Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm all contributed to the round, the company said. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said the funds are to be focused on hiring talent to be competitive in the artificial intelligence space.
Startups working on AI models have reached high valuations as big companies and venture capitalists seek to plow money in the recent AI boom, which kicked off last year when Microsoft-backed OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot.
Hugging Face's big valuation and crop of prominent backers reflect how a more collaborative approach to building AI has been gaining steam in recent months, especially after Facebook parent Meta released its Llama large language model, which is free to use for the vast majority of companies.
Other highly valued AI startups, like OpenAI or Cohere, work on the technology directly and guard the results as a trade secret, then charge customers to access them through application programming interfaces, or AIs.
But Hugging Face produces a platform where AI developers can share code, models, data sets, and use the company's developer tools to get open-source artificial intelligence models running more easily. In particular, Hugging Face often hosts weights, or large files with lists of numbers, which are the heart of most modern AI models.
While Hugging Face has developed some models, like BLOOM, its primary product is its website platform, where users can upload models and their weights. It also develops a series of software tools called libraries that allow users to get models working quickly, to clean up large datasets, or to evaluate their performance. It also hosts some AI models in a web interface so end users can experiment with them.
It's similar in theme and practice to code-repository GitHub (which Microsoft acquired in 2018), where coders from around the world post their projects while they're working on them.
Hugging Face endorses the belief that most companies working with AI will want to develop their own models or technology, and will need tools to do so, co-founder and CEO Delangue told CNBC. He hopes that AI developers will rely on Hugging Face on a daily basis to get their work done.
One reason the big companies are investing: Their employees are actively using the platform, he said.
"AI builders are using Hugging Face all day, every day," Delangue said. He predicted that the number of software developers working with AI models would grow in the coming years.
"Maybe in five years, you're going to have like 100 million AI builders. And if all of them use Hugging Face all day, every day, we'll obviously be in a good position," he said.
Although most attention in recent weeks has been on so-called large language models like ChatGPT or Llama that focus on generating text, Hugging Face hosts any AI model, including ones that generate music or images, translate languages, or identify objects inside images. Hugging Face hosts 500,000 different AI models, 250,000 data sets, and has 10,000 paying customers, the company said.
Delangue told CNBC he had recently played with IDEFICS, which allows users to upload an image and ask questions about it. He also mentioned Seamless M4T, a translation model from Facebook, as well as Llama2, Facebook's language model.
Hugging Face is named after an emoji, the hugging face, a smiley face framed by two open hands.
The name and logo date back to the company's founding. Hugging Face was originally a iPhone chatbot app, but when the company open-sourced some its machine-learning code, it realized that it was catching on with AI developers, and pivoted toward that.
"When we started the company, with my co founders Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, we joked that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three letter ticker," Delangue said.
"Maybe during this round we should start our lobbying exercise with the Nadsaq for them to allow us to use emojis on their board," he quipped. | AI Startups |
Lewis Hamilton isn't phased by a new rule in Formula 1 requiring drivers to get permission before making political statements during race weekends ... saying, he "won't be silenced."
“Nothing will stop me from speaking on the things that I feel that I’m passionate about and issues there are,” the seven-time F1 champion said Wednesday.
Sky Sports
The FIA, Formula 1's governing body, implemented a rule in December prohibiting drivers from making political, religious, or personal statements without permission.
The idea is statements political in nature can be divisive (after all, much of the world is split when it comes to politics), and F1 doesn't want fans alienated. It's like the old Michael Jordan quote ... "Republicans buy sneakers, too."
Hamilton, one of the most vocal superstars in the sport, said he wasn't surprised when he learned of the FIA's new rule, and he doesn't plan to abide by it ... "I’m still going to be speaking on my end."
“I feel the sport does have a responsibility, still always, to speak out as a means to create awareness on important topics, particularly as we are traveling to all these different places, so nothing changes,” Lewis says.
Hamilton's had a contentious relationship with FIA ... he found himself in a battle with them last season after they (attempted to) crackdown on drivers wearing jewelry during races. | Autoracing |
Formula One faces a legal complaint accusing it of breaching Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development guidelines after the sport concluded a deal this year extending its contract to hold races in Bahrain until 2036. The complaint, made through the British government’s UK National Contact Point, which addresses issues of responsible business conduct, has been served by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird) and two alleged torture survivors from Bahrain, Najah Yusuf and Hajer Mansoor. Yusuf was detained and abused in prison after peaceful criticism of F1 in Bahrain in 2017 and Bird maintains Mansoor was also detained and mistreated at the same time.Bird has been conducting an ongoing campaign to ensure F1 to stick to its commitment to respect human rights issues where it goes racing. The pressure group says it has received no satisfactory response to its calls for F1 to investigate human rights issues in Bahrain and believes repression around the race has steadily become worse.In February, F1 agreed a new deal with Bahrain to host the race until 2036, the longest contract in the sport’s history, sparking Birdto adopt a formal legal approach.Their complaint alleges: “Formula One failed to engage with human rights stakeholders including human rights organisations, legislators from across Europe, victims impacted by the Formula One race and those who have faced reprisals for their human rights work.”It accuses F1 of having failed to conduct a due diligence process in assessment of human rights before awarding the new contract and alleges “forced disappearances, extrajudicial killing and torture” continue to occur in Bahrain.The complaint specifically accuses F1 of being complicit in sportswashing, noting that the regime has used the event to promote a public display of unity within the kingdom over one of suppression. It alleges that F1 intensifies this oppression stating “the race has been responsible for a considerable spike in human rights abuses as the government acts to forestall and suppress protest around the time of the race”.The intent of pursuing legal action through the UK’s NCP is to force the issue to the OECD, which then may take action against F1. Part of the impetus behind the sport implementing a human rights policy was because of a previous complaint made by the NCP and Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, director of advocacy at Bird, hoped this, too, would provoke action from F1.“It appears that Formula One has taken the decision to disengage with any stakeholders, in violation of their own policy, and has estranged themselves from all experts who attempt to warn them about the serious human rights risks posed by their activities in Bahrain,” he said.“Our repeated attempts to engage with F1 have fallen on deaf ears, particularly since 2021, only to later learn that, in the wake of Bahrain’s horrific human rights abuses, they had been busy awarding the regime with the longest contract in motor racing history. We are now escalating the matter by taking it before the UK NCP.”Bahrain is set to hold the opening race of next season and its only pre-season test but criticism of the regime is intensifying. The Human Rights Watch group is to publish a report next week entitled: You Can’t Call Bahrain A Democracy: Bahrain’s Political Isolation Laws. It will document the Bahraini government’s use of political isolation laws and other tactics to keep activists and opposition members out of public office and public life, in what are described as further human rights abuses.Quick GuideHow do I sign up for sport breaking news alerts?ShowDownload the Guardian app from the iOS App Store on iPhones or the Google Play store on Android phones by searching for 'The Guardian'.If you already have the Guardian app, make sure you’re on the most recent version.In the Guardian app, tap the yellow button at the bottom right, then go to Settings (the gear icon), then Notifications.Turn on sport notifications.“Bahrain has spent the last decade cracking down on peaceful opposition and the political isolation laws are yet another example of the government’s repression expanding into new spheres,” said Joey Shea, Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “These draconian laws have made a mockery of Bahrain’s upcoming parliamentary ‘elections’, which can neither be free nor fair when you make any political opposition essentially illegal.”F1 has been approached but is yet to comment on the complaint. However, it has previously stated its position in relation to Bahrain. “We have always been clear with all race promoters and governments with which we deal worldwide that we take violence, abuse of human rights and repression very seriously.” “Our human rights policy is very clear and states that the Formula 1 companies are committed to respecting internationally recognised human rights in its operations globally and have made our position on human rights clear to all our partners and host countries who commit to respect human rights in the way their events are hosted and delivered.” | Autoracing |
Ferrari's Carlos Sainz took his first Formula 1 victory at the end of an extraordinary British Grand Prix packed full of incident and drama.The Spaniard benefited from questionable strategy calls from Ferrari, which cost his team-mate Charles Leclerc the win and a chance to revive his title hopes.Lewis Hamilton was in the battle for victory but finished third behind Red Bull's Sergio Perez after a frantic final final nine laps following a late safety car.Leclerc could finish only fourth and Ferrari missed the opportunity to make up significant ground in the title race on a bad day for championship leader Max Verstappen.The Red Bull driver finished only seventh, his car slowed by rear bodywork damage, but lost only six points to Leclerc as a result of Ferrari's race management.Verstappen leads Perez in the championship by 34 points, with Leclerc a further nine adrift.The race was delayed for an hour after a huge pile-up at the first corner caused a red flag, which took attention away from environmental protesters who had invaded the track after the start.Alfa Romeo's Zhou Guanyu vaulted the barriers at the first corner after sliding upside down across the gravel trap, but was freed from the car by paramedics and declared uninjured after a check-up at the medical centre.Williams driver Alex Albon was flown to Coventry Hospital for precautionary checks after he was involved in a separate accident, Aston Martin's Sebastian Vettel punting him into the pit wall.More to follow'We're better than that' - Hamilton discourages booing of VerstappenLando Norris column: 'I feel bad saying no to weddings'Full race results Following a huge crash at the start Zhou ended up stuck between the catch-fencing and the barrier - he was declared uninjured by medics Russell on bouncing cars, Hamilton and Silverstone | Autoracing |
Alex Albon becomes latest F1 driver to voice concerns about the FIA's new Sporting Code restricting political statements
Alex Albon has joined Valtteri Bottas and Max Verstappen in voicing concerns about the FIA's new Sporting Code restricting drivers from making political statements claiming it has "gone back and retracted" from the sport's previous ambitions.
Alex Albon is the latest Formula 1 driver to express concern about the FIA’s new regulations to restrict drivers from making social and political statements.
The FIA’s new Sporting Code limits drivers from making “political, religious and personal statements” in violation with the general “principle of neutrality promoted by the FIA” unless previously approved in writing from the governing body.
Albon joins Alpha Romeo’s Valtteri Bottas and Red Bull's Max Verstappen in raising concerns about the new regulation.
The 26-year-old Williams driver revealed there was some “confusion” from the driver cohort about the new FIA Sporting Code.
“I think firstly we just need to understand what are they trying to get out of it and what is the statement in the sense that last year we were talking about ‘We Race as One’ there was a joint ambition to try to speak up about certain issues,” Albon said, the Guardian reported.
“Whereas obviously it seems like we’ve gone back and retracted from our previous ambitions so it is a strange place I think there’s a bit of confusion from all of us.”
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Drivers looking to make a political or social statement will require written approval from the FIA and abide by its stance of neutrality.
“The general making and display of political, religious and personal statements or comments notably in violation of the general principle of neutrality promoted by the FIA under its Statutes, unless previously approved in writing by the FIA for International Competitions, or by the relevant ASN for National Competitions within their jurisdiction,” the new code states.
The new code is also in contrast to the F1’s inclusivity stances and the “We Race as One” initiative aimed at targeting racism and inequality.
F1 legend and Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton has been a stoic advocate for racist issues and has regularly participated in stances that support equality including with advocate t-shirts.
Hamilton wore a shirt that read “arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” when he stood on the podium at the Tuscan Grand Prix in 2020 in support of the medical technician shot by police during a raid on her home in Kentucky.
The F1 travels around the world including to locations in the middle east which have been the target of criticism for their religious views on same-sex marriages and women’s rights.
Albon said the sport had done a “good job” in addressing certain issues as they travel around the world but insisted a clear discussion to clarify the rules was needed.
“I’m sure there will be a statement or some clarity on it of course as drivers I feel like we do have responsibility in some respect to raise awareness to certain issues,” he said.
“And we just need to make sure. I’m sure... we won’t hold back on statements.”
At Red Bull’s 2023 launch, Verstappen echoed the concerns raised by Albon and while he admitted he was not an “outspoken” driver he said everyone “should be allowed to speak”.
"I'm normally not that outspoken, because first of all it's tough as a racing driver to be fully committed to that as well in terms of going into everything and making sure that you know all the facts, right?,” he said.
"But I don't think it is necessary because you are, in a way, making sure basically making sure that people are not allowed to speak anymore.
"I think we should be allowed and like I said before, some people will speak a bit more, some not, but it was probably a bit unnecessary."
Bottas also stood in support of his fellow drivers raising concerns over the new Sporting Code and insisted the drivers only speak out to “make the world a better place”.
“I think everybody should be allowed to say what they want and support things that they want or have passion for because people in this world should be free to say what they want,” he said, Sky Sports reported.
“So in a way I don’t see the need for that thing to be in the rule book but then if you think politically let’s say from F1’s side or the organiser’s side of a race obviously they want everything to go smoothly and not to have somebody with a t-shirt saying ‘this and this’.
"But normally when we've been speaking it's to try and make the world a better place. That's my view. I don't think it's necessary... but that's Formula 1."
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner also commented on the new regulation and warned the sport against creating a “load of robots” and urged the FIA to consider a “sensible balance”.
“I think, first of all, sports should never be used as a political tool. And I think that sport, in many ways, is there to obviously entertain, but to also have an element of escapism within it,” he said, according to Autosport.
“But certainly we at Red Bull have never constrained our drivers to not have the freedom of speech either, or the freedom of their opinions or the ability to speak their minds, because they do have a voice.
“I think it's a matter of finding a balance, and in the world that we live in today, everybody has a voice, and that shouldn't be suppressed. But of course, it does have to be done responsibly.
“So we don't want a load of robots that are without opinion going racing, but like with all these things, there just has to be a sensible balance.”
The F1 season will begin on February 23 for pre-season testing a Sakhir before the teams travel to Bahrain for the first Grand Prix on March 6.
The F1 was contacted for comment. | Autoracing |
After a two-year hiatus thanks to the pandemic, the Singapore Grand Prix — Formula One's first ever night race — is roaring back this Sunday on a circuit that Oracle Red Bull's Max Verstappen says he's thrilled about."We're always very excited to come here because the track is amazing to drive," the defending champion told CNBC's John Patrick Ong on Wednesday.Though the Belgian-Dutch racer, who's racing for the Netherlands, said Singapore's Marina Bay street circuit is "always a challenge," it's one he looks forward to."It is a very tough track just because it's a street circuit … and you have to always leave a bit more margin than on [a] normal track." F1's street circuits are generally bumpier than regular race tracks and have more corners. Of all the F1 circuits, Marina Bay's 3-mile loop has the second-highest number of corners, with at least one safety car deployed in every race to date.Max Verstappen wins third place and celebrates on the podium during the Singapore Grand Prix at the Marina Bay Street Circuit on Sept. 22, 2019. The Singapore Grand Prix is set to return as the Formula One's only night race on Oct. 2.Clive Mason | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images"Normally, it's one of the tougher or toughest ones on the calendar," Verstappen said, but it's one he will "try to win."Referring to the city-state's humidity, he added that he isn't looking forward to "[losing] a lot of fluid.""We haven't been here in a while... so it will be very interesting for us to understand the track [and] how much has changed."The No.1 Red Bull driver boasts a 116-point lead at the top of the standings, and has a mathematical chance of winning the championship.Hungarian Grand Prix hiccupBut things haven't always been smooth sailing for Verstappen.In July's Hungarian Grand Prix, he had to start at the 10th position after a power unit hiccup during the qualifying session. In spite of that, he managed to pull off a victory."As a team, I think we made all the right calls, in terms of when to pit, and we jumped a few people," he said.Max Verstappen won the race at Hungarian Aramco Formula One Grand Prix on July 31, 2022, in Mogyorod, Hungary. Though he had to start in the 10th position after a power unit hiccup during the qualifying session, he managed to pull off a victory.Robert Szaniszló | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesIn his 42nd lap, Verstappen did a 360-degree spin, which initially cost him the lead to Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc."It was definitely really satisfying. Because when I woke up that day, I didn't expect that I was going to win the race."Ground effect, a car design feature that F1 outlawed in 1982, was reintroduced this year. It enables drivers to follow the car in front of them more closely, allowing for more exciting wheel-to-wheel racing.While Verstappen said he had to readjust to the newer designs at the beginning of the season, his grip on the car has been improving."I think you could see already on quite a few tracks that there was a bit more overtaking, a bit more racing. And I think that's what we want to see."'Sometimes second's OK'The Red Bull Racing team announced a multi-year partnership with cryptocurrency exchange company Bybit in February.Verstappen drew similarities between the crypto industry and the world of F1, saying, "in a way, it's always about risk management as well.""In a way that's the same for a market right? Of course you try to make a lot of money but sometimes actually settling for maybe a safer bet can actually work out better in the long term."Max Verstappen of the Netherlands and Oracle Red Bull Racing celebrates his win on the podium after the Italian Grand Prix on Sept. 11, 2022 in Monza, Italy.Dan Istitene - Formula 1 | Formula 1 | Getty ImagesF1, which involves cars racing over 200mph, has always been known as a risky contest. But Verstappen expressed faith in his team's car."I know that I have a car to fight for the championship, so you don't always need to risk everything," he said."Sometimes second's OK, instead of trying to go for the ultimate goal of winning a race, it's all about always scoring points." | Autoracing |
07:44 AM BST
Q2 - A 1:29.964 from Verstappen
On used tyres and not too far off his Q1 lap time on new softs. Albon is about 1.6sec off that.
07:42 AM BST
Q2 begins - 15 minutes on the clock
Good from Albon to get through after struggling in FP3. That’s a brilliant lap from Lawson. I do wonder if AlphaTauri have made the right decision choosing Ricciardo over him. What would have been the harm in delaying another month and giving Lawson another three rounds to see how he does? And the same with Ricciardo.
Anyway, Verstappen, the two Ferraris and Albon are out there. All on used tyres; softs.
07:36 AM BST
Q1 - Classification
VER 1:29.878
NOR +0.185
LEC +0.515
LAW +0.547
PIA +0.561
SAI +0.773
PER +0.774
TSU +0.855
RUS +0.933
HAM +0.933
GAS +0.965
ALB +1.063
OCO +1.082
ALO +1.093
MAG +1.098
ELIMINATED:
BOT
STR
HUL
ZHO
SAR
07:34 AM BST
Q1 ends - Verstappen fastest
Bottas, Stroll, Hulkenberg, Zhou and Sargeant out.
Zhou complaining about traffic into turn nine but that is where he ran very wide and lost the lap time that probably cost him his place in Q2.
07:33 AM BST
Q1 - What can Stroll do?
Only 15th. I think he could be out here. Russell in seventh. Tsunoda into seventh, knocking Stroll out.
Hamilton about to complete his lap as Alonso goes 11th and Lawson a brilliant fourth on a new set of tyres. Hamilton moves 10th.
Albon needs to find some lap time here and he does! That’s Bottas out.
07:32 AM BST
Q1 - Bottas moves up to 10th
Will that be enough? Gasly into seventh, decent, Magnussen then goes ninth. Ocon then goes eighth. Nobody struggled so far...
07:31 AM BST
Q1 - Only one minute left on the clock
Verstappen, Norris, Leclerc and Sainz have not come back out. Everyone else bar Sargeant is out there.
07:29 AM BST
Q1 - That Lawson lap has led to a gaggle of cars at the end of the pit lane
“There’s so much traffic,” Hamilton says. Yeah, you’re part of it too, mate.
Only 15 drivers have set a lap time: Bottas, Hulkenberg, Sargeant, Albon and Gasly have not. So they are the drivers in the drop zone.
07:27 AM BST
Q1 - Lawson goes seventh and ahead of Russell
That suggests the track evolution is fairly strong here. Although he was also 0.3sec faster than team-mate Tsunoda.
07:26 AM BST
Q1 - Leclerc begins his hot lap
It’s not a brilliant first sector, 0.3sec down on Verstappen, though the Red Bull has been mighty there. He only loses 0.090sec in the middle sector, though, and will have a good chance to go into the top three here. Indeed he does, going third, 0.515sec down on Verstappen and splitting the two McLaren cars.
07:23 AM BST
Q1 - And we're back underway
Verstappen currently leads the way. The track temperature has dropped a little since we were last on track.
— Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant F1 Team (@AstonMartinF1) September 23, 2023
07:21 AM BST
Still nine minutes and five seconds left in the session
And seven drivers have yet to set a lap time and plenty of others will want to improve. Could be a busy finish. The Ferraris line up at the end of the pit lane to get their first laps in.
07:20 AM BST
SESSION WILL RESUME AT 7.22 BST
The track has been designated clear and we will get going again shortly after Logan Sargeant’s crash caused a red flag.
07:17 AM BST
There had been some thought that Liam Lawson could be loaned to Williams in 2024
Logan Sargeant has not had the best debut season and has also suffered a fair few crashes. It’s how Alexander Albon ended up at Williams, loaned from Red Bull. Either way, I think the American Sargeant is definitely driving for his future.
07:13 AM BST
Q1 - Sargeant just slid onto the grass in the final sector
...and then looked like he kept his foot in a bit too much and then slid into the barriers, left-side on.
— Formula 1 (@F1) September 23, 2023
07:12 AM BST
Q1 - Order under the red flag
VER 1:29.878
NOR +0.185
PIA +0.561
PER +0.774
RUS +1.104
HAM +1.139
ALO +1.236
OCO +1.291
TSU +1.333
ZHO +1.520
MAG +1.679
LAW +1.851
STR +2.368
NO TIME SET:
LEC
SAI
ELIMINATION ZONE:
BOT
HUL
SAR
ALB
GAS
07:10 AM BST
Q1 - RED FLAG
Sargeant is out of the car but it is wrecked and that will be the session stopped.
RED FLAG! 🚩
Logan Sargeant is OUT of qualifying after going into the barriers! ❌ pic.twitter.com/DjNekGKOWB
— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) September 23, 2023
07:10 AM BST
Q1 - McLaren looking the biggest threat to Verstappen this weekend
And Piastri confirms that by going third, albeit more than half a second down on Verstappen.
We’ve got double yellows because Logan Sargeant has had a fair old shunt at the final corner...
07:09 AM BST
Q1 - It's a 1:29.878 for Verstappen which is fastest
He does not have a great amount of soft tyres for this qualifying session so that might be his only lap. Sergio Perez will need to go again... he’s 0.774sec down on his team-mate.
Lando Norris up there with Verstappen after two sectors... but finishes the lap 0.185sec down on the Dutchman. Not too bad.
07:07 AM BST
Q1 - Verstappen begins his first fast lap
He, unsurprisingly, sets the fastest first sector time, although gets a bit lairy on the exit of Degner 2. He then goes fastest in the second sector as well.
07:05 AM BST
Q1 - Lawson with a 1:31.729sec
Lance Stroll is half a second off that time as the cars queue up at the end of the pit lane.
07:01 AM BST
Q1 - Lance Stroll the first driver out
He has had a bit of a time of it recently. Crashed heavily in qualifying in Singapore and then missed the race.
07:00 AM BST
GREEN LIGHT: Q1 begins!
18 minutes, 20 drivers and only 15 will go through to Q2. Liam Lawson keen to get out.
— Scuderia AlphaTauri (@AlphaTauriF1) September 23, 2023
07:00 AM BST
Red Bull can win the constructors' title this weekend
Verstappen cannot win the drivers’ championship.
06:56 AM BST
We are about three minutes away from Q1 beginning
It’s always good to have some home interest in Japan. Kamui Kobayashi finished on the podium here 11 years ago, which was some achievement.
06:49 AM BST
Thoughts on this new camera?
It’s good, isn’t it?
"It's like you're driving with Lewis Hamilton" 👊
This new on-board camera angle is 🔥 pic.twitter.com/rvIOih5cWG
— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) September 23, 2023
06:39 AM BST
Remaining F1 races this year
06:32 AM BST
Last week in Singapore was the first non-Red Bull win of the year
In fact, it was the first time Max Verstappen did not finish either first or second and broke his run of 10 wins in a row. So, well done to Ferrari and Carlos Sainz.
Can we expect a similar level of challenge this weekend? Well, going on the three practice sessions we have seen so far: fat chance. The track is probably one that suits the Red Bull and in particular Verstappen, a lot. I would be surprised if anyone got within four-tenths of Verstappen at the end of the qualifying hour.
06:26 AM BST
The two Degner right-handers causing issues
It tends to be the way these days. Tricky. Wouldn’t be surprised if someone binned it in qualifying. Pierre Gasly did so in practice yesterday.
Carlos dips a wheel into the gravel 👇 pic.twitter.com/b4c402EGsI
— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) September 23, 2023
06:22 AM BST
Is retaining Ricciardo the right decision?
Ricciardo’s comeback to F1 after being dropped by McLaren last year only begun in Hungary. He then had another race in Belgium before suffering his injury during a crash at Zandvoort. Lawson has been excellent in the races that he has deputised but that has only been two races... and Lawson is still young. In any case, if Ricciardo is a dud next year there’s nothing to say that they cannot switch them mid-season.
06:17 AM BST
Current constructor standings
06:05 AM BST
Current driver standings: Top 10
05:59 AM BST
Times from third and final F1 practice
Max Verstappen, Red Bull 1min 30.267sec
Lando Norris, McLaren 1min 30.507sec
Oscar Piastri, McLaren 1min 30.555sec
Sergio Perez, Red Bull 1min 31.004sec
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari 1min 31.022sec
Carlos Sainz, Ferrari 1min 31.137sec
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes 1min 31.159sec
George Russell, Mercedes 1min 31.505sec
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin 1min 31.549sec
Zhou Guanyu, Alfa Romeo, 1min 31.688sec
Valtteri Bottas, Alfa Romeo, 1min 31.699sec
Kevin Magnussen, Haas, 1min 31.880sec
Esteban Ocon, Alpine, 1min 31.924sec
Yuki Tsunoda, AlphTauri 1min 31.951sec
Nico Hulkenberg, Haas 1min 31.979sec
Logan Sargeant, Williams 1min 32.002sec
Liam Lawson, AlphaTauri 1min 32.048sec
Alexander Albon, Williams 1min32.113sec
Lance Stroll, Aston Martin 1min 32.154sec
Pierre Gasly, Alpine 1min 32.199sec
05:50 AM BST
Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda sign for AlphaTauri in 2024
Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda have been confirmed as AlphaTauri’s driver partnership for next season. Former Red Bull and McLaren driver Ricciardo returned to Formula One in July, replacing the axed Nyck de Vries in the second AlphaTauri, but suffered a broken hand in a heavy crash in just his second race back during practice at Zandvoort.
That presented an opportunity to New Zealander Liam Lawson, who impressed hugely in the rain in Zandvoort before picking up two points for the team last time out in Singapore. But the 21-year-old has not done enough to earn a drive with the Red Bull sister team next season and will instead reprise his role as reserve driver.
“I’m stoked to be driving with Yuki again next year and continuing the journey with Scuderia AlphaTauri,” Ricciardo, 34, said.
“Following the progress we have already made and the plans for the future, it’s an exciting time for the team.
“We are building and it is a great feeling. There is a lot of work to do, but we are heading in the right direction and there is a lot to look forward to. Bring on 2024!”
Lawson’s future in Formula One was the subject of great interest ahead of this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix, where he continues to deputise for Ricciardo while he recovers from surgery.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner did not rule out the possibility of loaning Lawson to another team, with American Logan Sargeant’s place at Williams rumoured to be under threat.
“He [Lawson] is a gritty racer, we knew that about him and I think he has grabbed the opportunity in Formula One that drivers very seldom get to demonstrate their talent,” Horner said on Friday ahead of AlphaTauri’s announcement.
“I think he’s done a tremendous job and certainly has put himself firmly on the radar and cemented the feeling that we had about him.
“He will be a Grand Prix driver, he already is, at some stage. Whether he has to wait a little for that or not he is demonstrating that he is a talent for the future.
“He is in the Red Bull family. If there was a seat, we have done that in the past when Carlos Sainz went on loan to the previous Renault team.
“If he is not sitting in a Grand Prix car next year then he will have plenty on his plate with other stuff to do.”
Tsunoda joked on Thursday that the team needed three seats next season, such was the battle to secure a drive between the three drivers.
The 23-year-old made his Formula One debut with the team at the start of the 2021 season and achieved his best finish of fourth place in the final race of that campaign.
In a difficult season for AlphaTauri, Tsunoda has picked up just three points and sits 17th in the standings ahead of his home race at Suzuka.
By Scott Hunt, PA, Suzuka | Autoracing |
Before taking off on its traditional summer break, F1 descends into the Ardennes Forest and the idyllic Spa-Francorchamps circuit this weekend for the Belgian Grand Prix.
Two-time defending series champion Max Verstappen is the heavy favorite to win for the third straight time in the country of his birth (he races under the Dutch flag but was born in Hasselt), but wet conditions could throw a spanner in the works and open the door for the likes of Lando Norris and a resurgent McLaren camp.
Here’s everything to know ahead of the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix:
- J
Belgian Grand Prix TV/streaming schedule
All times Eastern
Friday
7:25 - 8:30 a.m.: Free practice 1 (ESPN2, F1 TV Pro)
10:55 a.m. - Noon: Qualifying (ESPN2, F1 TV Pro)
Saturday
6:25 - 7:30 a.m.: Sprint shootout (ESPN2, F1 TV Pro)
10:25 - 11:30 a.m.: Sprint (ESPN2, F1 TV Pro)
Sunday
7:30 - 8:55 a.m.: Pre-race show (ESPN)
8:55 - 11 a.m.: Belgian Grand Prix (ESPN, F1 TV Pro)
- Watch F1 on ESPN and ESPN2
Sling TV
Belgian Grand Prix details
Track: Circuit Spa-Francorchamps (Spa, Belgium), 19-turn, 4.35-mile permanent racing facility
Race length: 44 laps for 191.4 miles
Lap record: 1:46.286
Tire compounds: C2 (Hard), C3 (Medium), C4 (Hard)
2022 winner: Max Verstappen, Red Bull-RBPT
Verstappen gets five-place grid drop
Max Verstappen's Red Bull-RBPT is taking on a fifth gearbox of the season and, since only four are allowed per season, he will be penalized by five grid spots for Sunday's Belgian Grand Prix. The gearbox is part of a list of limited components teams are able to use throughout a season along with power unit and engine parts. The two-time reigning and event champion will start from P6 after coming in first in qualifying.
Belgian Grand Prix starting grid
Charles Leclerc (16), Ferrari
Sergio Perez (11), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
Lewis Hamilton (44), Mercedes
Carlos Sainz (55), Ferrari
Oscar Piastri (81), McLaren-Mercedes
Max Verstappen (1), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
Lando Norris (4), McLaren-Mercedes
George Russell (63), Mercedes
Fernando Alonso (14), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Lance Stroll (18), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Yuki Tsunoda (22), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Pierre Gasly (10), Alpine-Renault
Kevin Magnussen (20), Haas-Ferrari
Valtteri Bottas (77), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Esteban Ocon (31), Alpine-Renault
Alexander Albon (23), Williams-Mercedes
Zhou Guanyu (24), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Logan Sargeant (2), Williams-Mercedes
Daniel Ricciardo (3), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Nico Hulkenberg, (27), Haas-Ferrari
Top drivers and best bets for the Belgian Grand Prix
Verstappen – as he will for the rest of the season – opens with an absurd advantage in the odds, with a -350 moneyline going into the weekend, while no other driver is better than 10-to-1 according to BetMGM. Keep betting him even if you have to risk more until he starts not to pay out.
Best odds to win
• Max Verstappen -350
• Lando Norris +1000
• Lewis Hamilton +1200
Yahoo Sports’ Nick Bromberg wrote earlier in the week on other wagers he’s eying for the weekend, including Verstappen and Norris finishing on the podium (+100) and both Aston Martin drivers to finish in the points (+175). Verstappen is imperious in the wet, while Norris is on a great run of form with back-to-back P2 finishes. As for Aston Martin, Fernando Alonso has bagged six podiums in 11 races so far, while teammate Lance Stroll has an average finish of P10 in races he’s finished for the team at Spa.
Sprint weekend format returns
In 2021, F1 introduced the Sprint weekend format, which moved traditional qualifying to Friday and put in its place a shortened race that would award minimal points and set the grid for Sunday’s Grand Prix. A few nominal tweaks later, we have our current format for the 2023 season, which effectively makes Saturday more like an exhibition. This weekend marks the third of six sprint format weekends in 2023.
Sprint Shootout is here! 🍿
Imagine qualifying, but even quicker. Every lap counts as Saturday's Sprint Shootout sets the grid for the #F1Sprint
Leaving Sunday's Grand Prix unaffected 🔒 pic.twitter.com/oTVrJIuLvl
— Formula 1 (@F1) April 25, 2023
The format change ditches the lame-duck Saturday morning practice session in favor of a quicker version of the traditional three-stage knockout qualifying format to set the grid for the sprint race later in the day. The top eight finishers of the sprint will be awarded points in descending order (eight for P1, seven for P2, six for P3, etc.).
F1 world drivers’ championship standings
1. Max Verstappen (1), Red Bull-Honda RBPT - 281
2. Sergio Perez (11), Red Bull-Honda RBPT - 171
3. Fernando Alonso (14), Aston Martin-Mercedes - 139
4. Lewis Hamilton (44), Mercedes - 133
5. George Russell (63), Mercedes - 90
6. Carlos Sainz (55), Ferrari - 87
7. Charles Leclerc (16), Ferrari - 80
8. Lando Norris (4), McLaren-Mercedes - 60
9. Lance Stroll (18), Aston Martin-Mercedes - 45
10. Esteban Ocon (31), Alpine-Renault - 31
11. Oscar Piastri (81), McLaren-Mercedes - 27
12. Pierre Gasly (10), Alpine-Renault - 16
13. Alexander Albon (23), Williams-Mercedes - 11
14. Nico Hülkenberg, (27), Haas-Ferrari - 9
15. Valtteri Bottas (77), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari - 5
16. Zhou Guanyu (24), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari - 4
17. Yuki Tsunoda (22), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT - 2
18. Kevin Magnussen (20), Haas-Ferrari - 2
19. Logan Sargeant (2), Williams-Mercedes - 0
20. Daniel Ricciardo (3), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT - 0
Belgian Grand Prix weather
Expect delays or cancellations. The forecast calls for hot, humid conditions with more than a 51 percent chance of precipitation for all three days. The nastiest weather is expected for Friday’s practice and grand prix qualifying sessions which could mix up the middle of the grid, but Verstappen, Hamilton and Norris are all strong wet-weather drivers and typically run very well at Spa, so temper expectations at the top.
Visibility both on track and in the air could severely alter the weekend schedule. With Spa’s deadly history, including the recent death of Dilano van 't Hoff after a crash in heavy rain, drivers are already pushing for more caution this weekend. Alternatively, if visibility in the skies hampers the ability for medical response helicopters to take off and land, that, too, could force race stewards’ hands in delaying or canceling on-track running.
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Two racing drivers have been involved in a horror crash at the British Grand Prix - with experts saying it could have been deadly but for a life-saving "Halo" device.Formula 2 drivers Roy Nissany and Dennis Hauger collided on the opening lap at Silverstone on Sunday, as Hauger's car was launched over the "sausage" kerb and sent airborne towards Nissany.
Hauger's vehicle landed on top of his rival at speed, before both cars came to a stop in the gravel.Incredibly, both drivers escaped unhurt and television replays showed it was the Halo - the cockpit-fixed safety device introduced to Formula 1 and Formula 2 in 2018 - that had saved the life of Nissany. Twitter Due to your consent preferences, you’re not able to view this. Open Privacy Options After the crash, F1 journalist Chris Medland tweeted: "The Halo absolutely saved Nissany's life. 100%." F1 commentator Tom Gaymor wrote: "Thank goodness for the Halo, unequivocally the saviour yet again."
The Halo is a protective barrier that helps to prevent large objects and debris from entering the cockpit of a single-seat racing car. Twitter Due to your consent preferences, you’re not able to view this. Open Privacy Options It has proven controversial with critics saying it spoils the "purity" of a single-seat, open-cockpit racing car.Some have also claimed it can get in the way if a driver needs to get out of the car quickly. In practice, this has proved to not be an issue.Lewis Hamilton credited the Halo for saving him after he was involved in a crash at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix with fierce rival Max Verstappen. Twitter Due to your consent preferences, you’re not able to view this. Open Privacy Options Verstappen's Red Bull car was sent out of control and airborne into the path of Hamilton, with the rear-right wheel crushing the top of the Briton's Mercedes. Afterwards, Hamilton said: "I feel very, very fortunate today. Thank God for the Halo which saved me, and saved my neck." | Autoracing |
About halfway around Harris Hill Raceway, traditionally affectless Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen lets out the tiniest giggle. He's single-handedly -- like, literally using one hand -- sliding the new Honda Civic Type R around a bumpy turn, the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires begging for mercy while Max tests the limits of adhesion. He slams the shifter into third gear and goes hard on the gas as the Type R bouncy-bounces around the asphalt. "Just give it full throttle here," he says. "It's the only way."Seriously, Max is freaking caning the Civic. And from the passenger seat, all I can do is giggle, too. The Civic Type R clearly loves being thrashed, and at the hands of an F1 champ, this car's inner hooligan has every opportunity to shine. That inherent playfulness was one of the previous Civic Type R's best traits, and not an ounce of that spirit was lost in the development of the new car. Instead, Honda worked on smoothing out many of Type R's rougher edges, and the Civic is better for it. 2023 Honda Civic Type R Is a Little More Adult, No Less Fun See all photos The big win: The Type R no longer looks like an anime character. The handsome styling of the 11th-gen Civic totally works when pumped up for hot-hatch duty, and now the Type R looks like a car an adult could reasonably pull off. Sure, there's still a big wing out back serving as the last bastion of immaturity, but at least it's functional, and like the old Type R, it doesn't impede rear visibility.The interior is similarly straightforward, and carries over mostly unchanged from the standard Civic. There's a Type R-specific steering wheel with a thicker rim and red stitching, in addition to an aluminum shift knob, metal trim on the console and awesome red carpets. The new sport seats are comfy as heck and easier to get in and out of but offer lots of side and thigh support. The reshaped seats don't push your head forward if you're wearing a helmet, which is helpful for getting a good seating position on track. Oh, and the seats are heated now. Finally.The interior doesn't change much from the standard Civic, which is good, because it's pretty darn fabulous. Honda The Civic's digital gauge cluster has a new display motif for the Type R's hottest Plus R drive mode, complete with F1-style shift indicator lights. Atop the dash, you'll find the same 9-inch touchscreen as other Civic models, with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and a relatively simple -- if basic -- complement of features. Driver-assistance tech gets a boost this year, too, with the addition of traffic sign recognition, blind-spot monitoring and rear cross-traffic alert, bolstering standard features like adaptive cruise control, forward-collision warning, lane-keeping assist and lane-departure warning.You'll hear more about the Civic Type R's on-road livability when we drive it again next month, but for now, my test time is strictly limited to a few laps around Harris Hill. The 2.0-liter turbo I4 engine is a treat, making 315 horsepower and 310 pound-feet of torque -- increases of 9 hp and 15 lb-ft over the old Type R. There's the slightest bit of initial lag as the turbo spools up, but the full torque thrust hits hard just above 2,500 rpm, and the power band is wide enough that you can hold third gear through corners where you might normally want to downshift to second.
The Type R continues to use Honda's automatic rev-matching tech, which the company says is now 10% quicker than before. You can turn it off if you prefer to heel-and-toe yourself, but it works just fine when left on. Plus, automatic rev-matching is useful for day-to-day driving in traffic. It also makes the transmission a bit more forgiving, which is great for newbie stick-shifters.Zip zip zip. Honda On track, you really notice the 2023 Type R's more responsive steering, which feels better on initial turn-in and delivers slightly more feedback through the wheel. The suspension is a little better, too, keeping the Civic frisky and agile without being overly stiff. When you push it hard, there's an appropriate amount of roll that gives a higher sensation of speed, but the Civic encourages you to keep hustling. This car loves to attack corners, the four-piston Brembo brake calipers clamping down on 13.8-inch front rotors to quickly scrub off speed with only a slight shimmy from the hatch's rear end. My past experience with Cup 2 tires leads me to believe they offer tremendous grip, but I'll have to sample this setup again when I'm not getting an F1 driver's sloppy seconds.Those Cup 2s are an optional tire sold at the dealer level, FYI, with the standard rolling stock consisting of 265/30-series Michelin Pilot Sport 4S rubbers wrapping 19-inch wheels. Those wheels are an inch smaller in diameter than the 20s from the old Civic Type R, but they're wider, which is a win-win for ride quality and traction.My only complaint is that the Type R still doesn't sound particularly good, even with the 2023 model's improved exhaust flow and active valve design. It just doesn't bark like a Hyundai Elantra N or Toyota GR Corolla, but at least that super cool tri-tip exhaust setup remains intact.Next month, we'll tell you all about how the Civic Type R feels on the street. Honda Those compact performers from Hyundai and Toyota will be the Civic Type R's strongest competitors, especially since they both undercut the Honda's $43,990 base price (including $1,095 for destination). An Elantra N starts at $33,245 while the GR Corolla starts at $36,995, though if you want Toyota's hella-hot Morizo Edition, that crests $50K. Woof.Assuming the Civic Type R isn't a total chore to drive on the street (how could it be?), it'll continue to be one of the best all-around performance cars money can buy. Better looking and better equipped, the 2023 Type R is a grown-up machine that's even easier to live with, but it packs a serious punch that'll make even the most stoic of F1 drivers smile.Editors' note: Travel costs related to this story were covered by the manufacturer, which is common in the auto industry. The judgments and opinions of CNET's staff are our own, and we do not accept paid editorial content. | Autoracing |
Formula One has confirmed the cancellation of the 2023 Chinese Grand Prix because of continuing Covid restrictions. The meeting was to form part of a record 24-race season next year and F1 is in negotiations with venues interested in stepping in to replace the Shanghai race.The Chinese GP was due to take place on 16 April but that was always dependent on China’s strict Covid policies, particularly in relation to teams and personnel being able to enter the country and function with sufficient ease to hold the race. F1 has not raced in China since 2019 because of the country’s zero-Covid policy.On Friday F1 formally announced the conditions required to go racing could not be met. “Formula 1 can confirm, following dialogue with the promoter and relevant authorities, that the 2023 Chinese Grand Prix will not take place due to the ongoing difficulties presented by the Covid-19 situation,” said their statement.The cancellation leaves a significant gap of up to four weeks in the calendar. The race was due to take place between the Australian GP on 2 April and the Baku GP on 30 April. F1 is already in discussion with potential replacements to bridge what would be a major break in the calendar, potentially losing momentum after the first three rounds of the season. However, a decision is not expected until the new year.It is understood F1 had requested Baku move its race forward but the race organisers wanted to stick to their previously agreed date. A number of other tracks are believed to be interested in taking the slot, with an additional race in Europe most likely to be chosen. However, that too would create additional cost and complexity in returning freight from Australia back to Europe and then on to Azerbaijan.Portimão in Portugal, which stood in twice during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 and proved popular with teams and drivers, is believed to be the most likely candidate. Turkey’s Istanbul circuit also hosted races during Covid-affected seasons and Paul Ricard in France remains a possibility having hosted a race last year but with no place on the calendar in 2023.The Portuguese F1 commentator João Carlos Costa implied on Twitter on Thursday that the negotiations with Portimão were already at an advanced stage and expected it to be confirmed shortly.“Portugal once again on the F1 route,” he wrote. “Imminent decision - Portimão should replace China in the 2023 calendar. Small details are missing, to be resolved before the FIA World Council, scheduled for December 9, in Bologna. Portuguese fans, what a Christmas gift!” If the meeting was held there it would mark the 15th anniversary of the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve.F1 made no comment on the potential replacements but it is understood it will only opt to add another meeting if a suitable and logistically acceptable venue is found. “Formula 1 is assessing alternative options to replace the slot on the 2023 calendar and will provide an update on this in due course,” it said. | Autoracing |
Max Verstappen can clinch the 2023 Formula 1 title before Sunday’s Qatar Grand Prix even starts.
Verstappen enters the race weekend a staggering 173 points ahead of Sergio Perez with six races to go. And with Qatar being a sprint weekend, Verstappen can ensure that Perez has no mathematical shot to win the title by simply finishing sixth in Saturday’s sprint race.
A sixth-place finish would prevent Perez from winning the title even if Perez won each of the last six races and posted the fastest lap in each of them while also winning the three sprint races remaining on the schedule.
If the title isn’t clinched on Saturday — it likely will be — Verstappen just has to have a 146-point lead on Perez after the Grand Prix to be crowned champion. And given how much of a favorite Verstappen is to win at the Lusail Circuit, don’t be surprised if he’s celebrating his title in victory lane on Sunday.
Verstappen is -450 to win the race at BetMGM and no other driver is better than 12-1. Perez and Lando Norris are tied as the No. 2 favorites at +1200 while McLaren’s Oscar Piastri is at +1800. Yes, McLaren’s drivers are the No. 2 favorites to Red Bull and ahead of both Mercedes and Ferrari. Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton is at +2000 while Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc is at +2200.
This weekend’s race is just the second F1 event at Lusail and the first since 2021. The track was added to the 2021 calendar because of the COVID-19 pandemic and then added on a regular basis going forward starting in 2023.
Hamilton won the 2021 race by 25 seconds ahead of Verstappen in a race that didn’t feature a single caution. It’s hard to take much from that victory, however. The car regulations were much different and Mercedes won the constructor’s title.
The track features a long front straight and lots of high-speed corners. That’s a perfect recipe for Verstappen and Red Bull.
Here are a few bets that we like ahead of the race weekend. All odds are from BetMGM.
Fernando Alonso to finish top 10 (-400)
Alonso’s speed has fallen off the longer the season has gone on. But his Aston Martin is still plenty fast enough to get a top 10.
Lewis Hamilton to finish top six (-350)
Mercedes still has an extremely finicky car but is bringing upgrades to the track this weekend as it looks to beat Ferrari for No. 2 in the constructor’s standings.
Sergio Perez to finish in the top three (-135)
With Verstappen’s title clinched and the constructor’s title already locked up, we wouldn’t be surprised if Perez has a great race without any pressure.
Mercedes to finish ahead of Ferrari (+100)
Ferrari is -140 to have a car finish ahead of Mercedes despite Hamilton having better odds to win than Leclerc and George Russell having better odds to win than Carlos Sainz. We’re going with the order of the winner’s odds here.
Max Verstappen and Lando Norris to finish 1-2 (+175)
We thought about doubling down on the Sergio Perez bet with a Verstappen/Perez top two at the same odds, but we’ll go with McLaren here and see if we can get the top three finishers correct. | Autoracing |
Brazilian Grand Prix 2023: Schedule, Race Time In India, Where To Watch
The Brazilian Grand Prix 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Brazilian GP. Get the full schedule, date, and timing here
The Brazilian Grand Prix 2023 will be held on November 5, 2023 at the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace in São Paulo, Brazil. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Brazilian Grand Prix.
Brazilian Grand Prix 2023: Full schedule, Date, and Timing
Here is the entire Formula 1 weekend schedule for the Brazilian Grand Prix. The timings are as per Indian Standard Time.
November 3, Friday
Free Practice 1 - 8.00 pm to 9.00 pm
Qualifying: 11:30 am
November 4, Saturday
Sprint Shootout: 7.30 pm to 8.14 pm
November 5, Sunday
Sprint: 12 am
Race: 10.30 pm
Where To Watch Brazilian Grand Prix 2023 in India
The Brazilian GP will not be televised In India. However, Indian F1 fans can access the live streaming by subscribing to F1 TV Pro and the F1 TV app. Fans will also get the race sessions across the weekend, including support series races on the streaming service and global broadcast feeds. F1 TV Pro app is supported on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and smart TVs.
Brazilian Grand Prix Statistics
The Brazilian Grand Prix is one of the most iconic and popular races on the Formula One calendar. The race has been held every year since 1973. The Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace is a challenging circuit, with a mix of fast straights and tight corners.
The track is also known for its unpredictable weather conditions, which can often lead to exciting races.
Last five Brazilian GP winners
2022 - George Russell (Mercedes)
2021 - Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2019 - Max Verstappen (Red Bull Racing-Honda)
2018 - Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2017 - Sebastian Vettel (Ferrari)
Brazilian Grand Prix Vital Stats
First Grand Prix – 1973
Track Length – 4.309 km
Most pole positions - Ayrton Senna - 6
Most wins – Alain Prost - 6
Pole run to Turn 1 braking point – 300 meters
Overtakes completed in 2022 – 45
Pit stop time loss – 25 seconds | Autoracing |
Last Updated: 22/10/22 10:35pm Mateschitz founded the energy drink company and then brought it to Formula 1 to huge success Red Bull founder and owner Dietrich Mateschitz has died at the age of 78. Mateschitz was an influential Austrian businessman who founded the energy drink company and then brought it to Formula 1 to huge success, winning four straight double world titles from 2010 to 2013.His passing was confirmed just before qualifying at the United States GP, with a sombre Red Bull team seemingly told the news together in the paddock. More to follow.This is a breaking news story that is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh this page for the latest updates.Sky Sports brings you live updates as they happen. Get breaking sports news, analysis, exclusive interviews, replays and highlights.Sky Sports is your trusted source for breaking sports news headlines and live updates. Watch live coverage of your favourite sports: Football, F1, Boxing, Cricket, Golf, Tennis, Rugby League, Rugby Union, NFL, Darts, Netball and get the latest transfers news, results, scores and more.Visit skysports.com or the Sky Sports App for all the breaking sports news headlines. You can receive push notifications from the Sky Sports app for the latest news from your favourite sports and you can also follow @SkySportsNews on Twitter to get the latest updates. | Autoracing |
Ferrari have put Charles Leclerc through the mill in the past few years - and at times vice versa, too, it has to be said - but the driver some in Formula 1 believe to be the fastest of all over one lap says his commitment to a future with the Italian team is absolute.
Leclerc's contract is up for renewal at the end of next year, and after a difficult couple of years he could be forgiven for thinking he might be better off away from Maranello.
But he says he wants nothing more than to stay with the team which has been his life for the past decade and more.
"I have always loved Ferrari and I would love to stay," Leclerc tells BBC Sport in an exclusive interview. "I've always made it very clear that my goal is to try to be a world champion, but firstly with Ferrari.
"I know how difficult it is. We are not in the easiest situation. There is a big gap to fill to get to Red Bull's level but Ferrari has helped me before I got into F1, believed in me and put me into the Ferrari seat very early on, and it's always a team that I've loved.
"My priority is to win with Ferrari and it is not my worry whether I won't achieve it or whatever. We just need to work on the team and try to improve it as much as possible, and I hope that I can achieve that one day."
Now in his sixth season in F1, Leclerc has established himself as one of the very top drivers in the sport, so it is inevitable that - with Ferrari struggling - there will be both speculation about his future, and genuine suitors.
For some time, Leclerc has been linked with a possible move to Mercedes, while Aston Martin are believed to be courting the 25-year-old.
Some have looked at Leclerc's situation at Ferrari and worried for him. Is his career at Maranello, they wonder, going to go the same way as, for example, that of Fernando Alonso - an abundantly talented driver who Ferrari failed to provide with a competitive car, leading him to eventually lose faith and leave the team two years before the end of his contract.
A name from history resonates, too - Gilles Villeneuve. Leclerc shares many of the qualities of the great Canadian. Not only is he incredibly fast, and capable of producing qualifying laps that leave onlookers gasping in disbelief, but he's also a disarmingly straightforward and honest person.
But ask whether Leclerc has any concerns that his career could go the same way, and he says: "Absolutely not. Because at the end, being a Ferrari driver is a dream for everybody."
The word is Ferrari are as committed to Leclerc as he is to them, and that behind the scenes both parties are already talking as if their future together will go well beyond 2024, and that a new contract is only a matter of time.
Leclerc says: "There are some jokes here and there, but no serious talks yet."
He adds: "Honestly, I am not in a rush. I don't think Ferrari's priority is signing me at the moment, which is understandable because we are all just focused on trying to have the best race car possible as quickly as possible.
"I understand that. So for now we are just focusing on the season. I am sure talks will arrive at one point during the season, probably a bit later on."
'There is a special connection with Ferrari'
Leclerc's love for Ferrari stems from their history together. The late Jules Bianchi, who suffered fatal injuries in a crash during the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix, was Leclerc's godfather, and a Ferrari junior driver who was being groomed for a future at Maranello.
The following year, Ferrari stepped in when Leclerc's family ran out of money to fund his racing career and joined forces with his manager Nicholas Todt to support him. Leclerc's subsequent performances have fully justified their faith, but it is that backing that forms the foundation for his attachment to the team.
"It's my whole family and environment," he says. "Being so close to Jules so early on and seeing him part of the Ferrari driver academy and then helping him reach his goal, and obviously they helped me in 2015.
"There is just a special connection. I have always been a fan of this team. My dad [who died in 2017] also was a huge fan of Ferrari and all of this makes it special.
"But even apart from all that, I have always loved this team and I've always had a special relationship with Italy also."
The reciprocal nature of that relationship will be obvious at this weekend's Italian Grand Prix, where Leclerc will enjoy a support from the famous tifosi that borders on worship.
Does he almost feel part-Italian?
"I could say, kind of, yes," he says. "I speak fluent Italian. It is the country apart from Monaco where I have spent most time in my life. So I have a very close relationship. I know the guys at the factory and here at the track since I was 15 or 16, which also makes it a very special relationship."
'Just not good enough from our side'
Despite the obvious strengths of his bonds to Ferrari, all relationships are tested over time. And Leclerc's tenure has not exactly been the easiest period of the team's history.
At the end of his first season - 2019 - Ferrari were revealed to have reached a confidential agreement with governing body the FIA, which said it believed the team's engine had not at all times been run within the rules, even if it could not prove it.
Ferrari always denied that was the case. But the drop in engine performance that followed that ruling led to the team's worst season for 40 years in 2020.
Things began to look more positive through 2021, and Ferrari entered the era of the new ground-effect regulations with a bang. They started 2022 with the fastest car, and Leclerc won three of the first four races to emerge as Max Verstappen's closest title rival.
But then the season imploded at remarkable pace. Ferrari suffered a series of strategic errors and reliability failures that cost Leclerc three potential victories, and in the second half of the season Red Bull simply moved into another gear and left them behind.
After that, Ferrari entered 2023 expecting to learn from their errors, take the next step and challenge for the title, only to find Red Bull had moved the goalposts again and they were even further adrift.
The Ferrari has been respectably quick over one lap in qualifying - along with Lewis Hamilton, Leclerc is the only driver not in a Red Bull to set a pole position - but its handling has been vicious at times, and in races it tends to fall backwards.
Ask Leclerc how it ended up like this and he says Ferrari were simply not ambitious enough with what they were seeking from the new car.
"If we look on the technical side," he says, "whenever we put the car on the track at the first test, it was doing what we expected. So we expected it to be a good step forward.
"But unfortunately Red Bull had done twice the step, especially in the race, and that was just not good enough from our side.
"I don't think we underachieved. I think just the targets were not the right ones."
'I struggled quite a bit'
Those targets were set under former team principal Mattia Binotto, but the Swiss did not survive in his role to see the effects of his decisions, for he lost his job at the end of last year.
Binotto's replacement is Frenchman Frederic Vasseur - a very different character. Binotto's background is engineering. Vasseur is a racer, who ran successful teams in the junior categories before moving into F1, first with Renault, then Sauber for a while before the big job at Ferrari.
Leclerc and Vasseur go back a long way - Leclerc won the GP3 title driving for Vasseur's ART team in 2016, they were at Sauber together in his first season in 2018, and have remained close.
Leclerc professes complete faith in the changes Vasseur is instigating aimed at bringing Ferrari back to a position of competitiveness, but this has been a trying season for both, starting with a car that was not only not fast enough, but also incredibly difficult to drive.
In the early part of the season, it was relatively commonplace to see either Leclerc or team-mate Carlos Sainz in the gravel or barriers having lost their battle to keep on top of their wayward car. Leclerc is renowned for his ability to control a loose rear end - it's what he wants from a car - but even he has struggled.
"The very tricky thing," he says, "is I love oversteer-y cars in general, and this has been a trait throughout my career. The thing with this year's car was that it wasn't an oversteer-y car, but a very unpredictable car.
"It was affected much more than our competitors with the wind direction, and obviously going round in circles then you always find yourself with a tailwind at some point and that wasn't a very comfortable position to be in. It was impossible for the driver to anticipate.
"We still have this limitation in the car today. It is much better compared to the beginning of the season but it is still there, and obviously driving with a pointy car makes this characteristic even more difficult to manage. So at the beginning of the season, I struggled quite a bit."
Leclerc had to set the car up in a way he did not want in order to cope with its erratic behaviour, and dial in a lack of front grip.
"I had to deal with quite a bit of understeer just to have a bit less unpredictable moments," he says, "which is not what you want, and it is not the balance I enjoy the most, so it doesn't really fit my driving style.
"But we worked on it. We had a good reaction. We did a really big step forward on that and now we just need to add more performance and still work on this weakness in order to improve the car."
In the circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that Leclerc has out-qualified Sainz less frequently than in the past. Last year, it was at a ratio of nearly three to one. This year, on the head-to-head, Leclerc is only narrowly ahead, even if his average pace advantage over the Spaniard has remained pretty much the same, at 0.125secs a lap.
That Ferrari and Leclerc are still struggling with this difficult car was in evidence at last weekend's Dutch Grand Prix, where Leclerc crashed in qualifying - again complaining the car had not done what he expected - then had a difficult race after sustaining early collision damage.
With so many incidents, no-one could claim this has been his best season, even if he insists he is "happy" with it overall.
He says: "In a season like this, it's difficult as a driver because whenever you do a good race, nobody really notices it, because you are a bit in the middle of nowhere."
His highs, though, have been as impressive as ever. There have been strong race drives in Belgium, Austria, Canada and Bahrain - the last one before he retired with an engine failure in the closing stages while running third.
And the peak was undoubtedly Azerbaijan, where he took a car that was unpredictable and overly sensitive to the wind and put it on pole on a street circuit in a place nicknamed the 'windy city', more than 0.8secs quicker than Sainz in qualifying for the race and nearly 0.6secs ahead in the sprint shoot-out.
"Baku was a really big surprise," Leclerc says. "For some reason, I felt really comfortable, which is not something we expected because coming to Baku we knew our weaknesses and we knew it was a city track, so windy, with walls around (and that) is never really good for confidence.
"I found a good balance with the car. I was also playing quite a bit with the walls as it was kind of cutting the wind, so this was helping us in the way you were taking the corner.
"At that point, I did a really good lap in both qualifyings, which helped us do a double pole, which was a big surprise for us."
'I still feel like victory is possible'
In the race in Baku, as Leclerc puts it, "everything was a bit back to normal" and Red Bull moved ahead, although he still took a strong third place.
It is a pattern all drivers have had to come to terms with this year, but it must be especially frustrating for Leclerc, given he was going toe-to-toe with Verstappen a little over a year ago.
How does he deal with going into a race knowing one car - and particularly one rival - is basically unbeatable?
"As strange as it can sound, whenever I put my helmet on, I still feel like the victory is possible," he says.
"Whenever I am home training or when I am in the car, winning is what motivates me and it never feels unachievable. Then of course realistically before the weekend you know that, if nothing happens to them, they are just going to be in a league of their own come Sunday.
"But whenever I close the visor, I still believe in it. I still think this is something I can do. A win is still possible and I will always give absolutely everything for the win. So there is no lack of motivation whatsoever."
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Is General Motors’ backing what makes Michael Andretti’s dream of a Formula 1 team a reality?
FIA president Mohamed Ben Sulayem told the Associated Press that the automaker’s support of Andretti’s potential team would be hard to refuse. Andretti Autosport announced in January that it was partnering with Cadillac in its quest to field a Formula 1 team.
Andretti hasn’t been shy about his interest in owning a Formula 1 team for years and the series has been welcoming new manufacturers recently. Three new engine manufacturers have announced intentions of joining the series in 2026 and Honda is joining forces with Aston Martin that season.
There are currently 10 two-car teams in F1 and series regulations mean there’s space for two new teams if the series decides to expand. Ben Sulayem told the AP that GM’s interest in F1 is “good for all of us.”
“People have to understand we are here to promote motorsport and we are here to be fair. The Expressions of Interest process is very robust and there is no circumstance where we can deny any teams if they fulfill the criteria to enter,” Ben Sulayem told AP. “So imagine me saying no to someone like GM? We have in the regulations that we can go up to 12 teams. I’m not breaking (rules). But do we allow anyone to enter? No. But how on earth can we refuse GM?
“I mean, where’s the common sense in this? GM is a heavyweight and when they come with Andretti, that’s good for all of us.”
General Motors would be the second American-based automaker to enter Formula 1 this decade if the Andretti bid goes through. Reigning F1 champions Red Bull and Ford announced earlier this year that the manufacturer would make Red Bull's engines starting in 2026. Red Bull currently uses rebadged Honda engines.
A second American automaker in F1 would also continue the growth of the series in the States. F1 added a third race in the U.S. this season with the addition of the Las Vegas Grand Prix and television ratings are strong thanks to a deal with ESPN and the "Drive to Survive" docuseries on Netflix.
A decision on any new teams in Formula 1 starting in 2026 is set to be made by the end of July and Ben Sulayem told the AP that there were multiple candidates in addition to Andretti. Haas is currently the only American team on the grid and it fields Ferrari engines.
Andretti Autosport currently has teams in the IndyCar Series and in IMSA after announcing a partnership with Wayne Taylor Racing and is already a participant in the electric Formula E series. Andretti’s IndyCar teams have struggled in recent years, however, and have been behind both Team Penske and Chip Ganassi Racing.
If Andretti’s F1 bid is accepted by the FIA, Colton Herta would immediately be mentioned as a name to move to Formula 1. Herta, 23, has seven IndyCar wins in 74 starts but has just one win in his last 26 races dating back to 2021. Andretti drivers won two races in 2022 and Kyle Kirkwood has the team’s only win through nine races in 2023.
The Andretti name has long been synonymous with F1 too. Mario Andretti is one of the greatest drivers of all time and won the 1978 Formula 1 title with six wins in 16 races. Michael Andretti ran 13 F1 races in 1993 in the midst of an American open-wheel career that included 42 CART wins from 1986-2002. | Autoracing |
While Max Verstappen's dominance of the 2023 Formula 1 season has been fantastic for Red Bull Racing, there's evidence to suggest that it's not a hit with fans.
A Buzz Radar case study on the social media engagement around F1 has found a significant decline in interest this year.
According to three key metrics identified by the study — mentions, growth of 'key' social accounts and total social reach — the first half of the 2023 season took a significant step back after two years of colossal growth.
There are mitigating factors that explain these numbers as the 2021 season included the best championship battle in recent years — coming down to the final lap of the final race — and 2022 got off to an exciting start before Verstappen pulled away, but they are still grim.
While the social media landscape can't tell the complete story of fan sentiment, Buzz Radar's findings do line up with some trends in F1 ratings — at least in the United States. The Miami Grand Prix, for instance experienced a 24% ratings dip on ABC in 2023 compared to its 2022 debut, and and through the first 13 races of the season ESPN saw average viewership drop from 1.3 million per race to 1.24 million.
By the end of 2022, ESPN averaged 1.21 million viewers thanks to a late-season ratings slide, so you could characterize 2023 as slight growth overall. But, another ratings decline seems likely now that Verstappen has clinched the world drivers' championship and Red Bull has clinched the constructors' championship.
Even if what we're seeing is more of a plateau, it has to be discouraging for F1 in the context of its growth the prior two seasons. According to Axios, F1 races on ESPN averaged 607K viewers per race in 2020, then saw that grow 54% to 949K in 2021, before jumping another 27.5% in 2022. Prior to 2021, the all-time record was 748K (1995).
It seems clear that the current state of affairs hurts the product's entertainment value in the eyes of some fans, making audience growth difficult. It's tough to predict when other teams will be able to change that dynamic by challenging Verstappen and the Adrian Newey-designed Red Bull. It could be as soon as 2024. Perhaps it will take until 2026 when F1 engine regulations change radically. Red Bull might be ahead of the pack even then.
There's no knowing precisely when Verstappen's vise grip over the top of the sport will loosen, but until it does F1 might struggle to grow the way it looked like it was going to at the outset of the 2020s.
An intriguing backdrop to the story is the recent rumor that Apple might be interested in offering $2 billion per year for global broadcasting rights to F1. Apple has reportedly found great success with its MLS deal after its experimentation with MLB didn't exactly hit the ground running.
Landing F1 broadcast rights would be Apple's biggest play in the broadcasting rights space to date — and the tech giant will pay close attention to the climate around F1 before jumping in with two feet.
The company's interest wouldn't be in the immediate term. Apple couldn't get its hands on American broadcast rights until after ESPN's current deal expires after the 2025 season and wouldn't be able to lock in exclusive global rights until 2029. It's entirely possible — but far from guaranteed — that the climate around F1 will have change significantly by the time any massive deal is being negotiated.
As is often the case, there are multiple ways to interpret the situation. You could say lack of viewership improvements and general interest dips in 2023 are a blip. After all, Verstappen is having a historically dominant season.
While there are plenty of storylines worth following in any given race, more casual fans are often interested in race and championship wins. If the Dutchman makes it impossible for his rivals to challenge him for either, it's reasonable to expect interest to wane. But the current situation isn't going to last forever.
F1 remains a sport with global appeal, the pipeline of fans coming in through Drive to Survive is still growing, and there are factors that could put upward pressure on American interest in the years to come.
The Las Vegas Grand Prix is sure to be a spectacle no matter what the competitive situation — and if Michael Andretti is able to get his FIA-approved Cadillac team up and running that could create a natural rooting interest for American fans more compelling than Haas-Ferrari.
On the other hand, 2023 has provided proof of concept that F1 isn't a rocket ship destined to grow exponentially simply based on its success with Netflix.
The biggest potential broadcasting partners — such as Apple — have the ability to weather the peaks and valleys, but it wasn't too long ago that it looked it would be all peaks. | Autoracing |
F1 2023 Calendar: Schedule, Teams, And Driver Line-ups
All you need to know about the 2023 F1 season, from the 23-race schedule to the confirmed teams and driver line-ups.
It’s almost time for the new Formula 1 2023 season, with 23 races lined up between March and November 2023. While the top three teams (Red Bull, Ferrari, and Mercedes) have chosen to stick to their previous driver pairings, the same can’t be said for the rest of the teams. While we will see the return of an old favourite this F1 season, a few rookies will also look to leave their mark in Formula 1 this year.
Let’s look at the Formula 1 2023 schedule and driver line-up for the year.
Formula 1 2023 Calendar
Race 1: March 03-05, 2023, Formula 1 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix 2023
Race 2: March 17-19, 2023, Formula 1 STC Saudi Arabian Grand Prix 2023
Race 3: March 31-April 02, 2023, Formula 1 Rolex Australian Grand Prix 2023
Race 4: April 28-30, 2023, Formula 1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix 2023
Race 5: May 05-07, 2023, Formula 1 Crypto.Com Miami Grand Prix 2023
Race 6: May 19-21, 2023, Formula 1 Gran Premio Del Made In Italy E Dell'emilia-Romagna 2023
Race 7: May 26-28, 2023, Formula 1 Grand Prix De Monaco 2023
Race 8: June 02-04, 2023, Formula 1 Aws Gran Premio De España 2023
Race 9: June 16-18, 2023, Formula 1 Pirelli Grand Prix Du Canada 2023
Race 10: June 30-July 02, 2023, Formula 1 Grosser Preis Von Österreich 2023
Race 11: July 07-09, 2023, Formula 1 Aramco British Grand Prix 2023
Race 12: July 21-23, 2023, Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix 2023
Race 13: July 28-30, 2023, Formula 1 Belgian Grand Prix 2023
Race 14: August 25-27, 2023, Formula 1 Heineken Dutch Grand Prix 2023
Race 15: September 01-03, 2023, Formula 1 Pirelli Gran Premio D’italia 2023
Race 16: September 15-17, 2023, Formula 1 Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prix 2023
Race 17: September 22-24, 2023, Formula 1 Lenovo Japanese Grand Prix 2023
Race 18: October 06-08, 2023, Formula 1 Qatar Grand Prix 2023
Race 19: October 20-22, 2023, Formula 1 Lenovo United States Grand Prix 2023
Race 20: October 27-29, 2023, Formula 1 Gran Premio De La Ciudad De México 2023
Race 21: November 03-05, 2023, Formula 1 Rolex Grande Prêmio De São Paulo 2023
Race 22: November 16-18, 2023, Formula 1 Heineken Silver Las Vegas Grand Prix 2023
Race 23: November 24-26, 2023, Formula 1 Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix 2023
2023 Formula 1 Team And Driver Line-ups
Take a look at the . | Autoracing |
“There’s nothing in between.”
founder and CEO Dilbagh Gill is explaining the motivation behind building another all-electric racing series. Gill, who was CEO and team principal of Mahindra Racing since Formula E began, left his post last year to embark on something new. His project is one that had been “fermenting” in his mind for a year and a half. “I always thought there had to be a credible ladder in the electric racing series,” he said.
Gill explained that while traditional, combustion-engine racing has had a development path for decades, there’s nothing currently that exists between electric karting and FIA world championships like Formula E. “It’s not something we’re trying to reinvent,” he said. “We’re just trying to take the ladder the other direction.”
A major hurdle for young drivers climbing the ranks in motorsport is cost. It’s not enough for a driver to be quick, they need the financial backing as well. So, in addition to creating a new training ground for future champions, Ace is also working to reduce the barrier to entry when it comes to the cost of equipment. “They have the talent, but they don’t have the opportunity,” Gill noted. “Let’s try and make a championship which can be more inclusive than motorsport is today.”
Ace Championship isn’t just hoping to develop a new crop of drivers each season. The series will also offer opportunities for ages 15-25 who are interested in engineering, communications, marketing and other aspects of motorsport to get real-world experience. Gill said that during his eight years in England at the reins of Mahindra Racing, guest lectures opened his eyes to the fact that nearly 30 percent of university students in motorsport disciplines were from Asia. “What are they going to do next?” he asked himself. “Could something like [Ace] help them find a path?” Gill further explained that Ace would offer a scholarship program to reduce the financial burden even more. “Some talented folks who can’t afford getting in, we will be supporting them,” he said.
As a means of lowering costs, teams will be able to run four drivers with two cars. In most current series, each driver has their own vehicle – hence the high cost to participate. Ace Challenger will be the series’ entry-level format, meant for drivers who found success in karting and are looking for an academy experience. Here, races will run at reduced power so that drivers can acclimate to the car as well as learn about “technique, technology and collaborating with engineers.” Ace Championship is the higher level that runs the cars at increased power output. The focus shifts from the basics to things like detailed race strategy and energy management – two key elements for Formula E and other series.
To further level the playing field, Ace will keep all of the cars at its so-called Powerpark. “We don’t want the cars going back to their garages to start getting modified,” Gill explained. “We want to keep them in a controlled environment.” He also emphasized the importance of building the facilities in Asia. “We think Asia is going to be the melting pot [for electric racing],” he said. “From there, we are within five hours of flying to three or four regions.”
Serving as the series HQ, the campus will offer simulators for each team as well as classroom training on topics like telemetry, working with engineers and social media management. Preparation will be key because the currently proposed format would have each team traveling for around 10 weeks before returning to Powerpark. This means they’ll have to devise strategies for each circuit before they depart since there won’t be simulators to train on while they’re on the road.
With the new championship, Gill and his colleagues are also designing a completely new all-electric racer for the series. When Ace at the Hyderabad E-Prix in February, Gill showed off a prototype vehicle that was built from a Formula E Gen2 chassis. However, the car the series will use won’t just be modified leftovers from the previous generation forever.
“After eight years at Mahindra Racing, when I left, they gave me a Gen2 car,” Gill said. “So that was an easy acquisition of a prototype – my personal car.”
Ace is currently working to build a brand new chassis, which Gill explained won’t “use anything that exists on the market.” The reason for this, he noted, is that the custom-made cars will run a front powertrain kit and no existing chassis can integrate it “without a lot of work.” The current plan is to have the new cars ready for the third year of the championship, which should begin in 2024. Gill said Ace aims to use its initial design for six years before an anticipated upgrade. Both the Challenger and the Championship series will use the same car with some physical differences – like slight variations to the nose kit and rims. Power output can be controlled by software, which will allow a team’s four drivers to use just the two cars.
Another key element of the car’s design will be LED lighting. Formula E uses lights around the halo of its cars to indicate things like Attack Mode. The Ace Championship aims to make things a bit more dynamic here, with color changes for things like when the driver is accelerating, when a car is regenerating energy through braking or when the driver is coasting. Ace also wants to take a page from the Tour de France and use the LEDs to point out the leader. Gill said the lights could also indicate the driver in P1 as well as green and purple sectors in qualifying or the driver with the current fastest lap. “We have to figure it out,” he admits, but the lights could be a simple way to make races more informative for fans and they’ll undoubtedly provide a unique look during night events.
The series is also exploring the possibility of using two different tire compounds for Ace Challenger and Ace Championship, “so that drivers can understand the different nuances,” according to Gill. He floated the idea that there’s a tire with a smaller performance window for the Challenger series so that you have to bring it to a peak and manage it the rest of the way. And for the Championship, perhaps the tire is “a bit more forgiving… so you can push it without much degradation.” Gill enlisted former Formula 1 and Mahindra Formula E driver Nick Heidfeld to work with tire manufacturers on the various compounds and Ace already has a prototype that it’s currently testing.
At the end of the day, Gill envisions having a car that’s within three to three and a half seconds of the performance of a Formula E car. “The steps are smaller,” he explained. “New people coming to Formula E, especially on the drivers side, it takes a long time for them to get adapted.” The overall idea is for the Ace Championship cars to offer drivers a translatable experience to Formula E in the way Formula 2 does for Formula 1. “This step up from our championship isn’t where a [driver] will struggle for a year,” he said. Drivers who are new to Formula E may be quick over one lap, but variables like tire and energy management can be very challenging for the uninitiated.
“We believe tire and energy management is going to be valuable across all forms of motorsport,” Gill proclaimed. Internal combustion engines have hybrid components in series like Formula 1, and drivers and engineers must learn how to manage and deploy that energy properly during a race. That is amplified in Formula E where you start the race with less energy than it takes to finish. Teams rely on the drivers’ ability to regenerate the difference on track, as well as their strategy for managing consumption on each lap. And, of course, being able to go quick without using up your tires is a valuable skill for any racing discipline.
The Ace Championship plans to schedule races in four different regions: East Asia, Southwest Asia, The Americas and Europe and Africa. During its first two years, the series will only travel to two of those areas with the goal of expanding in 2026. Grouping races like this allows Ace to eliminate the cost of flying teams around the world between events. Racing in each region could take place over the span of a quarter, with the aim of having a new set of drivers each time. While the series hosts its first events in 2024 and 2025, it will also be building a second set of cars. Gill explained that Ace wants to have enough vehicles to have regional events take place while the others are back at Powerpark getting refurbished for the following quarter.
Scheduling is wide open at this point, though. Gill admitted a regional championship may have to be condensed into three weeks so Ace can “synchronize” with the Formula E calendar that runs from January to July. The goal here is to do tandem events with the FIA-sanctioned global EV championship, taking place around the E-Prix during the same weekend, even though it may only be one Ace category due to the time and logistics of street circuits. Again, it’s much like Formula 2 does at some Formula 1 races. Not only will piggybacking off Formula E events provide visibility for the series, but it will give young drivers and support staff a glimpse of how things are done at the next level.
Other Ace races will be standalone, including two of the six events during a regional championship being doubleheaders on back-to-back days. Gill said the current idea is for the independent races to take place on small circuits. Each regional schedule will serve as its own championship, so at the end of the first year, there will be four winners – two from each Ace category.
The ultimate prize for the Ace Championship is to train drivers, race engineers, mechanics and other members of a motorsport team who move on to FIA disciplines like the World Endurance Championship, Formula 2 or Formula 1. And that by doing so, they’re establishing a talent pool across all of those areas ready to contribute to the success of a world championship team.
“Our goal is to make world champions in the next five years,” Gill said. | Autoracing |
McLaren’s multi-million dollar 2022 Formula 1 car and the e-reader you keep on your bedside table now have something in common: they each feature an electronic paper display. But while your Kindle helps you fall asleep each night, McLaren Racing is instead leveraging the unique display technology to help revolutionize corporate sponsorships.OffEnglish01:08Ernie Hudson | First FandomsFriday 2:04PMRacing is a big business, especially at the Formula 1 level where a team can spend over a hundred million dollars in a single season. Corporate sponsorships help offset those costs, and enable other companies to benefit from a Formula 1 teams’ efforts. Putting a corporate sponsor’s logo on a Formula 1 race car isn’t just a way to say thanks, it’s valuable publicity for the company, so much so that after a race it’s someone’s job to calculate just how much screen time a given sponsor’s corporate logo had. Sponsors compete for placement on the limited space a Formula 1 car offers, but that could soon change.Gif: BMWMcLaren Racing recently announced a partnership with a company called Seamless Digital to upgrade its 2022 MCL36 cars with electronic paper screens. It’s an idea we’ve seen before. At CES 2022, earlier this year, BMW demo’d an SUV that was completely wrapped in flexible electronic paper from E Ink, allowing the vehicle to dynamically changes its appearance from white to black, or introduce different patterns and designs, without a trip to the paint shop.The BMW iX Flow was just a concept—the carmaker has no definitive plans to offer the E Ink wrap as an official option—but at this past weekend’s United States Grand Prix, McLaren Racing upgraded its MCL36 cars with a pair of electronic paper displays, one on either side of the cockpit, that it plans to continue using during practices for the remainder of the 2022 season.The displays, which are lightweight and flexible, wrap to the contours of the race cars so as not to affect their aerodynamics, and allow the vehicle’s branding to be changed on the fly, even in the middle of a race. Craig Scarborough shared some additional details about how the display system works on Twitter. They’re powered by the vehicle’s own electrical system and have been tested to endure the heat and vibrations the vehicles are exposed to. They are slightly heavier than traditional decals, but offer the advantage of some better branding opportunities.In a spot where a single logo was displayed on a car throughout an entire competition, McLaren Racing can now display rolling branding for several different sponsors, all pre-programmed for specific time intervals, locations, or even programmed to change depending on how the race goes. Sponsors could be given the opportunity to have their logo displayed more prominently while the vehicle was in first place, or pay more to have their logo appear longer while the race car was temporarily sitting at a stop in the pits. The added technology has nothing to do with the performance of the car, and everything to do with increasing the profitability of competing in Formula 1. | Autoracing |
MELBOURNE, Australia -- Taking a break in the paddock after watching Max Verstappen during a practice session Saturday at the Australian Grand Prix, Melbourne teenager Kaitlyn Bourne was loving her day at the track.
The 17-year-old Bourne, who was wearing a clear plastic poncho over a Red Bull sweater on a wintry day at Albert Park, is a massive fan of Australian Formula One driver Daniel Ricciardo, who is sitting out this season.
But Bourne, who comes from a motorsport-loving family and watches every Grand Prix race, hopes that one day she will have the chance to support a female F1 driver.
“It is still a very male dominated sport, so it would be good to bring in more females. I think it could happen,” she said.
There has not been a woman driver in a Formula 1 race for more than 40 years. But with estimates suggesting that 40% of current Formula 1 fans are female, the motorsport industry is making a concerted effort to ensure that changes.
The highest-profile female driver in recent years has been Danica Patrick. The now-retired American is the most successful woman in the history of American open-wheel car racing — her victory in the 2008 Indy Japan 300 is the only win by a woman in an IndyCar Series race.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said this week in Melbourne he believes gender equality in the sport is inevitable.
“I think it is fantastic to see the amount of girls, females, that are showing interest in Formula One now and we’re seeing it at all levels,” he said. “I think the interest is growing. It is appealing to more women to get involved in the sport, whether that is from an engineering basis, or across all aspects of the organization.
“As the sport does become more accessible, and we are pushing to make it more accessible, I think that is something that will naturally happen anyway.”
Horner was responding to reports that a team evenly divided between men and women from the cockpit to the executive offices was looking to enter F1 within two to three years.
Former British American Racing founder Craig Pollock told CNN last week he hoped to debut “Formula Equal” from the 2025 or 2026 season.
FIA chief executive Mohammed ben Sulayem posted on social media that he had instructed his staff to consider launching an “expressions of interest” process for prospective teams.
Pollock said he had interest from financial backers for his proposal to field an 11th team.
“Our ambition is to deliver and build opportunities and pathways for women to get to the very top level inside motorsports,” Pollock told CNN. “The concept and the idea is to try and build a Formula One team (that is) 50% male, 50% female, which is extremely hard to do if you have an existing Formula One team. It’s a lot easier with a clean sheet of paper.”
Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer said the importance of equality in Formula One was clear to all participants.
“So anything we can do to increase diversity in F1, I think everyone here would welcome it,” he said.
Bourne, whose interest in Formula One increased via the Netflix hit series Drive to Survive, said the introduction of the W Series in 2019 was a step in the right direction. That series was criticized for not including any female drivers, even from the W series.
“I think it is getting better. I know there is a women’s series now. So that is good,” she said.
Aaliya Ally, who is also from Melbourne, was attending the race with a friend.
“In terms of gender equality, I think it is good that there are more opportunities for women,” she said. “But I hope that it continues to get better and better and that they keep expanding it.”
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More AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports | Autoracing |
Brad Pitt Snubs F1 Journo Martin Brundle Racing Community Pissed 10/23/2022 1:58 PM PT Brad Pitt might be making a movie about Formula 1 racing, but he sure doesn't respect the sport in real life -- at least that's what F1 Twitter's saying after snubbing one of their heroes. The A-lister was on the ground these past few days down in Austin -- where the U.S. Grand Prix's been taking place all weekend -- but on Sunday ... the guy skirted out of an interview with Sky Sports' Martin Brundle ... a famed former race car driver turned pundit/journalist. Formula 1 Brundle -- who's well-known these days for his grid walks, where he interviews celebs (sometimes awkwardly) impromptu -- got a bit of a cold shoulder from BP in person. Now, in Brad's defense ... he didn't totally not respond to Brundle questions -- ones about the movie, which he says can't answer since it's top secret -- but clearly didn't wanna chat. It would seem like a no harm, no foul sitch ... but some online are offended on MB's behalf. Brundle himself seemed perturbed -- saying to the camera, "They're known at 'pit stops" if they don't want you talking to Brad Pitt. Bird app users are mostly agreeing, arguing he should respect the culture and talk to Brundle, whose interviews are par for the course on the grid and who's an F1 staple. In other words, play ball when you're on our turf, Brad! It's not the first time a celeb has brushed off Brundle -- Megan Thee Stallion famously did it last year -- but in this case, some are suggesting that since Brad is literally making a film about F1 ... he should be aware of the major players, Brundle included, and show respect. Outside of this salty interaction ... Brad has mostly been receiving the rock star treatment during his time in Texas. He's still a golden boy in Hollywood -- and this won't change that. Haters, take your mark. | Autoracing |
Keanu Reeves has been described as "a class act" after he answered a series of questions from a young fan at an airport following an international flight.The exchange was documented by TV producer Andrew Kimmel who praised the actor and said "little moments like this can make such a difference in people's lives".
Following a flight from London to New York, the boy asked Reeves for his autograph and a "series of rapid-fire questions".According to Mr Kimmel, the star of The Matrix and John Wick "happily responded to every single one".In the exchange, which has gone viral on Twitter, the 57-year-old actor told the boy he had been in London filming a documentary. He also talked about attending the Formula 1 grand prix at Silverstone at the weekend.
Reeves told the boy he was in New York for five days to see a broadway show.Mr Kimmel shared a brief transcript of their exchange:"Kid: Why were you in London?"KR: Filming a documentary."Kid: I saw online you were at the Grand Prix (pronouncing the x)"KR: Yes, the Grand Prix (in a French accent, without correcting him). F1! Race cars!"Kid: Do you drive?"KR: Not F1, but I like riding motorcycles."Kid: Do you live in NY?"KR: I live in LA."Kid: How long are you gonna be in New York?"KR: Four days! No… five. Five days!"Kid: Why are you in NY?"KR: Gonna see a broadway show!"Kid: What broadway show?"KR: American Buffalo! Mamet!"Kid: Where are you staying in NY?"KR: Midtown!" Twitter Due to your consent preferences, you’re not able to view this. Open Privacy Options Mr Kimmel wrote: "By this time the kid was running out of questions, so Keanu started grilling him. Why were you in Europe? What galleries did you go to in Paris? What was your favorite?"He added: "The man could not have been nicer, especially after an international flight."I thought I'd share this because the dude is a class act and little moments like this can make such a big difference in people's lives. We need more Keanus!" Read more from Sky News:Carlos Santana shares update after collapsing on stageReeves has previously been called the "nicest man in Hollywood" for how he responds to fans.He was at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone as he prepares for a role in an F1 documentary. | Autoracing |
not a metaphor — Built in 1898, the 2-mile Catesby Tunnel is now an alternative to a wind tunnel. Enlarge / A Mazda RT-24P emerges from the Catesby Tunnel.Multimatic A tip of the hat to the editor over at Dailysportscar this morning for reminding me of one of the cooler bits of industrial repurposing in the automotive world. It's a Victorian railway tunnel in England that saw its last train in 1966 but is now entering its second life as an advanced aerodynamics test facility and an interesting alternative to a wind tunnel.
The Catesby Tunnel can be found in Northamptonshire, but more importantly it's in the heart of what's sometimes called the UK's motorsport valley because of the concentration of Formula 1 teams—Mercedes, Aston Martin, Alpine, Williams, and Red Bull—and their suppliers. Originally built in 1898, it was part of the Great Central Line and connected London with the industrial cities of Manchester and Sheffield.
But the UK's train network was devastated in 1963 by the Beeching cuts, where 3,000 miles of railway were torn up, market towns and villages were cut off from the rail network, and the nation—like so many others—started becoming much more car-centric. Ironic, then, that the tunnel is, too, more than 50 years later, thanks to a company called Aero Research Partners. Enlarge / No, not a screenshot from Gran Turismo but the view Andy Priaulx had while testing the Mazda RT-24P in the Catesby Tunnel. "When it comes to pure aerodynamic testing, I’m used to engineers studying static car models in wind tunnels with no involvement from the drivers. At the start it felt a little odd to jump into a race car and drive flat-out through a 2.7 km tunnel, but the team assured me that the end was very clearly marked! Catesby Tunnel is an incredible facility, and it doesn’t surprise me at all to know that Multimatic chose to be an early adopter and primary client of the facility," Priaulx said.Multimatic
Its new life is as a controlled environment for straight-line vehicle testing, away from the vagaries of wind and rain. In a wind tunnel, the car stays where it is, and the air is blown over it. But here, the car moves under its own power.
"Compared to conventional wind tunnels, this is better because it’s real," said Larry Holt, who runs Multimatic, a Canadian engineering company that has had a hand in carbon-fiber supercars like the Aston Martin One-77 and Ford GT, working concept cars like the Aston Martin DB10s used in Spectre, as well as race cars like the Mazda RT-24P and now the new Porsche 963. (It also has a very advanced simulator, which it kindly let me drive back in 2018.)
"In a moving ground plane wind tunnel, the car is stationary, and the wind is blown over it by a massive fan and flow conditioning set-up, and a belt is arranged to move under the car at a coordinated speed. It's a very sophisticated configuration, but the car is still stationary, and that constitutes the "not totally real" piece. Page: 1 2 Next → | Autoracing |
It’s not too early to start thinking about when Max Verstappen can clinch the 2023 Formula 1 title.
Verstappen won for the 10th time over the first 12 races of the season in Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix. He had to start sixth thanks to a five-spot grid penalty for a gearbox change but was fourth just seconds into the first lap and easily got to first before driving away from teammate Sergio Perez.
The two-time defending champion has 314 points so far this season and when you remove the points he’s scored over the three sprint races he’s averaging a staggering 24 points per race.
A season ago, Verstappen clinched the title with four races to go and scored 454 points over the entirety of the 22-race season. He’s well ahead of that pace in 2023 and it’s not impossible that he could clinch the title before the month of September is over.
F1 returns Aug. 27 in Verstappen’s home country of the Netherlands before three races over the month of September in Italy, Singapore and Japan. Another Japan clincher for Verstappen is not entirely out of the question.
If Verstappen wins the next four races and scores 100 points (or more), he could be more than 144 points clear of teammate Sergio Perez in the points standings with six races to go in the season. If Perez fails to score points in one or more of those four races, the gap could be even larger.
If we were betting on when Verstappen will clinch the title, we’d pick the Qatar Grand Prix on Oct. 8 with five races to go. All Verstappen has to do to clinch by the end of the Qatar Grand Prix is be 146 points ahead of Perez or whoever is in second place.
Here are some more of our takeaways from the first half of the 2023 Formula 1 season as the series enters its annual summer break.
Is the Red Bull sweep really going to happen?
It’s a foregone conclusion at this point that Verstappen will win the driver’s title and Red Bull will win its second consecutive constructor’s title this season. Red Bull currently has more than twice the points as second-place Mercedes in the constructor’s standings and Verstappen alone would have a 67-point lead on the point totals of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell combined.
Thanks to a Verstappen win at the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2022, Red Bull now owns the longest win streak in F1 history at 13 races with wins in every race so far this season. And every Red Bull … err, Verstappen … win makes it more and more likely the team could pull off the improbable feat.
Right now, we’d still guess that someone from another team will get a win. Verstappen has been incredibly dominant but has also had some very good luck. He’s bound to have an incident with another driver or a poor qualifying effort he can’t overcome, right? And Perez is too inconsistent on a week-to-week basis to count on. The over/under for Red Bull wins this season should be at 19.5 and the over would be a tempting pick even if you don’t believe the sweep is possible.
Mercedes’ steadiness is showing
Mercedes is showing that you don’t have to be flashy to be the best of the rest in Formula 1. And the fight for second, third and fourth-best is really fascinating so far.
After a fourth-place finish by Hamilton and a sixth-place finish by Russell in Belgium, Mercedes is 51 points ahead of Aston Martin in the constructor’s standings. Aston Martin is just five points ahead of Ferrari in fourth while McLaren has jumped to fifth and is 144 points back of Mercedes.
It’s been a frustrating year for Mercedes as it quickly realized that the car design it struggled to capitalize on in 2022 was still a problem in 2023. But the team’s race pace has kept it in the hunt while Ferrari has strategy blunders on a semi-weekly basis and Aston Martin’s sparkling pace from the beginning of the season has faded.
Fernando Alonso opened the season with five podium finishes over the first six races and his only non-podium was a fourth-place finish in Azerbaijan. In the six races since, Alonso hasn’t finished lower than ninth, but he’s scored just one podium in that span.
As Alonso’s performance has dropped off, Hamilton’s has ticked up. Hamilton has five top-four finishes in the last six races as he’s now within a point of Alonso for third in the driver’s standings.
How real is McLaren’s surge?
McLaren had a miserable start to the 2023 season. Lando Norris had just three top-10 finishes over the first six races while Oscar Piastri had two.
But a switch flipped with the team’s upgrades at the Austrian Grand Prix and the British Grand Prix. After having the fastest non-Red Bull cars at Silverstone, McLaren kept up the pace in Hungary. Belgium didn’t go well after Piastri got pinched into the wall on the first lap, but Norris finished seventh despite having a car that had a bunch of downforce built into it in case of rain.
The standings don’t show it, but McLaren may currently be the third-best team in F1.
Will a leadership change boost Alpine?
Alpine is the most disappointing team in 2023.
The French team finished a clear fourth ahead of both McLaren and Aston Martin in 2022 and looked poised to be in the thick of the midfield battle this season. Instead, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly have combined for just 57 points so far as Alpine is stuck in sixth place in the constructor’s standings.
Both Ocon and Gasly were out of the Hungarian Grand Prix in the opening laps and the team announced ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix that team principal Otmar Szafnauer, the team’s sporting director and its chief technical officer would all be out ahead of the summer break.
Alpine showed some speed in Belgium as Gasly finished third in the sprint race and Ocon was eighth in the Grand Prix. But those are baby steps for a team that needs to take a leap to have any chance of competing with the top five. Outside of a third-place finish for Ocon in Monaco, there hasn’t been much to be optimistic about at Alpine. Especially for Gasly. He hasn’t finished better than seventh all season and has three consecutive finishes outside the top 10. | Autoracing |
Max Verstappen got another easy win in Sunday’s Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix.
Verstappen wasn’t challenged at any point past the race’s first corner after he started on pole. Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz put in a valiant effort heading into Turn 1 on the opening lap, but Verstappen used his Red Bull to close off Sainz’s route on the outside and drove away from the field over the opening stint.
By the time Lewis Hamilton got to second place, Verstappen’s lead was nearly nine seconds before the first round of pit stops. Verstappen went on to finish 23 seconds ahead of Hamilton while Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate George Russell finished third.
The victory is Verstappen’s fifth of the season through the first seven races of 2023 and extends his lead over teammate Sergio Perez to 50 points. The size of the gap puts Verstappen on pace to post a bigger title-winning margin to a season ago when he won 15 of 23 races and beat Charles Leclerc by 146 points in the standings.
Has Mercedes closed the gap?
Yes, Hamilton was a long way back of Verstappen. But it was easy to glean some optimism if you’re a Mercedes fan about the way Sunday’s race played out. The team’s upgrades appeared to significantly close the pace gap to Verstappen’s Red Bull.
While Verstappen was obviously the race’s fastest driver, Hamilton and Russell were able to stay in closer touch once they got track position at a track that seems much more suited to the Red Bull car type.
It’s a bit odd to say after a blowout, but the best of the rest status that Mercedes obtained on Sunday showed why the idea of Red Bull’s Verstappen and Perez winning every race this season is so improbable even without factoring in any potential reliability issues. If Mercedes’ pace on Sunday was real, Red Bull’s margin for error over the rest of the field appears to be less than it had been. | Autoracing |
CNN — Formula One has canceled next year’s Chinese Grand Prix in light of Covid-19 difficulties, according to a statement released by F1 on Friday. The race was scheduled to take place in Shanghai on April 16, marking F1’s first race in China since 2019. But the country’s strict Covid-19 protocols have left F1 “assessing alternative options” for the fourth race of the 2023 season. “Formula 1 can confirm, following dialogue with the promoter and relevant authorities, that the 2023 Chinese Grand Prix will not take place due to the ongoing difficulties presented by the COVID-19 situation,” the statement said, adding that an update on an alternative location would be provided “in due course.” Over the past week, thousands of demonstrators have protested in cities across China against the country’s zero-Covid strategy. As of Friday, thousands of buildings and residential communities across China remain under lockdown restrictions due to their classification as “high risk.” Case numbers in the past week have hovered around record highs, with more than 34,000 new infections reported on Thursday. This week, China’s most senior official in charge of its Covid response told health officials that the country faced a “new stage and mission” in pandemic controls, according to state media Xinhua – potentially indicating an adjustment to Beijing’s “zero-Covid” strategy. The 2023 F1 season is scheduled to get underway in Bahrain on March 5. That kicks off a campaign featuring 24 races, assuming an alternative location is named in place of the Chinese Grand Prix. CNN’s Simone McCarthy, Wayne Chang and Xiaofei Xu contributed to reporting. | Autoracing |
A group of Just Stop Oil protesters have been found guilty of risking "serious harm" during a track invasion at the Formula 1 British Grand Prix.
Four men and two women were convicted at Northampton Crown Court of causing a public nuisance.
The jury was shown footage of five of them sitting on Silverstone's Wellington Straight as two F1 cars passed close by.
Prosecutors said the group had caused an immediate risk of serious harm.
They said the group had sat "in the face" of fast-moving vehicles and risked serious harm to F1 drivers and race marshals at the track in Northamptonshire.
Alasdair Gibson and Louis McKechnie, both 22, Bethany Mogie, 40, David Baldwin, 47, Emily Brocklebank, 24, and 29-year-old Joshua Smith had all denied causing a public nuisance at the Northamptonshire circuit in July last year.
Jurors deliberated for almost nine hours over three days before convicting all six defendants. | Autoracing |
F1 Japanese GP 2023: Race Time In India & How To Watch
Here is the Formula 1 race day schedule for the Japanese Grand Prix.
The Japanese 2023 Grand Prix has already started with Max Verstappen and Red Bull bouncing back from a tough weekend in Singapore. After leading the timesheets in FP1, they continued their strong performance with the quickest lap in FP2. However, the session was abruptly halted towards the end due to a crash involving Alpine's Pierre Gasly.
Japanese Grand Prix 2023: Date and Time
Here is the entire Formula 1 weekend schedule for the Japanese Grand Prix. The timings are as per Indian Standard Time.
September 22, Friday
Practice 2: 11:30 am to 12:30 pm
September 23, Saturday
Practice 3: 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Qualifying: 11:30 pm to 12:30 pm
September 24, Sunday
Race: 10:30 am
Where To Watch Japanese Grand Prix 2023 in India
The Japanese GP will not be televised In India. However, Indian F1 fans can access the live streaming by subscribing to F1 TV Pro and the F1 TV app. Fans will also get the race sessions across the weekend, including support series races on the streaming service and global broadcast feeds. F1 TV Pro app is supported on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and smart TVs.
Japanese Grand Prix Winners
The Japanese Grand Prix has been held at Suzuka since 1987, and has produced some of the most memorable races in F1 history. The Suzuka Circuit is known for its challenging layout and high speeds. It is also one of the most popular circuits on the F1 calendar.
Last five Japanese GP winners
2022 – Max Verstappen (Red Bull)
2019 – Valtteri Bottas (Mercedes)
2018 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2017 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2016 – Nico Rosberg (Mercedes)
Singapore Grand Prix Vital Stats
First Grand Prix – 1987
Track Length – 5.807 km
Most pole positions - Michael Schumacher (8)
Most wins – Michael Schumacher (6)
Pole run to Turn 1 braking point – 277 metres
Overtakes completed in 2022 – 69
Pit stop time loss – 22.01 seconds | Autoracing |
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! The Denver Broncos will have a seven-time Formula One champion as part of their new ownership group. On Tuesday, F1 star Lewis Hamilton was named a limited investor to the Walton-Penner group, which agreed to purchase the NFL franchise for a record $4.65 billion in June. "We're delighted to welcome seven-time Formula One World Champion Sir Lewis Hamilton to our ownership group," the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group said in a statement. "He is a champion competitor who knows what it takes to lead a winning team and a fierce advocate for global equality, including in his own sport. With over 100 race wins, Lewis is considered the most successful F1 driver of all time. His resilient spirit and standard of excellence will be an asset to the ownership group and the Broncos organization." Lewis Hamilton of the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team at the end of the F1 Grand Prix of Hungary. (Marco Canoniero/LightRocket via Getty Images)NEW YORK JETS BIG ON VETERAN KWON ALEXANDER AFTER FIRST PRACTICE: ‘HE’S GOT AN EDGE TO HIM'The NFL will hold a vote among its owners on the sale Aug. 9. Hamilton, who drives for the Mercedes team, announced the deal on Twitter. Lewis’ seven F1 championships tie him with Michael Schumacher for the most in F1 history, though Lewis’ 103 victories are an F1 record. Lewis Hamilton of Great Britain and a Mercedes AMG Petronas driver won second place at the Hungarian Aramco Formula 1 Grand Prix July 31, 2022, in Mogyoród, Hungary. (Robert Szaniszló/NurPhoto via Getty Images)It’s the second recent notable addition to the ownership group. Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice joined the group in mid-July. CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM"A highly respected public servant, accomplished academic and corporate leader, Secretary Rice is well known as a passionate and knowledgeable football fan who has worked to make the sport stronger and better," Walton said in a statement. "Her unique experience and extraordinary judgment will be a great benefit to our group and the Broncos organization." Lewis Hamilton of the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team celebrates on the podium at the end of the F1 Grand Prix of Hungary. (Marco Canoniero/LightRocket via Getty Images)CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPIt’s been an offseason of change for the Broncos, who traded for quarterback Russell Wilson in March. The Associated Press contributed to this report Joe Morgan is a Sports Reporter for Fox News. | Autoracing |
Max Verstappen sealed the 2023 world title last time out in Qatar and also claimed his 14th grand prix victory of the season. McLaren’s Oscar Piastri was driver of the weekend, however, winning the sprint race and coming second in the grand prix on Sunday.
Lewis Hamilton had a weekend to forget, crashing into Mercedes team-mate George Russell, while the Ferrari pair of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were among the chasing pack. Lando Norris finished third to secure a double podium for McLaren.
Verstappen won a thrilling race at COTA last year, edging out Lewis Hamilton who has still not won a race since the 2021 season. Hamilton is, however, a five-time winner at the circuit.
Follow live updates from the United States Grand Prix with The Independent
F1 UNITED STATES GRAND PRIX - QUALIFYING
Qualifying in Austin is at 10pm (BST)
Max Verstappen was fastest in first practice; Leclerc 2nd; Hamilton 3rd
FP1 RESULTS:
19:47 , Kieran Jackson
— Formula 1 (@F1) October 20, 2023
Max Verstappen quickest in FP1!
19:32 , Kieran Jackson
Lewis Hamilton went fastest in the first and second sectors... but then it all went missing! Only third-fastest in the end, 0.281 secs off Max Verstappen.
The Dutchman once again the quickest, but it’s relatively close! Charles Leclerc is second, a tenth back, with Sergio Perez in fourth and Kevin Magnussen fifth.
6-10: Russell, Albon, Sainz, Hulkenberg, Gasly
McLaren struggling a fair bit about there... Norris and Piastri only 15th and 19th respectively.
Max Verstappen back on top
19:27 , Kieran Jackson
As we go through the qualifying simulations on soft tyres, Max Verstappen is 0.156 secs clear of second place with a 1:35:912.
Charles Leclerc is in second for Ferrari, with Sergio Perez in third. But it could change in the final five minutes... Lewis Hamilton on a flier...
Oscar Piastri almost in the wall!
19:10 , Kieran Jackson
What a save from the Aussie!
Piastri loses control of the car in sector one and it looks set to spin into the wall... but he saves it and only turfs up a load of dirt off track!
Relief in the McLaren garage!
Oscar Piastri goes drifting in Austin 😅 pic.twitter.com/6sdG9vQKvG
— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) October 20, 2023
Lewis Hamilton fastest at halfway!
19:06 , Kieran Jackson
Lewis Hamilton now top of the timesheets, at a circuit he’s won at five times! It’s a 1:37:394 on hard tyres, with Max Verstappen a tenth down.
Lando Norris is in third, two-tenths back, with Yuki Tsunoda and Kevin Magnussen in fourth and fifth.
6-10: Leclerc, Perez, Ricciardo, Zhou, Piastri
George Russell, suspiciously, down in P17. And both Aston Martins in the garage with brake issues, so in the bottom-two. Problems for Aston...
Red Bull boss Christian Horner:
18:56 , Kieran Jackson
“These are all cup finals for us. We’ve never achieved first and second so that’s an objective but really it’s about attacking every one of these five events.
“Checo is doing OK. He’s had a rough ride the last couple of races, he’s done a lot of work in the sim - three straight days. He’s prepped really hard for this event. He just needs a solid weekend, hopefully he can have that here.”
Max Verstappen fastest early on!
18:47 , Kieran Jackson
Max Verstappen quickest with a 1:37:498 in the first 15 minutes, with Lewis Hamilton less than a tenth down in second place.
In third is Yuki Tsunoda, six-tenths behind first place, with Lando Norris in fourth and Kevin Magnussen in fifth!
Close shave between Sainz and Norris!
18:42 , Kieran Jackson
“Oh my god... we nearly crashed!” Carlos Sainz almost collided with Lando Norris in the twists of sector one!
A close shave for CarLando!
FP1 at the US Grand Prix!
18:32 , Kieran Jackson
It’s time for the one and only practice session in Austin, Texas!
32C at the Circuit of the Americas and not a cloud in the sky! George Russell leads the queue of cars in the pit lane out around this 5.5km track, with 20 turns and a real mixture of long straights and twisty corners!
And the clock counts down from 60 minutes...
What is the race schedule?
18:26 , Kieran Jackson
(All times BST)
Friday 20 October
Free practice 1: 6:30pm
Qualifying: 10pm
Saturday 21 October
Sprint shootout: 6:30pm
Sprint race: 11pm
Sunday 22 October
Race: 8pm
Driver Standings ahead of this weekend:
18:22 , Kieran Jackson
1) Max Verstappen - 433 points (champion)
2) Sergio Perez - 224 points
3) Lewis Hamilton - 194 points
4) Fernando Alonso - 183 points
5) Carlos Sainz - 153 points
6) Charles Leclerc - 145 points
7) Lando Norris - 136 points
8) George Russell - 132 points
9) Oscar Piastri - 83 points
10) Lance Stroll - 47 points
11) Pierre Gasly - 46 points
12) Esteban Ocon - 44 points
13) Alex Albon - 23 points
14) Valtteri Bottas - 10 points
15) Nico Hulkenberg - 9 points
16) Zhou Guanyu - 6 points
17) Yuki Tsunoda - 3 points
18) Kevin Magnussen - 3 points
19) Liam Lawson - 2 points
20) Logan Sargeant - 0 points
21) Nyck de Vries - 0 points
22) Daniel Ricciardo - 0 points
Max Verstappen still fully focused despite world title wrap-up:
18:17 , Kieran Jackson
"Nothing to crazy yet" 😅
Has Max Verstappen had a big celebration yet for winning the World Championship? 🏆 pic.twitter.com/nL33zoAxFd
— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) October 19, 2023
Daniel Ricciardo must prove he still belongs on the F1 grid
18:14 , Kieran Jackson
Weekend preview by Kieran Jackson
For a man handed a lifeline in Formula One – with an illustrious Red Bull-shaped reward beckoning down the line – it has not quite been the statement return Daniel Ricciardo envisaged back in July. What did that look like? Top-10 finishes with AlphaTauri, perhaps with a memorable overtake or two evoking the Ricciardo of old back onto the grid. But it has in fact been the complete opposite: the only return has been his return to inactivity.
Two races in and a hand injury sustained in practice in Zandvoort, north Holland, back in August has seen the affable Australian feature only on the sidelines again. A seesaw seven weeks have followed: while on one hand confirmation of a seat on the grid in 2024 was, rather peculiarly, confirmed in his absence in Japan, his deputy Liam Lawson caught the eye with a string of impressive performances, including a team-best result of ninth in Singapore.
So as Ricciardo struts back into the paddock this weekend in Austin, the broken bone in his hand healed, the pressure is firmly on the 34-year-old’s shoulders at his home from home. Affection works hand in hand with Ricciardo and the United States: he loves America, Americans love him.
Full piece below:
‘Let’s not get too soft’: Hamilton insists F1 must remain extreme
18:04 , Kieran Jackson
Hamilton’s Mercedes team-mate George Russell branded the race a fortnight ago “beyond the limit of what is acceptable” as temperatures in the drivers’ cockpits exceeded 50 degrees.
Canadian Lance Stroll said he faded in and out of consciousness because of the extreme heat and humidity in Lusail.
Daniel Ricciardo is back after five races out!
17:57 , Kieran Jackson
Here are the constructors’ standings ahead of this weekend:
17:42 , Kieran Jackson
1) Red Bull - 657 points (champion)
2) Mercedes - 326 points
3) Ferrari - 298 points
4) Aston Martin - 230 points
5) McLaren - 219 points
6) Alpine - 90 points
7) Williams - 23 points
8) Alfa Romeo - 16 points
9) Haas - 12 points
10) AlphaTauri - 5 points
What is a sprint race in F1 and how does new qualifying shootout work?
17:29 , Kieran Jackson
The fifth Formula 1 sprint event in 2023 takes place this weekend at the United States Grand Prix
Full detail below:
F1 drivers react as sport governing body increases size of fines
17:14 , Kieran Jackson
Lewis Hamilton and his fellow Formula One drivers could be fined up to one million euros following a dramatic change to the sport’s rulebook.
Ahead of this weekend’s United States Grand Prix, F1’s governing body announced it has increased the maximum sanction that stewards can impose on a driver from 250,000 euros (£218,000) to 871,500 euros (£760,000).
The FIA said the amount had been static for the last 12 years and “does not reflect the current needs of motor sports”.
But the decision was met with surprise by the grid’s drivers. Daniel Ricciardo, back in action after missing five races with a broken hand, calling it “scary”, and Haas’ Kevin Magnussen branding the move “ridiculous”.
Full quotes below:
Driver Standings ahead of this weekend:
17:06 , Kieran Jackson
1) Max Verstappen - 433 points (champion)
2) Sergio Perez - 224 points
3) Lewis Hamilton - 194 points
4) Fernando Alonso - 183 points
5) Carlos Sainz - 153 points
6) Charles Leclerc - 145 points
7) Lando Norris - 136 points
8) George Russell - 132 points
9) Oscar Piastri - 83 points
10) Lance Stroll - 47 points
11) Pierre Gasly - 46 points
12) Esteban Ocon - 44 points
13) Alex Albon - 23 points
14) Valtteri Bottas - 10 points
15) Nico Hulkenberg - 9 points
16) Zhou Guanyu - 6 points
17) Yuki Tsunoda - 3 points
18) Kevin Magnussen - 3 points
19) Liam Lawson - 2 points
20) Logan Sargeant - 0 points
21) Nyck de Vries - 0 points
22) Daniel Ricciardo - 0 points
Daniel Ricciardo must prove he still belongs on the F1 grid
17:02 , Kieran Jackson
Weekend preview by Kieran Jackson
For a man handed a lifeline in Formula One – with an illustrious Red Bull-shaped reward beckoning down the line – it has not quite been the statement return Daniel Ricciardo envisaged back in July. What did that look like? Top-10 finishes with AlphaTauri, perhaps with a memorable overtake or two evoking the Ricciardo of old back onto the grid. But it has in fact been the complete opposite: the only return has been his return to inactivity.
Two races in and a hand injury sustained in practice in Zandvoort, north Holland, back in August has seen the affable Australian feature only on the sidelines again. A seesaw seven weeks have followed: while on one hand confirmation of a seat on the grid in 2024 was, rather peculiarly, confirmed in his absence in Japan, his deputy Liam Lawson caught the eye with a string of impressive performances, including a team-best result of ninth in Singapore.
So as Ricciardo struts back into the paddock this weekend in Austin, the broken bone in his hand healed, the pressure is firmly on the 34-year-old’s shoulders at his home from home. Affection works hand in hand with Ricciardo and the United States: he loves America, Americans love him.
Full piece below:
What is the race schedule?
16:59 , Kieran Jackson
(All times BST)
Friday 20 October
Free practice 1: 6:30pm
Qualifying: 10pm
Saturday 21 October
Sprint shootout: 6:30pm
Sprint race: 11pm
Sunday 22 October
Race: 8pm
F1 United States Grand Prix qualifying LIVE!
16:59 , Kieran Jackson
Good evening - it’s triple header time!
F1 swings back stateside for the second of three races in the US this year! And we’re back to the 5.5km Circuit of the Americas for the US Grand Prix and the penultimate sprint weekend of the season!
Max Verstappen stole victory right at the death from Lewis Hamilton last year and the race at COTA usually brings plenty of excitement... what will we be in for this weekend?
It’s practice first up at 6:30pm (BST) before qualifying for Sunday’s grand prix at 10pm (BST) - stay right here for all the updates! | Autoracing |
F1 Hungarian Grand Prix 2023: Dates, Race Time In India, Where To Watch, Statistics
The 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix is sure to be another exciting race. The Hungaroring is a great track for racing.
The 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix will take place on July 23, 2023 at the Hungaroring in Budapest, Hungary. The 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix is sure to be another exciting race. The Hungaroring is a great track for racing, and with the drivers so closely matched this year, it could be anyone's race. The race is the 10th round of the 2023 Formula One World Championship.
F1 Hungarian Grand Prix 2023: Full schedule, Date, and Timing
Here is the entire Formula 1 weekend schedule for the Hungarian Grand Prix. The timings are as per Indian Standard Time.
July 21, Friday
Practice 1: 5 pm to 6 pm
Practice 2: 8.30 pm to 9.30 pm
July 22, Saturday
Practice 3: 4 pm to 5 pm
Qualifying: 7.30 pm to 8.30 pm
July 23, Sunday
Race: 6.30 pm
F1 Hungarian Grand Prix 2023: Where To Watch
The Hungarian GP will not be televised In India. However, Indian F1 fans can access the live streaming by subscribing to F1 TV Pro and the F1 TV app. Fans will also get the race sessions across the weekend, including support series races on the streaming service and global broadcast feeds. F1 TV Pro app is supported on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and smart TVs.
F1 Hungarian Grand Prix 2023: Statistics
The Hungaroring is a 4.381-kilometer (2.723-mile) circuit that has been on the F1 calendar since 1986. It is a relatively slow track, with long straights and a number of tight corners. This makes it a difficult track to overtake on, and it is often known for producing close and exciting races.
Last five Hungarian GP winners
2022 – Max Verstappen (Red Bull)
2021 – Esteban Ocon (Alpine)
2020 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2019 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2018 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
Canadian Grand Prix Vital Stats
First Grand Prix – 1986
Track Length – 4.381 km
Most pole positions: Lewis Hamilton (8)
Most wins – Lewis Hamilton (8)
Pole run to Turn 1 braking point – 476 metres
Overtakes completed in 2022 – 99
Pit stop time loss – 20.84 seconds | Autoracing |
Protesters at the British Grand Prix are being urged not to invade the track on race day.Northamptonshire Police says it has received intelligence that individuals may attempt to interrupt the Formula 1 event at Silverstone on Sunday.
Appealing directly to the protesters, Chief Inspector Tom Thompson said: "I strongly urge you to not put yourselves, the drivers, as well as the many marshals, volunteers and members of the public, at risk."With racers travelling at speeds of more than 140mph, the event commander described the plans as "reckless" - and stressed "going on a live racetrack is extremely dangerous".He added: "Protesting is of course everyone's human right in this country and we are more than happy to speak with you to help you facilitate a peaceful protest at the circuit, we just please ask that you do not create a situation that puts lives in danger." The force has confirmed that "extra resources will be in place throughout the race weekend should anyone ignore these warnings and try to disrupt the event".
Ch Insp Thompson urged members of the public to be "extra vigilant" and approach an officer if something doesn't look right - and said the police would rather have a "well-meaning report that turns out to be nothing, than not receive one at all". More on Formula 1 Bernie Ecclestone says he would 'take a bullet' for 'first class' Vladimir Putin as he defends war in Ukraine Formula One to hold night race on Las Vegas strip next year in 'perfect marriage of speed and glamour' Saudi Arabia Grand Prix to go ahead after Yemen rebels target oil depot as fire breaks out near F1 race circuit He said: "We are very experienced in the policing of this event having done so over a number of years but let me make this clear - this doesn't make us complacent."The security measures we have put in place are as stringent as ever and anyone thinking of taking advantage of the race weekend to commit a crime will be caught."Protesters have been told they can speak to Northamptonshire Police ahead of race day by calling 101 and using Op Pitlane as the reference. | Autoracing |
F1 Singapore Grand Prix 2023: Schedule, Race Time In India, Where To Watch
The race is held at the Marina Bay Street Circuit and is the only night race in Formula One.
The Singapore Grand Prix is a Formula One motor race which is held annually in Singapore. The race is held at the Marina Bay Street Circuit. The race is the only night race in Formula One, and it is one of the most popular races on the calendar.
The 2023 Singapore Grand Prix was interrupted three times by lizards traversing the Marina Bay track.
F1 Singapore Grand Prix 2023: Full schedule, Date, and Timing
Here is the entire Formula 1 weekend schedule for the Singapore Grand Prix. The timings are as per Indian Standard Time.
September 15, Friday
Practice 1: 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Practice 2: 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm
September 16, Saturday
Practice 3: 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Qualifying: 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm
September 17, Sunday
Race: 5:30 pm
Track continuing to ramp up as we head into the final 10 mins of FP1 in Singapore.— Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team (@MercedesAMGF1) September 15, 2023
Lewis and George currently P5 and P6 on the Softs - both cars finding gains on their second quick laps.
Top five covered by just 0.2s. â±ï¸ð®âð¨ pic.twitter.com/etDucZPAhn
Where To Watch Singapore Grand Prix 2023 in India
The Singapore GP will not be televised In India. However, Indian F1 fans can access the live streaming by subscribing to F1 TV Pro and the F1 TV app. Fans will also get the race sessions across the weekend, including support series races on the streaming service and global broadcast feeds. F1 TV Pro app is supported on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and smart TVs.
Singapore Grand Prix History
The Singapore Grand Prix is a challenging race for drivers. The heat and humidity are high, and the circuit is narrow and twisty. The race is also known for its safety car interventions, with an average of 2.2 safety car deployments per race.
Last five Singapore GP winners
2022 – Sergio Perez (Red Bull)
2019 – Sebastian Vettel (Ferrari)
2018 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2017 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2016 – Nico Rosberg (Mercedes)
Singapore Grand Prix Vital Stats
First Grand Prix – 2008
Track Length – 4.940km
Most pole positions - Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton (4)
Most wins – Sebastian Vettel (5)
Pole run to Turn 1 braking point – 178 metres
Overtakes completed in 2022 – 71
Pit stop time loss – 29.83 seconds | Autoracing |
Max Verstappen sealed his second Formula 1 world championship after winning a chaotic, rain-shortened Japanese Grand Prix.There was huge confusion at the chequered flag amid uncertainty over whether full or partial points would be awarded for a race in which only 29 of the 53 scheduled laps were completed.
With between 50% and 75% of the laps completed, most of the F1 paddock believed Verstappen would only be awarded 19 points for his victory.But for the Japanese GP there was a different interpretation of the rules, which state that the reduced points are only applied if a race is suspended "and cannot be resumed".Verstappen was clearly confused by the situation as celebrations began and were then paused, but it was eventually confirmed that full points had been awarded, sealing the 25-year-old's triumph with four races of the season remaining.
"The first one is a little more emotional, the second one is more beautiful," Verstappen said."Looking back, what a year we've had so far. It's been incredible. It's something I could never have imagined. After last year, fighting until the end, and then having such a good car again this year. I'm so thankful to everyone who has been contributing to this success." More from World Ukraine latest news: Thirteen dead and 87 injured in missile attack as Russian divers check damage to blast-hit Crimea bridge Donegal explosion: Girl, 5, and her father killed in petrol station blast - as all 10 victims named Donegal explosion: Rescuer who pulled people from debris says one man was saved by a table The Dutchman would have been denied the title if Charles Leclerc had come second, but the Ferrari driver's final-lap error saw him given a five-second penalty - for leaving the track and gaining an advantage - that demoted him to third behind the other Red Bull of Sergio Perez.Verstappen's 13th victory in 18 races this season, and his sixth in the last seven rounds, took him an unassailable 113 points clear in the world championship. After coming through the most intense of battles with Lewis Hamilton last year, Verstappen has been in a league of his own in 2022. | Autoracing |
Roku just made its first live sports deal, and it may be welcome news if you're a motorsports fan. The company has struck a deal to stream 11 Formula E races for free through The Roku Channel, beginning with the next season. You'll also find on-demand videos like race previews, replays and the "Unplugged" documentary. The channel is available through Roku hardware, the web and dedicated mobile apps.
This isn't strictly an exclusive. Paramount+ will simulcast five Formula E races alongside CBS. The offering will be available starting in January 2024. Formula E media chief Aarti Dabas sees both the Roku and Paramount+ deals as ways to "dramatically increase" exposure to the race series, particularly in the US.
This isn't on par with Formula 1 or other major sports deals. However, it significantly expands the range of content available through Roku's ad-supported service. The Roku Channel initially launched with a focus older movies and shows, but has since added premium subscriptions, originals and live TV. Now, it has a chance to attract sports fans.
There's plenty of pressure to grow. Numerous other streaming services have their own sports exclusives. Amazon Prime Video streams a limited number of NFL games, while Apple has Friday Night Baseball and MLS Season Pass. Paramount+ already has multiple soccer exclusives. Moreover, ad-supported channels are reaching more platforms — Amazon recently launched its own free TV for Fire devices. Formula E could sustain interest in Roku's hardware and services, especially for viewers who crave live content. | Autoracing |
Netflix’s “Drive To Survive” is back for a fifth installment.
The hit series helped catapult Formula 1 into the cultural zeitgeist, and four years after the show premiered, the sport is more popular than ever in the United States.
Season 5 highlights Daniel Ricciardo’s fight to remain on the grid, Red Bull’s controversial cost cap breach, and marks the return of world champion Max Verstappen, who famously boycotted the series in 2021.
Executive producer Paul Martin told The Post that “politics” would be “front and center” in the latest installment.
“The battle in the paddock is as important as the battle on the track,” the Box To Box Films co-founder said. “I think the challenge is we don’t want to become too comfortable … we’re constantly reminding our crews that the show works by shining a light on things that make the teams squirm in their seats a little bit.”
Here are five major takeaways from Season 5, which premieres on Netflix on Feb. 24:
Daniel Ricciardo wanted $10 million to join Haas
Fan-favorite Ricciardo was unceremoniously dropped by McLaren, and much of the season charts his mission to secure a drive with another team in 2023.
Haas team principal Guenther Steiner was wearing a mic while deliberating who would take Mick Schumacher’s seat following his departure from the US-backed team.
“Ricciardo?” Haas’ top driver Kevin Magnussen suggested during a closed door meeting.
“We can’t afford him, Kevin. He wants 10 f–king million. Minimum,” Steiner said.
The German team boss, who is one of the series’ breakout stars, ultimately tapped Nico Hulkenberg, while Ricciardo returned to Red Bull as the team’s reserve driver.
“‘Drive To Survive’ won’t be the same without me,” Ricciardo later declared, adding, “F–k ’em all.”
Oscar Piastri has ‘no regrets’ over Alpine contract debacle
Rookie driver Oscar Piastri, heralded as one of the sport’s most exciting young talents, shocked the F1 world when he revealed he wouldn’t be driving for Alpine in 2023.
The former F2 champion was the team’s reserve driver, and the natural successor to Fernando Alonso, who announced a move to Aston Martin in mid-2022.
Nevertheless, the Australian racer had secretly inked a deal with McLaren, which left Alpine red-faced when he infamously tweeted, “I understand that, without my agreement, Alpine F1 have put out a press release late this afternoon that I am driving for them next year. This is wrong and I have not signed a contract with Alpine for 2023. I will not be driving for Alpine next year.”
In a confessional, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said, “nobody saw it coming,” while Red Bull boss Christian Horner added, “He must have a seat. He wouldn’t do that without having a seat.”
When asked about the debacle, Piastri told producers, “I have no regrets in securing my future and fulfilling a dream of mine.”
Zak Brown tried to ‘swap’ Daniel Ricciardo for Oscar Piastri
McLaren CEO Zak Brown attempted to orchestrate a driver swap after Alpine boss Otmar Szafnauer threatened to sue Piastri for defecting to their rival team.
“We can’t keep going on like this. We need to start considering what a change would look like,” Brown said of Ricciardo’s poor performance, noting the team was pursuing Piastri.
After the deal was made public, Szafnauer revealed his plans to sue the rookie for $5 million as compensation for the money spent developing him.
“It was difficult for me to understand the lack of loyalty. I was hoping that Oscar had a little bit more integrity than that,” he said.
Brown, a California born marketing pro, quipped, “I think Otmar has been caught with his pants down. If I was him I’d be very embarrassed.”
During a heated negotiation, Szafnauer said, “We think we have a good case in U.K. law,” to which Brown replied, “The downside is, you guys going after him would be a PR disaster. Is the five million worth it?”
The McLaren boss left the meeting and informed his colleagues, “Alpine want to sue Piastri which is f–king crazy. I definitely didn’t see that coming but I’ve got as plan: if we can get Alpine to do a driver swap between Daniel and Oscar that would be a great solution.”
Ultimately, Alpine dropped its plans to sue Piastri and signed French driver Pierre Gasly.
The FIA President told Christian Horner the other teams ‘want to f–k you’
Red Bull’s cost cap breach dominated headlines in the latter part of the 2022 season, and cameras caught the moment Horner learned his team had overspent by 1.6 percent.
Just hours after Verstappen secured the world drivers championship in Japan, the FIA informed the team it had breached the $145 million cost cap in 2021.
At the following race, Horner sat down with FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem to discuss the team’s penalty: a $7 million fine and a 10 percent reduction in its aerodynamic testing allowance for 12 months.
‘He said, “They all want your blood, they want to f–k you. You don’t have friends. I’m your only friend,'” Horner told his colleagues, referencing the president of the sport’s governing body.
“Well I don’t need friends,” he quipped.
Christian Horner ‘regrets’ not signing Oscar Piastri
Alpine and McLaren weren’t the only teams who had Piastri on their mind: the Red Bull Racing team principal revealed he still regrets not signing the Melbourne-born athlete.
“He is an outstanding talent,” Horner said.
“We had an opportunity to potentially do something with him in his very formative years and we didn’t pursue that,” he added. | Autoracing |
The 2023 F1 season resumes this weekend at the home track of the team that has topped the series for the past two-plus seasons. The Austrian Grand Prix emanates from the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Styria and will feature the second sprint weekend of the season.
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen enters in imperious form, having won the past four races on the trot and sporting a massive 69-point lead in the world drivers’ standings over teammate Sergio Perez. That’s nearly a full three-race lead. Verstappen has won four times in 10 starts at the Red Bull Ring.
Here’s everything you need to know about the Austrian Grand Prix weekend:
Austrian Grand Prix TV/streaming schedule
All times Eastern
Friday
7:25 - 8:30 a.m.: Free practice 1 (ESPN2, ESPN+)
10:55 - 11 a.m.: Qualifying (ESPN2, ESPN+)
Saturday
6:25 - 7:30 a.m.: Sprint shootout (ESPN2, ESPN+)
10:25 - 11:30 a.m.: Sprint (ESPN, ESPN+)
Sunday
7:30 - 8:55 a.m.: Pre-race show (ESPN)
8:55 - 11 a.m.: Austrian Grand Prix (ESPN, ESPN+)
Austrian Grand Prix details
Track: Red Bull Ring (Spielberg, Austria), 2.683-mile, 10-turn permanent racing facility
Race length: 71 laps for 190 miles
Lap record: 1:05.619 (Carlos Sainz, Ferrari, 2020)
Tire compounds: C3 (Hard), C4 (Medium), C5 (Soft)
Last year’s winner: Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
Sprint weekend format returns
In 2021, F1 introduced the Sprint weekend format, which moved traditional qualifying to Friday and put in its place a shortened race that would award minimal points and set the grid for Sunday’s Grand Prix. A few nominal tweaks later, we have our current format for the 2023 season, which effectively makes Saturday more like an exhibition.
Sprint Shootout is here! 🍿
Imagine qualifying, but even quicker. Every lap counts as Saturday's Sprint Shootout sets the grid for the #F1Sprint
Leaving Sunday's Grand Prix unaffected 🔒 pic.twitter.com/oTVrJIuLvl
— Formula 1 (@F1) April 25, 2023
The new format ditches the lame-duck Saturday morning practice session in favor of a quicker version of the traditional three-stage knockout qualifying format to set the grid for the sprint race later in the day. The top eight finishers of the sprint will be awarded points in descending order (eight for P1, seven for P2, six for P3, etc.).
McLaren, Ferrari, Aston Martin bringing upgrades
After being overtaken for second place in the world constructors’ standings by Mercedes at the Canadian Grand Prix, Aston Martin is bringing an upgrade package they hope will enable them to “attack” the Silver Arrows. Fourth-place Ferrari will debut new front-wing elements, a new floor and a new rear wing it hopes will make its race performance more predictable. McLaren, mired in sixth in the constructors’ standings, will begin a series of significant changes to the car beginning in Austria.
“I look forward to anything that’s new,” McLaren driver Lando Norris told Australia’s Speedcafe.
Norris currently sits in 11th in the drivers’ standings after a sixth-place showing in 2022.
Top drivers and best bets for the Austrian Grand Prix
Barring an unforeseen catastrophe, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen will be the favorite entering every race weekend for the rest of the season as he charges toward his inevitable third-straight world drivers’ championship. He’s -275 to win in Austria at his team’s home track according to BetMGM and the next-best moneyline is Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso at +700.
Best odds to win
• Max Verstappen -275
• Fernando Alonso +700
• Lewis Hamilton +800
• Sergio Perez +900
Yahoo Sports’ Nick Bromberg wrote earlier in the week on some props worthy of consideration, including Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc to finish on the podium (-225). He also likes Fernando Alonso to finish on the podium in the sprint (-110), pointing to the strength of the car two weeks ago in Montreal.
Austrian Grand Prix entry list
Max Verstappen (1), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
Sergio Perez (11), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
Charles Leclerc (16), Ferrari
Carlos Sainz (55), Ferrari
Lewis Hamilton (44), Mercedes
George Russell (63), Mercedes
Pierre Gasly (10), Alpine-Renault
Esteban Ocon (31), Alpine-Renault
Lando Norris (4), McLaren-Mercedes
Oscar Piastri (81), McLaren-Mercedes
Zhou Guanyu (24), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Valtteri Bottas (77), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Fernando Alonso (14), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Lance Stroll (18), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Kevin Magnussen (20), Haas-Ferrari
Nico Hulkenberg, (27), Haas-Ferrari
Nyck De Vries (21), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Yuki Tsunoda (22), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Logan Sargeant (2), Williams-Mercedes
Alexander Albon (23), Williams-Mercedes
Weather for the Austrian Grand Prix
Thunderstorms are expected to impact Friday afternoon’s qualifying session as well as the sprint shootout qualifying session Saturday morning before conditions potentially improve. Race day is only forecast to have a 20% chance of rain, which means even if the grid is mixed up by variable conditions Friday, the stronger cars like Red Bull, Aston Martin and Mercedes should be able to carve their way up the field by the end of the grand prix. | Autoracing |
- J
Hulkenberg (P16) has lost four spots since the start while Bottas (P17) has lost three
Sao Paulo Grand Prix qualifying results
Max Verstappen (1), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
Charles Leclerc (16), Ferrari
Lance Stroll (18), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Fernando Alonso (14), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Lewis Hamilton (44), Mercedes
George Russell (63), Mercedes
Lando Norris (4), McLaren-Mercedes
Carlos Sainz (55), Ferrari
Sergio Perez (11), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
Oscar Piastri (81), McLaren-Mercedes
Nico Hülkenberg, (27), Haas-Ferrari
Esteban Ocon (31), Alpine-Renault
Pierre Gasly (10), Alpine-Renault
Kevin Magnussen (20), Haas-Ferrari
Alexander Albon (23), Williams-Mercedes
Yuki Tsunoda (22), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Daniel Ricciardo (3), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Valtteri Bottas (77), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Logan Sargeant (2), Williams-Mercedes
Zhou Guanyu (24), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Formula 1 concludes its lone triple-header of the 2023 season this weekend in Brazil with the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.
Interlagos and the Autódromo José Carlos Pace are a favorite of drivers and fans alike for its unique twisting layout, elevation changes and propensity to deliver memorable and thrilling moments. Just last year, Kevin Magnussen won his maiden pole (albeit, yes, it was aided by weather) and George Russell won his first F1 Grand Prix.
Here’s what to know ahead of Sao Paulo Grand Prix:
Sao Paulo Grand Prix TV/streaming schedule
All times Eastern
Friday
10:25-11:30 a.m.: Free practice 1 (ESPN2, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
1:55-3 p.m.: Qualifying (ESPN2, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
Saturday
9:55-11 a.m.: Sprint Shootout (ESPN2, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
2:25-3:30 p.m.: Sprint (ESPNNews, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
Sunday
10:30-11:55 a.m.: Pre-race show (ESPNNews, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
11:55 a.m.-2 p.m.: Sao Paulo Grand Prix (ESPN, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
Sao Paulo Grand Prix details
Track: Autódromo José Carlos Pace (Interlagos) | 2.677-mile, 15-turn permanent racing facility in Sao Paulo
Race length: 71 laps
Lap record: 1:10.540 (Valtteri Bottas, 2018, Mercedes)
Tire compounds: Hard (C4), Medium (C3), Soft (C2)
2022 winner: George Russell, Mercedes
— Pirelli Motorsport (@pirellisport) October 31, 2023
Final sprint weekend of 2023
In 2021, F1 introduced the Sprint weekend format, which moved traditional qualifying to Friday and put in its place a shortened race that would award minimal points and set the grid for Sunday’s Grand Prix. A few nominal tweaks later, we have our current format for the 2023 season, which effectively makes Saturday more like an exhibition. This weekend marks the sixth and final sprint format weekends of 2023.
Sprint Shootout is here! 🍿
Imagine qualifying, but even quicker. Every lap counts as Saturday's Sprint Shootout sets the grid for the #F1Sprint
Leaving Sunday's Grand Prix unaffected 🔒 pic.twitter.com/oTVrJIuLvl
— Formula 1 (@F1) April 25, 2023
The 2023 format ditches the lame-duck Saturday morning practice session in favor of a quicker version of the traditional three-stage knockout qualifying format to set the grid for the sprint race later in the day. The top eight finishers of the sprint will be awarded points in descending order (eight for P1, seven for P2, six for P3, etc.).
Top drivers and best bets for the Sao Paulo Grand Prix
Max Verstappen has already broken his own record for wins in a single season and enters Interlagos again a massive favorite according to BetMGM, entering the weekend with a -300 moneyline. The next-best odds belong to Lewis Hamilton at 7-to-1. Lando Norris is the only other driver with 12-to-1 odds or better entering the weekend.
Best odds to win
• Max Verstappen -300
• Lewis Hamilton +700
• Lando Norris +1200
Yahoo Sports’ Nick Bromberg wrote yesterday on the betting market and, in addition to backing Verstappen for the race win, also likes George Russell to finish ahead of Charles Leclerc (-120) and Verstappen and Hamilton to finish in the top two (+165).
2023 F1 drivers' standings
1. Max Verstappen (1), Red Bull-Honda RBPT – 491*
2. Sergio Perez (11), Red Bull-Honda RBPT – 240
3. Lewis Hamilton (44), Mercedes – 220
4. Carlos Sainz (55), Ferrari – 183
5. Fernando Alonso (14), Aston Martin-Mercedes – 183
6. Lando Norris (4), McLaren-Mercedes – 169
7. Charles Leclerc (16), Ferrari – 166
8. George Russell (63), Mercedes – 151
9. Oscar Piastri (81), McLaren-Mercedes – 87
10. Pierre Gasly (10), Alpine-Renault – 56
11. Lance Stroll (18), Aston Martin-Mercedes – 53
12. Esteban Ocon (31), Alpine-Renault – 45
13. Alexander Albon (23), Williams-Mercedes – 27
14. Valtteri Bottas (77), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari – 10
15. Nico Hülkenberg, (27), Haas-Ferrari – 9
16. Daniel Ricciardo (3), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 6
17. Zhou Guanyu (24), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari – 6
18. Yuki Tsunoda (22), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 8
19. Kevin Magnussen (20), Haas-Ferrari – 3
20. Liam Lawson (40), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 2
21. Logan Sargeant (2), Williams-Mercedes – 1
22. Nyck De Vries (21), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 0
* — Clinched world championship
Sao Paulo Grand Prix weather
While race day appears clear there is a 51% chance of rain forecast for qualifying and sprint days, with possible thunderstorms Friday. Wet conditions typically influence Sao Paulo race weekends; even if rain doesn’t fall, teams are monitoring the radar as much as they are the timing screens. | Autoracing |
Broadcaster Jennie Gow has updated fans on her recovery from a serious stroke ahead of the new Formula 1 season.
The 45-year-old, who covers F1 for BBC Radio 5 Live, said she was "progressing well" since her stroke at the end of December.
In a message on the BBC's Chequered Flag podcast, Gow added "my speech has been the thing that is most affected".
Podcast co-host Jack Nicholls said: "We wish Jennie all the best and hope to see her again soon."
The Southampton-born presenter, who grew up in Wargrave, Berkshire, began her broadcasting career at BBC Radio Solent before working for commercial radio stations in the south of England.
Gow has covered F1 and other motorsport events for the BBC, ITV, Netflix and Sky.
During her podcast message, she said: "I'm progressing relatively well since having my stroke at the end of December. It's not quite the off-season I'd had in mind.
"As you can probably tell, my speech has been the thing most affected, ironically, but we're working on that."
After the show went out on Tuesday, the presenter tweeted: "My 30 second appearance on the Chequered Flag preview show was difficult for me to record in so many ways, but is hopefully another step forward on my road to recovery."
Thank you so much for your messages of support. My 30 second appearance on the Chequered Flag preview show was difficult for me to record in so many ways, but is hopefully another step forward on my road to recovery. #stroke #determination #BBCF1 #F1 https://t.co/FQkxAqKM0O— Jennie Gow (@JennieGow) February 28, 2023
Since announcing the news in January, dozens of fellow broadcasters and motorsport firms have sent messages of support.
Formula 1 Racing tweeted: "Thinking of you Jennie, and wishing you all the very best with your recovery."
The opening race of the new season takes place in Bahrain this weekend with coverage across the BBC.
- A stroke happens when the blood supply to part of the brain is cut off, killing brain cells
- That can be due to a clot in a blood vessel, blocking the flow. Or, a vessel can burst
- There are different reasons or risk factors. People may be born with or develop weaker blood vessels. Some medical conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, can be a factor
- Some lifestyle habits, such as smoking and eating an unhealthy diet, can contribute too
- Stroke is an emergency - rapid treatment can save lives and prevent disability. If you think someone is having a stroke, act FAST | Autoracing |
Will we see Nico Hulkenberg again in Formula 1? He has been without a full-time seat for three years now, but he is optimistic about a return to the premier class of motorsport. There is still one full-time Formula 1 seat available for the 2023 season. Only Mick Schumacher is not yet sure whether his Haas seat will also be for him next year. There are a few privateers on the coast, with reportedly old servant Nico Hulkenberg as the top favourite. Team boss Guenther Steiner previously admitted that talks are underway. Hulkenberg himself remains very quiet when it comes to his future. He does not give interviews, but on Austrian TV he is now letting go a little bit about his future. The German says he is optimistic when it comes to his chances for 2023. “In the end, it’s not my choice. Someone else will make the decision. There are still talks with the Haas team. I’m relatively optimistic, but we have to be patient,” the 35-year-old driver hints in conversation with Servus TV .Unmute Who else? Besides Schumacher and Hulkenberg, there are actually no candidates for the second seat in the Haas VF-23. Daniel Ricciardo has previously declined the opportunity and the other drivers who are contenders on paper, Antonio Giovinazzi and Pietro Fittipaldi, do not appear to be even considered by the team. This Tuesday morning At Aston Martin , where Hulkenberg is currently a test and reserve driver, Stoffel Vandoorne was announced for 2023. Aston Martin did not provide clarity about The Hulk , but since F2 champion Felipe Drugovich will also be given a similar role in the British formation, it seems It is quite possible that Hulkenberg has played his part. Or did Aston Martin already know about a departure from Hulkenberg to Haas? Time will tell. ALSO INTERESTING: Verstappen should fear Mercedes more than Ferrari on the way to even more records Red Bull was quite in the spotlight during the Grand Prix weekend in Mexico. Was it not because of the penalty for exceeding the budget cap, or because of the boycott of Sky Sports or simply because of Max Verstappen’s dominant performance in the race. The podcast trio Tom Coronel, Ruud Dimmers and Joris Mosterdijk discuss all events in the GP weekend in the new episode of the RacingNews365 Formula 1 podcast. Continue Reading | Autoracing |
Saudi Arabian GP 2023: When And Where To Watch Qualifying And Main Race
Know the full schedule, timings, live streaming details, and more about this weekend’s F1 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix 2023.
The 2023 F1 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix is the next race for the season. The current F1 season was flagged off with the Bahrain GP on March 5, 2023, where Max Verstappen claimed the first position. What came as a pleasant surprise during the opening race of F1 2023 was the progress made by the Aston Martin F1 team and the great performance by Fernando Alonso, who grabbed P3 in the race.
While the season’s first race was exciting, Formula 1 fans are now gearing up for the Saudi Arabian GP. The race will be hosted at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah. Here is everything you need to know about the 2023 F1 Saudi Arabian GP.
2023 F1 Saudi Arabian GP Venue
The 2023 Formula 1 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix will be held at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit. This will be the track’s third time hosting a Grand Prix. For the 2023 Saudi Arabian GP, the track has undergone some changes, allowing drivers to have better visibility in some corners.
Saudi Arabian GP 2023 Race Weekend Schedule
The upcoming race in Jeddah will have a regular race weekend schedule, with 3 practice sessions, 1 qualifying session, and the main race.
The first free practice session will be held on Friday, March 17, 2023 at 4:30 pm local time. This will be followed by the second free practice session at 8 pm local time. The final free practice session will be held on Saturday, March 18, 2023 at 4:30 pm local time, followed by the Saudi Arabian GP qualifying session at 8 pm local time. All free practice sessions and the qualifying session will go on for an hour long as usual.
Finally, at 8 pm local time on March 19, 2023, it will be time for lights out on the Jeddah Corniche Circuit. The Saudi Arabian GP main race will go on for 50 laps.
Let’s take a look at the Saudi Arabian GP timings as per IST.
Saudi Arabian GP 2023 Full Practice Schedule – Date And Time (IST)
Practice Session 1- March 17, 2023, 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Practice Session 2- March 17, 2023, 10:30 pm to 11:30 pm
Practice Session 3- March 18, 2023, 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Saudi Arabian GP 2023 Qualifying And Main Race Schedule – Date And Time (IST)
Saudi Arabian GP 2023 Qualifying Session- March 18, 2023, 10:30 pm to 11:30 pm
Saudi Arabian GP 2023 Main Race- March 19, 2023, 10:30 pm onwards
Where To Watch Saudi Arabian GP 2023
While Formula 1 races were broadcast on the Star Sports network and on Disney+Hotstar until last year, Formula 1 fans in India will now have to move to the official F1 OTT platform, the F1 TV, to stream the motorsport. Know the . | Autoracing |
The grid for the Belgian Grand Prix will be set in championship order if wet weather makes it impossible to run qualifying on Friday.
Only 15 drivers set a lap time in a wet first practice. Ferrari's Carlos Sainz was fastest ahead of McLaren's Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris.
Governing body the FIA agreed with teams before the session not to set the grid from the practice results.
This is the default arrangement in the rules for a 'sprint' race weekend.
But it was considered a safety risk to have teams effectively turning first practice into a de facto qualifying session when teams had not previously run their cars on the track.
- Verstappen will have five-place grid penalty for Belgium GP
- How to follow the Belgian Grand Prix on the BBC
- Formula 1 'sprint' races: What is the format?
Safety at the historic Spa-Francorchamps track, especially in wet conditions, has been a focus in F1 in the run up to this weekend's race in the wake of the death of 18-year-old Dutch driver Dilano Van 't Hoff in a junior category race earlier this month.
Drivers have emphasised the dangers of racing in the rain at Spa because of the topography of the circuit, especially the run through the high-speed Eau Rouge swerves on to the Kemmel straight.
Van t' Hoff was killed in a wet race, when he lost control on the straight, hit the barriers and bounced back on to the track, where he was hit by another car.
The accident was a few hundred meters further on from the site of the death of Frenchman Anthoine Hubert in a Formula 2 race at the Belgian Grand Prix meeting in 2019.
Hubert's accident happened in dry conditions but also involved him coming to rest in the middle of the track just after the crest of the hill at Raidillon, the final left-hander at Eau Rouge.
He was involved in a multi-car pile-up and was T-boned by another car.
Two years ago, the Belgian GP was called off without any racing laps taking place because conditions were considered too dangerous for racing.
There was controversy when drivers were awarded half points for their grid order for a race that effectively didn't happen. Since then, the rules have been changed to dictate that a race has to have involved at least two laps not under a safety car or virtual safety car to be declared official.
The forecast is for rain to continue throughout Friday at varying levels of intensity.
The main concern regarding racing in the wet is that visibility has worsened in recent years because of F1 adopting wider tyres and cars with ground-effect aerodynamics, both of which suck up more water from the track and create more spray.
Mercedes driver George Russell likened racing in the wet with a bunch of cars to driving down the motorway in heavy rain without windscreen wipers.
Ferrari's Charles Leclerc added: "We are not exaggerating when we say we don't see anything. We really don't see anything."
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I feel like I was just watching Adam Driver fight dinosaurs and now he’s an old man racing cars.
Today, Neon released the official trailer for Ferrari, its upcoming drama film that tells the story of Enzo Ferrari — not about what made him rise to fame as a racer — but what happened later in his life after retiring from racing. The film will make its theatrical premiere on December 25, 2023.
You can watch the official teaser trailer for Ferrari on YouTube below:
What is Ferrari about?
As explained in the synopsis, Ferrari tells the story of Enzo in 1957 when he was struggling with a potential bankruptcy impacting his car company, a marriage on the rocks, and the death of his child.
Ferrari is set during the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle and danger of 1950’s Formula 1, ex-racer, Enzo Ferrari, is in crisis. Bankruptcy stalks the company he and his wife, Laura, built from nothing ten years earlier. Their tempestuous marriage struggles with the mourning for their one son. Ferrari struggles with the acknowledgement of another. His drivers’ lust to win pushes them out to the edge. He wagers all in a roll of the dice on one race, the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the iconic Mille Miglia.
In addition to Driver who plays Ferrari himself, the film also stars Penélope Cruz, Patrick Dempsey, Jack O’Connell, and Shailene Woodley. The film is directed by Michael Mann, the filmmaker behind Heat, The Last of the Mohicans, and Collateral. I personally loved Ford v Ferrari, the 2019 film starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon, so I’m up for diving into another film about cars, racing, and the people behind it. | Autoracing |
Team Red Bull, fresh off its 100th F1 Grand Prix victory, heads to its home turf this weekend for the 2023 Austrian Grand Prix. Max Verstappen remains in the lead for the drivers’ championship with 195 points, with fellow Red Bull teammate falling further behind in second place with 126 points. Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton bring up third and fourth place at 117 and 102 points, respectively.
Whether you’ve already got some miles on you as a Formula 1 fan, or this weekend’s race is your first time tuning into the action on the track, watching or streaming this wildly popular international sport from the US can be a challenge. If you don’t want to have to race to find the F1 Austria Grand Prix on TV, we’ve got you covered. Here’s how to watch F1 races this weekend:
How to watch the F1 Austrian Grand Prix 2023:
- Watch F1 on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN+
Hulu + Live TV
- Stream F1 from anywhere ExpressVPN
ExpressVPN
Date: June 30-July 2, 2023
Grand Prix start time: 9 a.m.
Location: Red Bull Ring, Spielberg, Styria, Austria
TV: ESPN
Streaming: ESPN+
What channel is the F1 Austrian Grand Prix on?
The 2023 Austrian Grand Prix will air live on ESPN and ESPN Deportes and stream live on ESPN+. So if you only want to tune in to the main event and you already know you subscribe to ESPN+, then you’re off to the races (literally). If you're still not sure how to stream the race this weekend, keep scrolling, we've got answers for you.
This F1 season, all 23 races in the championship will air across ESPN platforms, with 18 of the 23 airing on either ABC or ESPN and ESPN+, and the other five airing on ESPN2. So for cord cutters, we recommend a live TV streaming service such as Hulu’s live TV bundle, which includes ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN+.
How to watch F1 in the USA:
How to stream F1 for free from the US
Don’t want to deal with racing to find F1 coverage across ESPN platforms every Grand Prix? We’ve got a hack for you. Residents of Luxembourg or Austria are able to watch free F1 live streams of every Grand Prix in 2023 on the free-to-air ServusTV and ORF. If you don’t live in either of those countries, you can still stream like you do with the help of a VPN.
A VPN (virtual private network) helps protect your data, can mask your IP address and is perhaps most popular for being especially useful in the age of streaming. Whether you’re looking to watch Friends on Netflix (which left the U.S. version of the streamer back in 2019) or tune in to the F1 race this weekend without a cable package, a VPN can help you out. Looking to try a VPN for the first time? This guide breaks down the best VPN options for every kind of user.
Other ways to watch the F1 Austrian Grand Prix without cable:
- Watch F1 on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2
Sling TV
- Watch F1 on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2
Fubo TV
F1 Austrian Grand Prix schedule:
Friday, June 30
Free Practice 1: 7:30 a.m. - 8:30 a.m.
Qualifying: 11 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Saturday, July 1
Sprint Qualifying: 6 a.m. - 6:44 a.m.
Sprint Race: 10:30 a.m. - 11 a.m.
Sunday, July 2
Race: 9 a.m. (ESPN, ESPN+)
F1 Austrian Grand Prix 2023 live updates:
Check back here during the weekend for live F1 Grand Prix updates from Yahoo Sports. | Autoracing |
EA and Codemasters have revealed more details about this year's edition of their Formula 1 racing sim series. F1 2023 will hit PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC via the EA App, Steam and Epic Games Store on June 16th.
Among other things, the game will feature the return of the Braking Point story mode. Braking Point debuted in F1 2021, but it wasn't present in last year's edition. This time around, Devon Butler (the antagonist from the first chapter) and Aiden Jackson are now teammates on an upstart racing team looking to take on F1's heavy hitters. You can expect to encounter new characters, challenges and rivalries.
Codemasters has updated the cars' handling based on feedback from F1 teams. The cars are said to have more predictable behavior this time around, along with more traction when braking, accelerating and navigating corners. The studio has also improved the engine torque and inertia, balanced the aerodynamics and tire grip for added realism and incorporated Precision Drive tech for controller players, EA says.
Every team, driver and circuit from F1's real-life 2023 season is in the game, including the street circuit for the new Las Vegas Grand Prix and Qatar's Lusail International Circuit. Legacy circuits Paul Ricard (France), Shanghai (China), and Portimão (Portugal) will all be available from the jump too.
Players will be able to set races to 35 percent of their real-life distances. That should offer more flexibility to those who may not have the time for a standard-length grand prix. On top of all that, it's somehow taken until 2023 for EA to add red flags, a major aspect of F1 races, to the series. | Autoracing |
Formula 1 has cancelled the 2023 Chinese Grand Prix.The sport had been set to return to China for first time since 2019, in what was scheduled to be the fourth round of a record 24-race season on April 16.However, with China continuing to implement a zero-Covid policy, which has led to heavy restrictions and continued lockdowns, F1 has decided it is not feasible to hold a race at the Shanghai International Circuit.The cancellation reduces the schedule to 23 rounds, although F1 are understood to be in discussions about possible replacements.Read more stories from Sky SportsThere is currently a four-week gap between races in Australia and Azerbaijan at the beginning and end of April but there are several interested parties in taking China's spot, including Portimao for a Portuguese GP, which returned to F1 in 2020 and '21.A 23-race calendar would still be a record for F1, with a bumper schedule including a debut Saturday night race in Las Vegas.F1 expects to confirm whether the round in Shanghai will be replaced in the New Year.F1 said in a statement: "Formula 1 can confirm, following dialogue with the promoter and relevant authorities, that the 2023 Chinese Grand Prix will not take place due to the ongoing difficulties presented by the COVID-19 situation."Formula 1 is assessing alternative options to replace the slot on the 2023 calendar and will provide an update on this in due course." | Autoracing |
Sports seasons come and go within months, but one of the things fans love about Formula 1 racing is that it's a year-round sport. There's plenty to watch throughout the season and it's easy to get invested. What's not so easy, of course, is finding the best way to stream every Grand Prix race when you're a cable cutter.
Don't miss out on the action. Here's what you need to know to watch the highest class of international racing online.
Can you stream Formula 1 races for free?
There are two platforms that stream Grand Prix races for free: RTBF(opens in a new tab) and Servus TV(opens in a new tab). If you've never heard of either, that's because RTBF(opens in a new tab) is based in Belgium (with French commentary) and Servus TV(opens in a new tab) is based in Austria (with German commentary). If you don't speak fluent French or German, you can tune into the English commentary for each race via BBC's Radio 5 live(opens in a new tab) while watching the stream.
Because these streamers are based in other countries, you'll have to use a VPN in order to access them from the U.S. Don't worry; it's not as complicated as it sounds.
What is the best VPN for streaming F1 races live?
Not all VPNs are created equally. Terms and conditions vary, as well as the number of servers and server locations, security features, speed, performance, and of course, price. But we've done the hard part for you and rounded up our top picks for a VPN for streaming F1 races live. Here are our favorites.
Best overall: ExpressVPN(opens in a new tab)
We've tested ExpressVPN firsthand at Mashable and found it to be an overall excellent pick. Mashable contributor Branford Shaw noted that it's "easy to use, it works well, and there's ample support available whenever you need it," which is notable for newbies. It offers over 3,000 different servers around the globe, including in Austria and Belgium, so you can seamlessly stream Formula 1 races via RTBF or Servus TV.
Read our full review of ExpressVPN.
Most affordable: CyberGhost VPN(opens in a new tab)
CyberGhost VPN regularly tops our list of the best VPNs due to its low cost, dedicated streaming servers, gigantic network, and annual Transparency Reports(opens in a new tab). There are 400 dedicated servers in Austria and 216 in Belgium, so you have a wide selection for streaming Formula 1 racing. Plus, as Mashable shopping reporter Haley Henschel noted, "The rate you see at signup is the rate you'll pay forever — no hidden fees here, folks."
Read our full review of CyberGhost VPN.
Best premium pick: NordVPN(opens in a new tab)
While it might not be the best VPN for newbies, there's a reason NordVPN regularly makes best VPN lists. It's an industry leader with advanced security features like split tunneling, multi-hop connections, and built-in malware protection. There are over 5,000 servers in over 60 countries, including Belgium and Austria, so you're set for streaming RTBF and Servus TV from the U.S. You can also add on tons of features to your plan — like a password manager or data breach scanner — but it can get expensive pretty quickly.
Read our full review of NordVPN.
Honorable mention: Proton VPN(opens in a new tab)
Don't want to commit to a VPN long-term? Proton VPN offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. It's not the biggest or most powerful VPN on the list, but it does offer plenty of servers in Austria and Belgium and is committed to consumer privacy. The price isn't too shabby either.
Read(opens in a new tab) our full review of ProtonVPN.
Best streaming services to watch Formula 1 racing
If the VPN route isn't your game, you can watch Formula 1 racing via cable or streaming services as well. Of course, these options aren't free, but they are a bit simpler.
Cable subscribers still have a leg up on the cord-cutters when it comes to watching live events. If you still subscribe to cable or know someone who does, your best bet will be to use a login to stream ABC, ESPN, or ESPN2 live. Already cut the cord? No problem — you still have some options. As mentioned above, you can use a VPN to stream. Of course, this means you'll have to listen in another language or stream a separate live radio broadcast. You can also subscribe to F1TV or a cable alternative and watch every session live or on demand — but it'll cost you. Each has its pros and cons, so let's weigh them out.
Best for diehard fans: F1TV Pro(opens in a new tab)
For Formula 1 fans who can't get enough and plan to watch every single practice session and race, F1TV Pro is your best bet. It costs $79.99 for the year(opens in a new tab) and gives you access to F1 live and on demand. You can stream practice sessions, qualifiers, and races ad-free from anywhere. You can also watch race replays and highlights, access onboard cameras and team radio, and more. If you're a diehard F1 fan, it's full of enough content to justify the price.
If you only want the live timing data and can settle for delayed race replays (no live footage), you can also subscribe to F1TV Access for only $26.99 per year. This is an affordable way to keep up with F1 without tuning in live.
Best cable alternative: YouTube TV(opens in a new tab)
If you have no access to cable, live TV streaming services serve as solid alternatives. They're still more affordable than cable and many offer trial periods and regular discounts. Our top pick for watching Formula 1 is YouTube TV(opens in a new tab). The base plan offers ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 — where you'll find every race — plus unlimited DVR space for when you can't tune in live. YouTube TV is currently offering a 10-day free trial, then an $8 per month discount for your first three months. That means you'll pay just $64.99 per month for your first three months after your trial period is up. It'll cost you $72.99 per month thereafter, but you can cancel at any time. It's your best bet for streaming every race live at the best price; competitors either don't offer all three channels or don't offer a trial period or discount quite as good.
Most affordable: ESPN+(opens in a new tab)
ESPN+ might not have every single race, but it has a pretty good chunk of them(opens in a new tab) and only costs $9.99 per month. Plus, as a bonus, you'll get access to plenty of other live sports in addition to F1. If you're already a Hulu(opens in a new tab) or Disney+ subscriber(opens in a new tab), you can even bundle ESPN+ into the mix for a discounted rate (only $12.99 per month for all three with ads). | Autoracing |
There were two horror crashes in the Formula One and Formula Two races at Silverstone today, with experts saying both could have been deadly but for a life-saving "Halo" device.Formula 2 drivers Roy Nissany and Dennis Hauger collided on the opening lap at Silverstone on Sunday morning, as Hauger's car was launched over the "sausage" kerb and sent airborne towards Nissany.
Hauger's vehicle landed on top of his rival at speed, before both cars came to a stop in the gravel.Incredibly, both drivers escaped unhurt and television replays showed it was the Halo - the cockpit-fixed safety device introduced to Formula 1 and Formula 2 in 2018 - that had saved the life of Nissany. Twitter Due to your consent preferences, you’re not able to view this. Open Privacy Options In the later Formula One race also held at Silverstone, Alfa Romeo driver Zhou Guanyu was involved in another first-lap crash that saw his car flip multiple times at great speed and skid upside-down across the gravel on top of its Halo device. Zhou's car ended up flipping again over a tyre barrier before getting wedged between the barrier and fencing at the first corner, delaying extraction efforts.
The race was red-flagged and George Russell, one of the drivers involved in the crash, ran to check on the Chinese driver.Russell, who described it as "one of the scariest crashes I've ever seen", was not allowed to return to the race because his Mercedes was taken back to pit lane while he was checking on Zhou.Mercedes protested the call, but the FIA did not budge.Zhou's teammate Valtteri Bottas initially confirmed that his colleague was talking and conscious and had not suffered any fractures.Alfa Romeo stated that he had been released from the circuit's medical centre following checks. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player 'Life saved' by F2 halo during crash After the crash between Nissany and Hauger, F1 journalist Chris Medland tweeted: "The Halo absolutely saved Nissany's life. 100%."F1 commentator Tom Gaymor wrote: "Thank goodness for the Halo, unequivocally the saviour yet again."The Halo is a protective barrier that helps to prevent large objects and debris from entering the cockpit of a single-seat racing car. Twitter Due to your consent preferences, you’re not able to view this. Open Privacy Options It has proven controversial with critics saying it spoils the "purity" of a single-seat, open-cockpit racing car.Some have also claimed it can get in the way if a driver needs to get out of the car quickly. In practice, this has proved to not be an issue.Lewis Hamilton credited the Halo for saving him after he was involved in a crash at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix with fierce rival Max Verstappen. Twitter Due to your consent preferences, you’re not able to view this. Open Privacy Options Verstappen's Red Bull car was sent out of control and airborne into the path of Hamilton, with the rear-right wheel crushing the top of the Briton's Mercedes. Afterwards, Hamilton said: "I feel very, very fortunate today. Thank God for the Halo which saved me, and saved my neck." | Autoracing |
Formula 1 concludes its lone triple-header of the 2023 season this weekend in Brazil with the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.
Interlagos and the Autódromo José Carlos Pace are a favorite of drivers and fans alike for its unique twisting layout, elevation changes and propensity to deliver memorable and thrilling moments. Just last year Kevin Magnussen won his maiden pole (albeit, yes, it was aided by weather) and George Russell won his first F1 Grand Prix.
Here’s what to know ahead of Sao Paulo Grand Prix:
Sao Paulo Grand Prix TV/streaming schedule
All times Eastern
Friday
10:25-11:30 a.m.: Free practice 1 (ESPN2, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
1:55-3 p.m.: Qualifying (ESPN2, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
Saturday
9:55-11 a.m.: Sprint Shootout (ESPN2, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
2:25-3:30 p.m.: Sprint (ESPNNews, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
Sunday
10:30-11:55 a.m.: Pre-race show (ESPNNews, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
11:55 a.m.-2 p.m.: Sao Paulo Grand Prix (ESPN, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
Sao Paulo Grand Prix details
Track: Autódromo José Carlos Pace (Interlagos) | 2.677-mile, 15-turn permanent racing facility in Sao Paulo
Race length: 71 laps
Lap record: 1:10.540 (Valtteri Bottas, 2018, Mercedes)
Tire compounds: Hard (C4), Medium (C3), Soft (C2)
2022 winner: George Russell, Mercedes
— Pirelli Motorsport (@pirellisport) October 31, 2023
Final sprint weekend of 2023
In 2021, F1 introduced the Sprint weekend format, which moved traditional qualifying to Friday and put in its place a shortened race that would award minimal points and set the grid for Sunday’s Grand Prix. A few nominal tweaks later, we have our current format for the 2023 season, which effectively makes Saturday more like an exhibition. This weekend marks the sixth and final sprint format weekends of 2023.
Sprint Shootout is here! 🍿
Imagine qualifying, but even quicker. Every lap counts as Saturday's Sprint Shootout sets the grid for the #F1Sprint
Leaving Sunday's Grand Prix unaffected 🔒 pic.twitter.com/oTVrJIuLvl
— Formula 1 (@F1) April 25, 2023
The 2023 format ditches the lame-duck Saturday morning practice session in favor of a quicker version of the traditional three-stage knockout qualifying format to set the grid for the sprint race later in the day. The top eight finishers of the sprint will be awarded points in descending order (eight for P1, seven for P2, six for P3, etc.).
Top drivers and best bets for the Sao Paulo Grand Prix
Max Verstappen has already broken his own record for wins in a single season and enters Interlagos again a massive favorite according to BetMGM, entering the weekend with a -300 moneyline. The next-best odds belong to Lewis Hamilton at 7-to-1. Lando Norris is the only other driver with 12-to-1 odds or better entering the weekend.
Best odds to win
• Max Verstappen -300
• Lewis Hamilton +700
• Lando Norris +1200
Yahoo Sports’ Nick Bromberg wrote yesterday on the betting market and, in addition to backing Verstappen for the race win, also likes George Russell to finish ahead of Charles Leclerc (-120) and Verstappen and Hamilton to finish in the top two (+165).
2023 F1 drivers' standings
1. Max Verstappen (1), Red Bull-Honda RBPT – 491*
2. Sergio Perez (11), Red Bull-Honda RBPT – 240
3. Lewis Hamilton (44), Mercedes – 220
4. Carlos Sainz (55), Ferrari – 183
5. Fernando Alonso (14), Aston Martin-Mercedes – 183
6. Lando Norris (4), McLaren-Mercedes – 169
7. Charles Leclerc (16), Ferrari – 166
8. George Russell (63), Mercedes – 151
9. Oscar Piastri (81), McLaren-Mercedes – 87
10. Pierre Gasly (10), Alpine-Renault – 56
11. Lance Stroll (18), Aston Martin-Mercedes – 53
12. Esteban Ocon (31), Alpine-Renault – 45
13. Alexander Albon (23), Williams-Mercedes – 27
14. Valtteri Bottas (77), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari – 10
15. Nico Hülkenberg, (27), Haas-Ferrari – 9
16. Daniel Ricciardo (3), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 6
17. Zhou Guanyu (24), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari – 6
18. Yuki Tsunoda (22), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 8
19. Kevin Magnussen (20), Haas-Ferrari – 3
20. Liam Lawson (40), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 2
21. Logan Sargeant (2), Williams-Mercedes – 1
22. Nyck De Vries (21), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 0
* — Clinched world championship
Sao Paulo Grand Prix weather
While race day appears clear there is a 51% chance of rain forecast for qualifying and sprint days, with possible thunderstorms Friday. Wet conditions typically influence Sao Paulo race weekends; even if rain doesn’t fall, teams are monitoring the radar as much as they are the timing screens. | Autoracing |
Formula 1 may do its preseason tests right before the new schedule of races begins, but Formula E holds its trials months before the first E-Prix. The official action starts in Mexico City in January, but last week the all-electric series took to the turns of Valencia for its annual preseason test. 2024’s Season 10 will be the second for the ultra-efficient Gen3 car, following a debut that delivered lots of wheel-to-wheel racing and a hard-fought driver’s championship that was decided in the final two races. While there isn’t a new car this year, there’s still plenty to know before the lights go out in Mexico.
A battery fire cut testing short
Teams lost a considerable amount of track time after a battery fire following the Tuesday morning session. The Race reports that the incident occurred in a pit stall occupied by WAE, the all-electric series’ battery supplier. The fire reportedly started from a battery that had been removed from the DS Penske driven by rookie Robert Shwartzman for three separate stints. Shwartzman had to stop on track due to an issue and once the car was back in the pit lane, the battery was removed and taken to WAE for inspection. Motorsport.com reports that the automatic battery safety system was activated causing the driver to stop. According to The Race, witnesses say there was a small audible explosion about 90 minutes after the car came to a halt on the circuit.
Formula E canceled the Tuesday afternoon and both Wednesday sessions while it looked into the cause of the fire. One person was taken to the hospital as a precaution but was released without any treatment. The series’ governing body, the FIA, deemed conditions safe to resume testing on Thursday afternoon following “investigations and findings provided by the technical suppliers,” Formula E explained.
As The Race notes, there has never been a traction battery fire at an E-Prix in nearly 10 years of events. There were incidents in 2015 and 2017, but those affected the smaller 12-volt battery. This was also unrelated to the new Attack Charge as Shwartzman had yet to demo that infrastructure. Formula E only had eight units for 11 teams and DS Penske didn’t have one at the time, The Race reports.
The first female driver in a Gen3 car
During the preseason test in Valencia, teams were required to put rookie drivers in their cars for three of the 18 scheduled hours of running. The lineup included former F2 driver Robert Shwartzman (DS Penske) and current F2 drivers Victor Martins (Nissan) and Zane Maloney (Andretti), among others. The rookie test saw the first female driver in a Gen3 Formula E car as well. LMP3 and GT4 driver Gabriela Jilkova got behind the wheel of the Porsche team’s EVs, completing a 46-lap run. Formula E previously held rookie tests ahead of the Berlin E-Prix and during an extra practice session in Rome, both happening earlier this year.
The first test of Attack Charge
During a 10-hour session last Friday, Formula E held a simulated race, giving teams a 27-lap trial to test setups, run through safety car periods and demo the upcoming Attack Charge pit stops. The series had planned to introduce the stops last season, but supply-chain issues meant the technology would only be ready for the final few races. By then, Formula E felt it would be too late and decided to postpone the debut of Attack Charge to this season.
A first look at fast charging 👀🔋 pic.twitter.com/OLrvwLVO50
— ABB FIA Formula E World Championship (@FIAFormulaE) October 24, 2023
There is still a lot of unknown about how the stops will work, but what we do know is that they will take place during a specific window Formula E officials will announce right before the race. The series has also said that teams will be unable to double stack their two cars, a practice of pitting both vehicles back-to-back, which could lead to some interesting decisions about which driver gets priority. An Attack Charge stop is also expected to be quite long at 30-35 seconds. A mechanic hooks up a charging cable to the back of the car while the battery is replenished.
Jaguar and Porsche are quick… again
After strong showings at the start of the Gen3 era last season, it looks like Jaguar TCS Racing and TAG Heuer Porsche are going to be contenders once again. Jaguar and Porsche vehicles claimed four of the top five times in each of the three test sessions, including quick laps from the Envision team that runs Jaguar powertrains.
Jaguar’s Mitch Evans posted the fastest time of the week, notching a 1m24.474s mark that was over half a second quicker than the fastest lap in last year’s test. Evans, who finished third in the driver’s championship in Season nine, also topped the times in the second session. New teammate Nick Cassidy, who finished second in the championship last season while driving for Envision, kept Evans from sweeping all three sessions with a 1m24.617s in the final running of the week.
Mahindra seems poised to bounce back
Season nine was one to forget for Mahindra. The team that’s been in Formula E since the series began finished 10th out of 11. Significant offseason changes include an all-new driver pairing of Edoardo Mortara and Season seven champ Nyck De Vries. Mortara was fifth fastest in the first session of the week while De Vries posted the third best time in session two. Mahindra was hampered by the battery fire as it suffered damage to its equipment and both cars, but both drivers showed great pace at different points during the week.
The driver’s championship should be close again
19 of the 21 drivers set lap times within 0.7 seconds of each other during the last session of the week. Sure, that’s one-lap pace as opposed to managing all of the nuances of a Formula E race (like energy consumption and regeneration), but it’s clear the drivers are learning how to unlock the potential of the Gen3 cars. Last year, for example, teams were grappling with new cars and new tires, having to figure out the optimal performance for a harder Hankook compound. | Autoracing |
CNN — George Russell won his maiden Grand Prix on Sunday after a collision-ridden race in Brazil. Russell, who won Saturday’s sprint race to start on pole, led from the opening lap, showing why he’s seen as one of Formula 1’s most exciting prospects. Behind him though, a crazy race was unfolding with crashes from the opening lap, including a coming together between rivals Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, for which Verstappen earned a five-second time penalty. At the end of all the drama, it was a Mercedes one-two with Hamilton finishing second behind Russell and Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz third. With one race left on the 2022 calendar, Russell moves up to fourth in the driver’s standings, a place ahead of eight-time world champion and teammate Hamilton. “What an amazing feeling. A huge thank you to the whole team for making this possible,” Russell said afterwards. “It’s been an emotional rollercoaster this season. “This race, I felt in control. Lewis was super-fast, and when I saw the safety car, I thought: ‘Oh Jesus, this is going to be a really difficult end.’ He put me under so much pressure. But so happy to go away with the victory. “I’m speechless, on the in-lap, all of these memories sort of come flooding back, starting off with my mum and dad in go-karting, and going through all the support I’ve had from the rest of my family, my girlfriend, my trainer, my manager. I can’t thank them enough. Yeah, super proud.” The race began with some dramatic, collision-ridden first few laps at the Autódromo José Carlos Pace. First, Daniel Ricciardo crashed into the back of Kevin Magnussen, with both drivers ruled out for the rest of the race as a result of the damage suffered. After the restart following the safety car, all hell broke loose. Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen collided shortly after, both spinning out. Hamilton was able to continue without pitting whereas Verstappen was forced to pit before returning to the race near the back of the pack. “That was no racing incident mate,” Hamilton could be heard saying on his team radio. Minutes later, it was announced that Verstappen had been handed a five-second time penalty for causing a collision. The Dutch driver couldn’t hide his incredulity when he was told of the outcome of the investigation. “Where did they expect me to go?” he said. Elsewhere, McLaren driver Lando Norris collided with Charles Leclerc, slamming the Ferrari driver into the barriers. Leclerc was forced to pit to change his front wing, while Norris was also handed out a five-second penalty for his involvement in the crash. For Russell, who began the race on pole, he remained unscathed during the early laps and managed to maintain his lead for the rest of the way in front of the chasing pack. Even with a late safety car bunching the pack up, Russell was faster than his more experienced teammate Hamilton, racing home for his first ever Grand Prix victory. The victory at the 2022 season’s penultimate race continues Mercedes’ late year resurgence after a very slow start. | Autoracing |
410 Hp from 2-Liter Displacement – Prototype of the H₂-ICE Race Engine from AVL RACETECH Proves Itself on the Testbed
The motorsport department of AVL is celebrating the next milestone on the road to a zero-emission future of motorsport. The prototype of a hydrogen-powered, two-liter turbo engine – built by AVL RACETECH – was put through its paces on the testbed and confirmed the top values calculated previously in simulations: with a specific power density around 205 hp per liter (150 kW per liter), the engine achieves a highly competitive level in the world of motorsport. This is made possible by, among other things, an intelligent PFI water injection to moderate combustion.
Graz, Austria, October 2023: Up until now, hydrogen combustion engines (H₂-ICE) have been somewhat renowned for low performance figures and lean-burn. AVL RACETECH is banishing that “preconception”. Over the past few months, the motorsport department at AVL has developed an innovative H₂ racing engine in cooperation with the Hungarian HUMDA Lab. For AVL RACETECH it is the first race engine under its own name. On one of the engine testbeds modified for the use of hydrogen at the AVL headquarters in Graz, a prototype of the hydrogen-powered, two-liter turbo engine achieved a top figure of 410 hp (301.7 kW) with an engine speed of 6,500 rpm. The engine generates 500 Nm of torque at 3000 - 4000 rpm, that corresponds with a mean pressure (BMEP) of 32 bar.
The features include an intelligent PFI water injection, which injects additional water into the engine’s intake air, in order to avoid unwanted premature ignition, which can damage the engine. The air-fuel ratio (lambda) is 1 (stoichiometric combustion), meaning it is no longer in the lean range. The air demand, which is lower than with lean combustion, is covered by using a wastegate turbocharger designed specifically for that purpose.
AVL had performed detailed simulations in advance, which displayed an excellent correlation with the results recorded on the testbed. The next milestone in the development is to test the new engine concept in a car on the racetrack.
Project leader Paul Kapus, Manager Development Spark Ignited Engines: “At the end of 2022, we announced for the first time that we would be working on a two-liter, hydrogen-powered racing engine with stoichiometric combustion and PFI water injection. Our goals were 500 Nm of torque and an output of up to 300 kW (specific output 150 kW/l). We are proud to have been able to validate those figures on the testbed.”
Ellen Lohr, Director Motorsport AVL: “The results achieved by our H₂ racing engine confirm that we are able to deliver an extremely competitive package with this technology. The goal of AVL RACETECH is to lead motorsport into a sustainable future. With the development of the first racing engine developed under our own name – a high-performance H₂-ICE – we have taken another step closer to achieving this vision.”
With more than 11,200 employees, AVL is one of the world’s leading mobility technology companies for development, simulation and testing in the automotive industry, and beyond. Drawing on its pioneering spirit, the company provides concepts, solutions and methodologies for a greener, safer and better world of mobility.
From ideation phase to serial production, the company covers vehicle architectures and platform solutions including the impact of new propulsion systems and energy carriers. As a global technology provider, AVL’s offerings range from simulation, virtualization and test automation for product development to ADAS/AD and vehicle software. The company combines state-of-the-art and highly scalable IT, software and technology solutions with its application know-how, thereby offering customers extensive tools in areas such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity or Embedded Systems.
AVL's passion is innovation. Together with an international network of experts at more than 90 locations and with 45 Tech and Engineering Centers worldwide, AVL is supporting customers in their mobility ambitions. In 2022, the company generated a turnover of 1.86 billion Euros, of which 11 % are invested in R&D activities to ensure continuous innovation.
Contact AVL
Markus Tomaschitz, Company Spokesman
E-mail: [email protected]
AVL RACETECH, is the global motorsport division of AVL. For more than 20 years, AVL RACETECH works with customers in more than 17 racing series across the globe in the fields of engineering, testing, simulation and manufacturing. It is a key supplier for teams in the most respected racing series, from Formula 1 and NASCAR to MotoGP, and provides state-of-the-art technology and services to the motorsport world. AVL RACETECH views motorsport as a platform for innovations. We transform our team's expertise into technologies and solutions to `innovate-accelerate-lead`.
For more information: www.avlracetech.com
Contact
Verena Jorde, Marketing & Communication AVL RACETECH
E-mail: [email protected]
Our mission: HUMDA Lab aims to be an incubator and leading organization for the Hungarian national motorsport research and development activities. Our story: We established the Lab in 2021 as a nonprofit organization focusing on scientific research, knowledge transfer, as well as high-tech and infrastructural developments in motorsports (and in a broader sense in mobility and automotive industry). In 2023 we became a subsidiary of Széchenyi István University Foundation, the managing authority of the University in the city of Győr, Hungary. Our headquarter is in Budapest with a branch office in Zalaegerszeg and Győr. We are a dedicated team of researchers, automotive system engineers, motorsport professionals, software developers and project managers with strong passion for racing.
M&H, based in Ilz, Styria, is counted among the international innovation leaders in the field of additive manufacturing. M&H's competencies include consulting, engineering, as well as 3D metal printing and finishing of complex high-end components. To achieve this, the 30-member, internationally successful niche player also leverages its long-standing expertise in conventional turning and milling processes. M&H is in demand as a partner in international motorsports, as well as in the aviation, mobility, and hydropower industries. "We excel from prototyping to serial production," explains M&H CEO Patrick Herzig.
VENTREX is a global leader in automotive valve solutions, designing and producing multiple types of valves and electronic pressure regulators for alternative powertrain systems and cooling circuits. Committed to create solutions that improve safety, efficiency, comfort and environmental footprint, we partner with our customers around the world to help them stay at the forefront of automotive innovation and shape the next generation of mobility.
As an engineering firm with affiliated manufacturing, WEISSGERBER engineering GmbH develops and produces metrological components and devices, as well as ignition technology for spark-ignited combustion engines, in close contact with the customer. High production depth allows the company to react quickly to customer requests and requirements. The core competencies include the development and small-scale production of components and devices for pulse and high-voltage technology, to be used under extreme environmental conditions.
75 years of AVL: International Guests from Politics, Economy and Culture Congratulate on Anniversary at Headquarters in Graz, Austria
The vehicle diagnostics and measurement technology specialist achieved first place at the Styrian ALC awards in the Big Player category
Hydrogen-powered, high-performance, two-liter turbo engine
AVL delivers Simulation- and Test Systems for new Battery Test Center
Be up-to-date with our latest press releases concerning company updates, research projects, our latest developments, and more.
Download our fact sheet to get a comprehensive overview about what we do as well as our latest company figures. | Autoracing |
Sao Paulo Grand Prix Sprint results
Max Verstappen (1), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
Lando Norris (4), McLaren-Mercedes
Sergio Perez (11), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
George Russell (63), Mercedes
Charles Leclerc (16), Ferrari
Yuki Tsunoda (22), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Lewis Hamilton (44), Mercedes
Carlos Sainz (55), Ferrari
Daniel Ricciardo (3), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Oscar Piastri (81), McLaren-Mercedes
Fernando Alonso (14), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Lance Stroll (18), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Pierre Gasly (10), Alpine-Renault
Esteban Ocon (31), Alpine-Renault
Alexander Albon (23), Williams-Mercedes
Kevin Magnussen (20), Haas-Ferrari
Nico Hülkenberg, (27), Haas-Ferrari
Zhou Guanyu (24), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Valtteri Bottas (77), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Logan Sargeant (2), Williams-Mercedes
Formula 1 concludes its lone triple-header of the 2023 season this weekend in Brazil with the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.
Interlagos and the Autódromo José Carlos Pace are a favorite of drivers and fans alike for its unique twisting layout, elevation changes and propensity to deliver memorable and thrilling moments. Just last year, Kevin Magnussen won his maiden pole (albeit, yes, it was aided by weather) and George Russell won his first F1 Grand Prix.
Here’s what to know ahead of Sao Paulo Grand Prix:
Sao Paulo Grand Prix TV/streaming schedule
All times Eastern
Friday
10:25-11:30 a.m.: Free practice 1 (ESPN2, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
1:55-3 p.m.: Qualifying (ESPN2, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
Saturday
9:55-11 a.m.: Sprint Shootout (ESPN2, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
2:25-3:30 p.m.: Sprint (ESPNNews, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
Sunday
10:30-11:55 a.m.: Pre-race show (ESPNNews, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
11:55 a.m.-2 p.m.: Sao Paulo Grand Prix (ESPN, ESPN+, F1 TV Pro)
Sao Paulo Grand Prix details
Track: Autódromo José Carlos Pace (Interlagos) | 2.677-mile, 15-turn permanent racing facility in Sao Paulo
Race length: 71 laps
Lap record: 1:10.540 (Valtteri Bottas, 2018, Mercedes)
Tire compounds: Hard (C4), Medium (C3), Soft (C2)
2022 winner: George Russell, Mercedes
— Pirelli Motorsport (@pirellisport) October 31, 2023
Final sprint weekend of 2023
In 2021, F1 introduced the Sprint weekend format, which moved traditional qualifying to Friday and put in its place a shortened race that would award minimal points and set the grid for Sunday’s Grand Prix. A few nominal tweaks later, we have our current format for the 2023 season, which effectively makes Saturday more like an exhibition. This weekend marks the sixth and final sprint format weekends of 2023.
Sprint Shootout is here! 🍿
Imagine qualifying, but even quicker. Every lap counts as Saturday's Sprint Shootout sets the grid for the #F1Sprint
Leaving Sunday's Grand Prix unaffected 🔒 pic.twitter.com/oTVrJIuLvl
— Formula 1 (@F1) April 25, 2023
The 2023 format ditches the lame-duck Saturday morning practice session in favor of a quicker version of the traditional three-stage knockout qualifying format to set the grid for the sprint race later in the day. The top eight finishers of the sprint will be awarded points in descending order (eight for P1, seven for P2, six for P3, etc.).
Sao Paulo Grand Prix qualifying results
Max Verstappen (1), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
Charles Leclerc (16), Ferrari
Lance Stroll (18), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Fernando Alonso (14), Aston Martin-Mercedes
Lewis Hamilton (44), Mercedes
George Russell (63), Mercedes
Lando Norris (4), McLaren-Mercedes
Carlos Sainz (55), Ferrari
Sergio Perez (11), Red Bull-Honda RBPT
Oscar Piastri (81), McLaren-Mercedes
Nico Hülkenberg, (27), Haas-Ferrari
Esteban Ocon (31), Alpine-Renault
Pierre Gasly (10), Alpine-Renault
Kevin Magnussen (20), Haas-Ferrari
Alexander Albon (23), Williams-Mercedes
Yuki Tsunoda (22), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Daniel Ricciardo (3), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT
Valtteri Bottas (77), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Logan Sargeant (2), Williams-Mercedes
Zhou Guanyu (24), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari
Top drivers and best bets for the Sao Paulo Grand Prix
Max Verstappen has already broken his own record for wins in a single season and enters Interlagos again a massive favorite according to BetMGM, entering the weekend with a -300 moneyline. The next-best odds belong to Lewis Hamilton at 7-to-1. Lando Norris is the only other driver with 12-to-1 odds or better entering the weekend.
Best odds to win
• Max Verstappen -300
• Lewis Hamilton +700
• Lando Norris +1200
Yahoo Sports’ Nick Bromberg wrote yesterday on the betting market and, in addition to backing Verstappen for the race win, also likes George Russell to finish ahead of Charles Leclerc (-120) and Verstappen and Hamilton to finish in the top two (+165).
2023 F1 drivers' standings
1. Max Verstappen (1), Red Bull-Honda RBPT – 491*
2. Sergio Perez (11), Red Bull-Honda RBPT – 240
3. Lewis Hamilton (44), Mercedes – 220
4. Carlos Sainz (55), Ferrari – 183
5. Fernando Alonso (14), Aston Martin-Mercedes – 183
6. Lando Norris (4), McLaren-Mercedes – 169
7. Charles Leclerc (16), Ferrari – 166
8. George Russell (63), Mercedes – 151
9. Oscar Piastri (81), McLaren-Mercedes – 87
10. Pierre Gasly (10), Alpine-Renault – 56
11. Lance Stroll (18), Aston Martin-Mercedes – 53
12. Esteban Ocon (31), Alpine-Renault – 45
13. Alexander Albon (23), Williams-Mercedes – 27
14. Valtteri Bottas (77), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari – 10
15. Nico Hülkenberg, (27), Haas-Ferrari – 9
16. Daniel Ricciardo (3), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 6
17. Zhou Guanyu (24), Alfa Romeo-Ferrari – 6
18. Yuki Tsunoda (22), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 8
19. Kevin Magnussen (20), Haas-Ferrari – 3
20. Liam Lawson (40), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 2
21. Logan Sargeant (2), Williams-Mercedes – 1
22. Nyck De Vries (21), AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT – 0
* — Clinched world championship
Sao Paulo Grand Prix weather
While race day appears clear there is a 51% chance of rain forecast for qualifying and sprint days, with possible thunderstorms Friday. Wet conditions typically influence Sao Paulo race weekends; even if rain doesn’t fall, teams are monitoring the radar as much as they are the timing screens. | Autoracing |
China is set to return to the Formula 1 calendar for the first time since the pandemic in a major revision of the schedule for 2024.
The season starts with races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to be held on Saturdays, because of the impact of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
In the quest for greater sustainability, the Japanese race moves to 7 April from its usual autumn date.
And Azerbaijan will be twinned with Singapore in September.
The calendar features what would be a record 24 races - exactly the same number as were due to be held this year before the cancellation of the Chinese and Emilia-Romagna Grands Prix.
Earlier this year, Australian Grand Prix organisers announced that Saudi Arabia would hold the opening race of the 2024 season.
But F1 has found a way to fit both Bahrain and Jeddah in before Melbourne by making the Middle Eastern events Saturday night races. Ramadan starts on the evening of 10 March, the day after the Saudi event.
China was due to return this year but had to be cancelled because of the uncertainty over the Covid situation in the country at the start of the year, when there were riots as a result of continued social restrictions. These have now been lifted.
The move towards greater regionalisation - which is an attempt to reduce carbon emissions from flights as F1 strives to become net-zero carbon by 2030 - has been partly stymied by Canadian organisers resisting F1's attempts to twin the Montreal race with Miami in May.
Instead, the Canadian Grand Prix retains its traditional June date, forcing teams to fly across the Atlantic twice in just over a month.
F1 chairman Stefano Domenicali said: "Our journey to a more sustainable calendar will continue in the coming years as we further streamline operations as part of our Net Zero 2030 commitment."
FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem added: "We want to make the global spectacle of Formula 1 more efficient in terms of environmental sustainability and more manageable for the travelling staff who dedicate so much of their time to our sport."
Pre-season testing is due to be held in Bahrain on 21-23 February but those dates are still subject to approval from the FIA world motorsport council.
Full 2024 F1 calendar
29 February - 2 March - Bahrain
7-9 March - Saudi Arabia
22-24 March - Australia
5-7 April - Japan
19-21 April - China
3-5 May - Miami
17-19 May - Emilia-Romagna
24-26 May - Monaco
7-9 June - Canada
21-23 June - Spain
28-30 June - Austria
5-7 July - United Kingdom
19-21 July - Hungary
26-28 July - Belgium
23-25 August - Netherlands
30 August - 1 September - Italy
13-15 September - Azerbaijan
20-22 September - Singapore
18-20 October - USA (Austin)
25-27 October - Mexico City
1-3 November - Brazil
21-23 November - Las Vegas
29 November - 1 December - Qatar
6-8 December - Abu Dhabi
- A gripping twist on a classic cat-and-mouse story: Watch all episodes of We Hunt Together on BBC iPlayer
- On-court legends and off-court revolutionaries: Meet the most iconic tennis players of the 1970s and 1980s | Autoracing |
By Olivia Le PoidevinNewsbeat ReporterImage source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Incredibly, Zhou Guanyu walked away from the crash without any serious injuriesTom Cruise was at the British Grand Prix this weekend and the action on the track looked like something from one of his films.F1 driver Zhou Guanyu's car flipped several times at almost 200mph and smashed into a grandstand barrier during the first lap at Silverstone. Incredibly, the Alfa Romeo driver survived and wasn't even seriously injured.He says he is the latest in a series of drivers to be saved by the halo safety device. But what is it and how does it work?What is halo?Halo is a wishbone-shaped titanium bar that sits on top of the cockpit of the car and wraps around the driver's head.It's designed to sustain the weight of a London double-decker bus - the equivalent of 12 tonnes balancing on a 7kg carbon fibre covered frame.When and why was it introduced?F1 has always been a dangerous sport but over recent years safety has been taken more seriously following the deaths of Henry Surtees in a Formula 2 race in 2009, Jules Bianchi at the 2014 F1 Japanese Grand Prix and Justin Wilson at an IndyCar event in 2015. Surtees and Wilson were killed after being struck on the head by debris from other cars.Halo was first trialled in F1 in 2016 before it became mandatory in the sport two years later in 2018 to protect drivers' heads from flying debris or the car flipping.After years of research it was found to be the only device that successfully passed the test of deflecting a wheel fired at it at 150mph.Also, crucially for drivers, it also was the only safety device that provided a largely unobstructed view. From initial resistance to supportIt took some years for halo to be introduced as many opposed it, including then-F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone. "People weren't happy with the aesthetics of it. People didn't like that there was a great big bar over the driver's head," F1 commentator Harry Benjamin tells Radio 1 Newsbeat. "The other argument was whether it was affecting the driver's visibility, looking out of the cockpit. Both have been disproven. Over the last few years people have got used to it."In 2016, Lewis Hamilton called it the "worst-looking modification" in the sport's history.And in February 2018, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said he would take a chainsaw to the halo if he could. But a few years later Hamilton said it had saved his life in his crash at the Italian Grand Prix in 2021. Image source, PA MediaImage caption, Zhou Guanyu said he was saved by the halo safety deviceAnalysisBy Andrew Benson, chief F1 writerThe halo head-protection device has been one of the single biggest success stories of Formula 1's constant quest to improve safety since the death of Ayrton Senna in 1994.It faced opposition from people who felt it might undermine the essence of the sport as an open-cockpit series - including a minority of drivers.But it quickly proved its worth when it was introduced in 2018, following a campaign by the late FIA F1 director Charlie Whiting and the Grand Prix Drivers' Association.In a multi-car pile-up at the 2018 Belgian Grand Prix, the halo deflected Fernando Alonso's flying McLaren away from Sauber driver Charles Leclerc's head.Since then, there have been at least three other incidents in which it has apparently saved a driver's life, most famously in preventing Romain Grosjean from being decapitated when his Haas pierced a barrier in his fiery crash in Bahrain in 2020.Alfa Romeo's Zhou Guanyu in Sunday's British Grand Prix was just the most recent example - and he almost certainly won't be the last.Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here. | Autoracing |
Fernando Alonso will participate in the Abu Dhabi tire tests, which will take place on November 22, with his new team. Fernando Alonso is in his last weeks as a driver for the Alpine Formula 1 team. The Asturian driver, who will compete with Aston Martin next season, will join the British team in just three weeks (November 22) to make his first test with the AMR22 , this year’s single-seater, in Abu Dhabi. The two-time world champion, who yesterday in Mexico added his fifth retirement of the year after a new mechanical problem in his Alpine A522 , has received the OK from his still team to be able to participate in training with Aston Martin. These tests will be dedicated to the 2023 tire test and for Alonso they will be important in order to have a first contact with his team. According to the British magazine ‘Autosport’, Alonso is expected to participate in half a day of testing at the wheel of the Aston Martin, while the rest of the work will be carried out by his future partner, Lance Stroll. In February, Alonso would once again get on the Aston Martin AMR22 to participate in the Pirelli tests, before the presentation of the new car for 2023, which is expected to be unveiled just before the start of the only pre-season tests next year, which They will take place a week before the Bahrain GP. Relief at the start of a new adventure with Aston Martin “There are only two left…”, Fernando Alonso breathed a sigh of relief , after getting off the Alpine A522 at the end of the Mexican Grand Prix , where he scored his fifth retirement of the season, after suffering a new mechanical problem in his car. The Spaniard was in seventh position and was the ‘leader of the rest’, only behind Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari. After a season with so many problems, mistakes on the Alpine wall and ‘lack of affection’ to which the driver himself has referred, Alonso is looking forward to starting his new adventure next year as an Aston Martin driver . At 41 years old, the man from Oviedo maintains the illusion of the first day. Alongside him, also in the Abu Dhabi tests, some drivers with their new 2023 teams are expected to participate, such as Pierre Gasly with Alpine or Nyck de Vries with AlphaTauri. Logan Sargeant will also ride with Williams, with whom he is expected to make his F1 debut next year. Continue Reading | Autoracing |
Dietrich Mateschitz (left) congratulated Max Verstappen at the Austrian Grand Prix in 2018Red Bull co-owner Dietrich Mateschitz, a major global business figure as a result of his energy drinks empire, has died aged 78.Mateschitz was the driving force behind the establishment of what became the global market leader in energy drinks.He used the fortune created by that to set up a Formula 1 team that has become one of the leading forces in the sport."It's very, very sad, what a great man," said Red Bull's team principal Christian Horner."What he achieved and what he has done for so many people, around the world in different sports, is second to none."Speaking to Sky Sports before qualifying at the US Grand Prix on Saturday, moments after Mateschitz's death was announced, Horner said his team was determined to "do our best for him" in qualifying and in Sunday's race."So many of us have to be so grateful to him for the opportunities he provided and the vision that he had, the strength of character and never being afraid to chase your dreams."That's what he did here in Formula 1, proving that you can make a difference. We're just incredibly grateful."Horner said that "thankfully" Mateschitz got to see Red Bull's Max Verstappen clinch his second consecutive world title when the Dutch driver won the Japanese Grand Prix two weeks ago."He was very proud of the team," added Horner.Mateschitz's death is not thought to threaten the future of Red Bull or its sister team Alpha Tauri.From salesman to founder of $25bn drinks giantAustrian Mateschitz was a salesman for consumer goods company Procter & Gamble when he discovered Krating Daeng, the drink that would become Red Bull, on his travels in Thailand.In 1984, he founded Red Bull with the drink's founder, Thai Chaleo Yoovidhya, and launched the Red Bull brand in 1987, eventually turning it into the world's biggest energy drink and making himself a fortune estimated at $25bn.He began to associate the brand with extreme sports such as surfing, cliff diving, winter sports and mountain biking, and Red Bull became involved as a sponsor in many of them.His involvement in F1 began with the Swiss-based Sauber team, of which Red Bull became a 60% shareholder, before the two parted company following a row over driver choice - Sauber signed the inexperienced Finn Kimi Raikkonen for his debut season in 2001, when Mateschitz wanted him to pick Red Bull protege Enrique Bernoldi.Three years later, Red Bull bought the failing Jaguar team from owner Ford and renamed it, employed ex-Formula 2 driver Christian Horner as team principal and signed the sport's leading design engineer Adrian Newey as technical director on a $10m salary.They set about turning Red Bull into a leading force, became the fastest team in F1 by 2009, and won their first drivers' and constructors' titles with the German Sebastian Vettel in 2010, the first of four consecutive championship doubles for the team.Red Bull also extended its sporting interests into football, buying teams in Salzburg, the city closest to Mateschitz's home in Fuschl am See in Austria, and Leipzig in Germany, as well as what was the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, Campinas in Brazil, founding a club in Ghana and taking over an ice hockey team in Munich.Red Bull forged a reputation for combining Newey's design genius and competitiveness with a ruthless, combative attitude to all areas of the sport, from exploiting technical grey areas, taking an abrasive approach to rule-makers and rivals and revelling in the role of disruptors.The advent of turbo-hybrid engines in 2014 brought their domination to a juddering halt, as Mercedes began their own period of command.Red Bull continued to produce competitive cars, but were held back by their Renault engines. In the meantime, they were laying the foundations for their return to the front.Mateschitz's right-hand man in motorsport, Helmut Marko, signed up Verstappen in 2014 midway through his first season in car racing, and made him the youngest driver to take part in a grand prix weekend when he was handed a Toro Rosso for first practice at the Japanese Grand Prix, aged 17 years and three days.Verstappen was signed for the Toro Rosso team - the former name of Alpha Tauri, which is now named for a group fashion brand - in 2015 and by the fifth race of 2016 was promoted to Red Bull, winning at the Spanish Grand Prix on his debut for the senior team.After abandoning their engine partnership with Renault and joining forces with Honda in 2019, Red Bull became increasingly competitive, and in 2021 had their first absolutely competitive car since 2013.Verstappen used it against Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton in one of the most intense title battles in F1 history, the Red Bull driver eventually being declared champion after a controversial finale in which he won the race, passing Hamilton, after the FIA race director failed to follow the rules correctly during a late safety-car period.With the advent of new rules in 2022, Red Bull emerged as the dominant team, culminating in Verstappen's commanding charge to a second world title.Throughout his involvement in F1, Mateschitz, although a reclusive figure who rarely gave interviews, emerged as one of the sport's most significant power-brokers.At the same time, he used his fortune to help regenerate his native area of Styria in Austria, promoting local crafts and arts. He also set up the Wings For Life charity in aid of spinal cord research.He carved a significant legacy in motorsport and global business. But his passing inevitably leaves long-term question marks hanging over all aspects of the business, even if Chalerm Yoovidhya, the eldest son of Chaleo and believed to be the Red Bull majority shareholder all along, is said to be an F1 enthusiast. | Autoracing |
Hollywood heartthrob Ryan Reynolds and fellow thespian Rob McElhenney are beefing up their burgeoning business portfolio with a foray into the world of Formula 1 racing.
The Canadian actor’s investment firm, Maximum Effort Investments, is joining private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners and Otro Capital to acquire a 24% stake in the Alpine Formula 1 Race Team.
French automotive company Renault Group — Alpine’s parent company — announced the transaction on Monday.
“The transaction values Alpine Racing Ltd. around $900 million following this investment,” the team said in a statement.
“It will accelerate Alpine’s growth plans and sporting ambitions in F1.”
Other investors include actor Michael B. Jordan.
With drivers Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon, Alpine stands fifth in the constructors’ championship.
The team was fourth in the constructors’ standings last year and has been struggling in its goal to close the gap on Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes this season.
Renault said the investors have an expertise in the sports industry, having previously worked with the Dallas Cowboys, Fenway Sports Group, the NFL, French soccer club Toulouse and Wrexham.
Renault said Alpine Racing SAS, the entity manufacturing F1 engines in France, is not part of the transaction and will remain entirely owned by Renault Group.
Reynolds is best known for starring in the “Deadpool” movies, while McElhenney is the creator of TV show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
Reynolds and McElhenney completed a $2.5 million takeover of Welsh soccer team Wrexham in November 2020.
The club was thrust into the global spotlight because of its A-list owners and secured promotion to the fourth tier of English soccer this season.
One of their stated aims when buying Wrexham from the club’s fans was to lead the 158-year-old club — the world’s third oldest professional club — to the Premier League and the journey is well underway.
With Post wires | Autoracing |
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! It was a triumph for safety technology.Alfa Romeo Formula One driver Zhou Guanyu was spared serious injury thanks to the Halo device projecting the cockpit when his car flipped over during the British Grand Prix.The Halo was instituted during the 2018 season. It comprises a hoop above the driver's head and a post directly in front of them, which is both a support and a means of deflecting debris approaching the car at high speed.Zhou was entering turn one of the Silverstone Circuit at the start of the race when he was clipped from behind by Mercedes-Benz driver George Russell, who had made contact with Alpha Tauri driver Pierre Gasly at approximately 140 mph. Zhou's Alfa Romeo was flipped entering the first turn of the British Grand Prix. (Gongora/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Zhou's Alfa Romeo was turned and flipped upside down and proceeded to skid down the straight and across the gravel trap before hitting the safety barrier and flipping over it into the catch fence.TOM CRUISE CELEBRATE'S 60TH BIRTHDAY AT BRITISH GRAND PRIX Zhou's car skidded down the track on its top. (Gongora/NurPhoto via Getty Images)The car then landed propped up on its side between the barrier and fence, causing the race to be red flagged and a lengthy delay before Zhou was extracted from the car. Zhou's car became stuck between the safety barrier and the catch fence. (Dan Mullan - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)Close-up images of the incident show how the Halo managed to keep Zhou's head from being pressed against the road, despite an apparent failure of the car's roll hoop above it, which is meant to be the primary means of protection in a rollover incident.THE MERCEDES-AMG ONE IS A $2.7 MILLION F1 CAR FOR THE ROAD The Halo protected Zhou's head despite the apparent failure of the vehicle's roll hoop. (Vince Mignott/MB Media/Getty Images)In a show of sportsmanship, Russell got out of his car and ran to Zhou to see if he could help the stewards and later called it "one of the scariest crashes I’ve ever seen." Fellow driver George Russell ran to Zhou's car to see if he could help the stewards. (MATT DUNHAM/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)Zhou was taken to the hospital as a precautionary measure, but amazingly suffered no injuries in the crash.He is not the first driver to be saved by the device.During last season's Italian Grand Prix, Red Bull's Max Verstappen and Mercedes-AMG's Lewis Hamilton were fighting for the lead when their cars came into contact and launched Verstappen's on top of Hamilton's.The Halo kept Hamilton's head from being crushed by Verstappen's rear tire as it rolled over the cockpit. Lewis Hamilton's head was protected by his car's Halo. (ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images)"Thank God for the halo. That ultimately saved me. And saved my neck. I think in the actual moment it was a big hit, but all I could think was to get going again," Hamilton said.IndyCar added a similar device it calls the Aeroscreen to its cars in 2020, that adds a polycarbonate windshield for extra protection, especially on the high speed ovals the series races on. Callum Illott was protected by his car's Aeroscreen. (IndyCar)Its effectiveness was dramatically demonstrated during practice for this year's race at Texas Motor Speedway, when Callum Ilott's car was struck by a suspension pushrod that had fallen off a car that crashed in front of his.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPSeveral other top open-cockpit series have also incorporated the Halo, including Formula E, Formula 2 and the all-female W Series.Russell was not allowed to re-enter the race for the restart because he had gotten out of his car, and the car was towed to pit lane. His teammate Lewis Hamilton finished third in the race, behind Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz in first and Red Bull's Sergio Perez in second. Gary Gastelu is FoxNews.com's Automotive Editor covering the car industry and racing @foxnewsautos | Autoracing |
Formula One’s calendar for 2023 has been announced with a record number of 24 races, the maximum allowed under the current commercial agreement with the teams. The schedule was approved by a meeting of the FIA’s world motor sport council on Tuesday.This year F1 is to host 22 races but with new meetings being added as the sport enjoys a surge in popularity across the world, it will attempt to hold the most extensive season in the sport’s history in 2023.The number of races will push F1 team personnel to the limit. July alone will feature four races across two double headers, with four further pairs of back-to-back races to come in its wake.In August the Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner, described 24 races as “right on the limit” of what could be asked of teams. The F1 CEO, Stefano Domenicali, also said this year he believed the number was as high as the sport should go.“Around 24 grands prix, 23, 24 maximum,” he said. “I don’t want to discuss any more than that number because then we have the problem of devaluation of [events].”The season will open in Bahrain on 5 March and will conclude in Abu Dhabi on 26 November, while the British GP will be held on 9 July. New meetings in Las Vegas and Qatar are confirmed as is the Monaco GP, whose future had been considered to be under threat, on 28 May as part of the only triple-header of the season after the Emilia Romagna GP and before the Spanish GP. F1 have also confirmed a new deal with Monaco to run until 2025. Quick GuideF1 calendar 2023Show5 March - Bahrain Grand Prix, Sakhir19 March - Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Jeddah2 April - Australian Grand Prix, Albert Park16 April - Chinese Grand Prix, Shanghai30 April - Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Baku7 May - Miami Grand Prix, Miami21 May - Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, Imola28 May - Monaco Grand Prix, Monte Carlo4 June - Spanish Grand Prix, Barcelona18 June - Canadian Grand Prix, Montreal2 July - Austrian Grand Prix, Spielberg9 July - British Grand Prix, Silverstone23 July - Hungarian Grand Prix, Hungaroring30 July - Belgian Grand Prix, Spa-Francorchamps27 August - Dutch Grand Prix, Zandvoort3 September - Italian Grand Prix, Monza17 September - Singapore Grand Prix, Marina Bay24 September - Japanese Grand Prix, Suzuka8 October - Qatar Grand Prix, Losail22 October - United States Grand Prix, Austin29 October - Mexico City Grand Prix, Mexico City5 November - Sao Paulo Grand Prix, Interlagos18 November - Las Vegas Grand Prix, Las Vegas26 November - Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Yas MarinaThe US will host three races, in Austin, Miami and Las Vegas, with the latter forming a double-header with the season finale in Abu Dhabi.As expected the proposed meeting in South Africa was not included but China has returned with a date scheduled for 16 April. That meeting remains subject to the Covid restrictions imposed in the country however and its position early in the schedule suggests if it is cancelled it could be replaced later in the year.The Belgian GP at Spa, also considered to be under threat, retained its place on 30 July but as expected the French GP is no longer featured. There is also no clash with the Le Mans 24 Hours which will take place on 10-11 June between the Spanish and Canadian GPs.Quick GuideHow do I sign up for sport breaking news alerts?ShowDownload the Guardian app from the iOS App Store on iPhones or the Google Play store on Android phones by searching for 'The Guardian'.If you already have the Guardian app, make sure you’re on the most recent version.In the Guardian app, tap the yellow button at the bottom right, then go to Settings (the gear icon), then Notifications.Turn on sport notifications.Despite strong opposition and criticism from human rights groups and some drivers the Saudi Arabian GP remains on the calendar.Domenicali welcomed the record breaking schedule. “Formula 1 has unprecedented demand to host races and it is important we get the balance right for the entire sport,” he said. “We are very pleased with the strong momentum Formula 1 continues to experience.” | Autoracing |
The Singapore Grand Prix is live on 5 Live and the BBC Sport websiteRed Bull have described as "speculation" claims they breached Formula 1's budget cap last season.Formula 1's governing body is said to be preparing to announce that two teams, Red Bull and Aston Martin, exceeded last year's $145m (£114m) cap.Red Bull's Christian Horner told BBC Sport it was "purely speculation".Aston Martin, the other team linked with a breach, said they were "in discussion with the FIA and awaiting certification".Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff told BBC Sport: "The cost cap is probably the most important evolution of regulations to keep a level playing field to allow teams that haven't got the full budget to catch up and to put a ceiling on the spending of the top teams. "It is of huge importance for a demonstration that these regulations are policed and I have no reason to believe otherwise."The FIA, particularly Mohammed [bin Sulayem, the president], has shown a pretty robust stance on enforcing all kinds of regulations. So if we are talking now about something big, he will show the same integrity and leadership that he has done before."The FIA told the teams this week that they would be issuing certificates of compliance with the 2021 financial regulations - or not - on 5 October.Why Singapore could delay Verstappen title partyHow to follow Singapore GPHamilton fastest in Singapore first practiceA number of teams questioned, when approached by BBC Sport, why the process of ensuring compliance with the budget cap had taken so long.The accusations, if proved to be true, risk exacerbating problems F1 has had with the credibility of the 2021 season and extending them into this year. The claims relate to the 2021 season, when Red Bull's Max Verstappen clinched his maiden title from Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton after a controversial end to the season in which FIA race director Michael Masi failed to implement the rules correctly during a late safety-car period.But the budget teams spend during a season also includes their development for the following year's car, so any breach would have had an impact on a team's performance in 2022.And if a team is found in breach in 2021, it is likely to have an impact going forward - they are likely to have used the same methodology to assess costs and spending in 2022, so could be in breach this year, too; and this would have an impact on 2023 car development.The budget cap was introduced as part of a swinging set of regulation changes aimed at closing up the field and making the racing in F1 more competitive.This year, Red Bull have dominated the season, helped by a series of errors and failures by Ferrari, and Max Verstappen is poised to clinch his second world title with several races to spare.McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl said: "I don't want to comment on specifics because I don't have any information, but it is clear that in terms of the financial regulations, similar to the technical and sporting regulations, good governance and policing is in place because the integrity of the sport is the most important thing."We have a lot of faith in the new president of the FIA and his team, seeing the rigour with which they investigated the budget cap on our side."We trust them to make the right judgement."It is also important to have proper penalties in place so the cap works as intended."An FIA spokesperson said: "The FIA is currently finalising the assessment of the 2021 financial data submitted by all F1 teams. Alleged breaches of the financial regulations, if any, will be dealt with according to the formal process set out in the regulations."What are the potential penalties?The cost-cap regulations define an overspend of less than 5% as "minor" and more than that as "material".Sanctions for a minor breach can include a deduction of points for the championship in which the breach took place, a suspension from a limited number of events, limitations on research and development and a reduction of the cost cap for the team in question.For a material breach, the possibility of banning a team or driver from an entire championship is included.Teams regard it as an open secret that there has been both a major and a minor breach. At least one team has been given that information direct from the FIA.And there is concern that the FIA will try to reduce the offence to a minor one to limit the damage to the championship.Red Bull and the FIA are known to have been in conversation on the matter of compliance with the budget cap for some time.One senior figure said that breaking the cost cap was analogous to doping as the financial increase involved is directly related to performance.However, there is no expectation within F1 that the results of last year's championship will be changed. But there is serious concern among teams that the championship could be distorted by breaches of the budget cap.Even a minor breach could give a team a significant advantage. A 5% overspend in 2021 would amount to an overspend of $7.25m. This is in the upper reaches of a leading team's annual spend on in-season development, so even a minor breach could amount to the equivalent of effectively an entire season's development.Another way of viewing the figure is that an extra $10m would allow a team to employ a further 100 people, based on a typical top team's average salary figure.The budget cap reduced to $140m in 2022 and is coming down to $135m in 2023. The exchange rate is fixed at $1.2961 to the pound - so the cap is not affected by the recent reduction in the value of sterling.Why did Sala's plane never arrive? Follow the investigation into the fatal crashSue Barker's life on and off the court: Lauren Laverne chats to the legendary tennis player and presenter | Autoracing |
2023 F1 Canadian Grand Prix: Dates, Race Timings In India, Where To Watch, Stats
F1 grid moves to Canada with Verstappen leading the championship battle with 170 points.
The 2023 Canadian Grand Prix is just around the corner, and anticipation is building for what promises to be an exciting race. The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is a challenging track that will test the drivers and cars to the limit, and with the championship battle still wide open, anything could happen on race day.
F1 Canadian Grand Prix 2023: Full schedule, Date, and Timing
Here is the entire Formula 1 weekend schedule for the Canadian Grand Prix. The timings are as per Indian Standard Time.
June 16, Friday
Practice 1: 11 pm to 12 am
June 17, Saturday
Practice 2: 2.30 am to 3.30 am
Practice 3: 10 pm to 11 pm
June 18, Sunday
Qualifying: 1.30 am to 2.30 am
Race: 11.30 pm
F1 Canadian Grand Prix 2023: Where To Watch
The Canadian GP will not be televised In India. However, Indian F1 fans can access the live streaming by subscribing to F1 TV Pro and F1 TV app. Fans will also get the race sessions across the weekend, including support series races on the streaming service and global broadcast feeds. F1 TV Pro app is supported on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and smart TVs.
F1 Canadian Grand Prix 2023: WeatherForecasr
The weather forecast for the Canadian Grand Prix race day on Sunday is for a partly cloudy day with a high of 23 degrees Celsius and a low of 17 degrees Celsius. There is a 30% chance of rain showers in the afternoon. The morning is likely to partly cloudy. Afternoon looks like mostly cloudy while evening will be back to being partly.
F1 Canadian Grand Prix 2023: Statistics
The 2023 Canadian Grand Prix is the ninth round of the 2023 Formula One World Championship. It will be at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The race will be held over 70 laps of the 4.361 kilometre (2.709-mile) circuit.
Last five Canadian GP winners
2022 – Max Verstappen (Red Bull)
2021 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2020 – Max Verstappen (Red Bull)
2019 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
2018 – Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes)
Canadian Grand Prix Vital Stats
First Grand Prix – 1967 (Mosport)
Track Length – 4.361 km
Most pole positions: Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton (6 each)
Most wins – Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton with 7 wins each
Pole run to Turn 1 braking point – 186 metres
Overtakes completed in 2022 – 51
Pit stop time loss – 18.37 seconds | Autoracing |
What is the most important factor to securing success in Formula 1? An eight-season study has offered up an answer.According to experts, a "long-held belief" that the car and the team contribute to 80% of race success with the skill of the driver making up the other 20% - sometimes called the 80-20 rule - is not accurate.
It's actually the interaction between the driver and the team, they said.Lead author Duane Rockerbie, from the University of Lethbridge in Canada, said the findings are "particularly validating for drivers".The professor added: "The car and team's input has been greatly overestimated. "Rather than 80%, it is closer to 20%. The driver's input accounts for roughly 15%.
"The biggest factor is more nuanced and it's the interaction between the driver and the team, which accounts for 30-40%. More on Formula 1 Protesters at British Grand Prix urged not to invade Silverstone track on race day Bernie Ecclestone says he would 'take a bullet' for 'first class' Vladimir Putin as he defends war in Ukraine Formula One to hold night race on Las Vegas strip next year in 'perfect marriage of speed and glamour' "Random factors that occur during the race make up the rest."Our findings are particularly validating for drivers as it shows they do not just drive the cars but also provide valuable input and feedback on the development of the cars."More skilled drivers improve the return to team technology and vice-versa.Read more:'Halo' devices save drivers in Silverstone horror crashes"After all, F1 cars do not drive themselves and drivers cannot ply their trade without an F1 car."The 80-20 rule vastly underestimates the role of the driver, given the critical complementarity between driver and team."They also looked at the variation of driver skill and compared it to how much a team spends on the car.The outcome suggests that although the teams which spend more on their budgets and driver salaries will improve their rank finishes, it's a bit more complicated than that."The return to hiring more driving skill (at an assumedly higher driver salary) is positive, in terms of returning better position finishes, but it diminishes the size of the team budget," says Professor Stephen Easton, co-author and professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University."The return to spending more on the team budget is positive, for finishes, but diminishing in the size of the driver salary. The team with the largest budget outlay overall, therefore, is most likely in the best position to win each season, as they can afford to not diminish the car's performance in exchange for a high-quality driver."This finding is further backed up with the casual evidence: drivers who move to teams with superior cars, and team support, or who are lucky enough to begin their F1 career with these teams, achieve superior results and possibly world championships."The findings, published in the journal Applied Economics, were analysed by Professor Rockerbie and co-author Stephen Easton using statistical modelling and data from the 2012-2019 seasons. | Autoracing |
Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali is downright giddy about the sport's flourishing American fan base. How giddy? A scene in the new season of Netflix’s "Drive to Survive," which premiered Friday, features him singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in his Italian accent.
“I'm pretty convinced we are just scratching the surface of this market. We are just looking into the future,” Domenicali says after having soaked up the crowd for Miami's new race. “I’m very excited.”
A Ferrari engineer is overwhelmed by the fans. “Mamma Mia, what have you done?” he quips to Domenicali. “F------ Super Bowl!”
American interest in Formula 1 is exploding as some of the fastest cars in the world hit the circuit Thursday for 2023 preseason testing ahead of the first race of the season under the lights in Bahrain on March 5. Defending world champion Max Verstappen set the fastest times in the opening sessions as he pursues a third successive title.
The sport has its first American driver since 2015 with 22-year-old Logan Sargeant now racing for the Williams team. For the first time in generations, there are an American driver and a U.S.-based team, Haas F1, simultaneously on the track.
This year, the calendar will feature three races in the U.S. — more than any other country — including the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, which last year smashed the all-time attendance record for a race with 440,000 fans. It includes the Miami race that debuted on ABC in May and attracted a highest-ever 2.58 million viewers in the U.S. And this year's calendar will add a much-hyped nighttime race with a straight spanning the glitzy Las Vegas Strip.
The growing F1 fan base has attracted praise from at least one national politician who sees it as an economic boon.
“It’s a big deal!” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. “We’re very excited in Las Vegas to be hosting. And not only is it exciting for Formula 1 fans; it’s exciting for Las Vegas and Nevadans.”
Cortez Masto said the Grand Prix will be “beneficial to our community” and “our economy” and demonstrate what Las Vegas and its “world-class service industry” have to offer.
Soaring viewership means the sport is also reaching new audiences. The 2021 season, which featured one of the most thrilling championship battles in history, averaged 949,000 U.S. viewers, according to ESPN. The 2022 season beat that by 28%, topping 1 million viewers on average per race for the first time. The network reported more female and younger viewers than ever last year.
“Viewership has increased every year since F1 returned to ESPN and ABC in 2018,” ESPN spokesman Andy Hall said in an email, adding that the pandemic-delayed and compressed 2020 season “held mostly steady from the year before,” unlike other sports.
Last fall, ESPN signed a new contract with F1 through 2025 that includes airing a minimum of 16 races on ABC and ESPN, with the rest on ESPN2. American fans will continue to get the Sky Sports F1 feed ad-free during the races, helmed by commentators David “Crofty” Croft and Martin Brundle.
“Making viewership predictions for an upcoming year isn’t something we do, though of course we’d love to see it rise again,” Hall said.
He said the TV rights will continue to coexist with the paid F1TV app, on which super-fans can view races directly and watch live onboards of all drivers and more during race weekends.
‘Drive to Survive’: Season 5 preview
The explosion of the U.S. fan base has been fueled by "Drive to Survive," which began in 2019 and rolled out all 10 episodes of its fifth season Friday morning on Netflix. The series once again includes tantalizing behind-the-scenes footage and previously unseen interviews with drivers and teams, capturing the glory and pain and humanity coursing through the paddock.
The new season sheds new light on the biggest stories of 2022, including Ferrari's roller coaster and how team principal Mattia Binotto navigated an impressive start that became a spectacular collapse, until he was replaced after the season.
Unlike last season, when he iced out Netflix over disagreements about how he was portrayed earlier in the series, Verstappen takes part as he defends his world championship.
The show chronicles Mercedes boss Toto Wolff — still bitter about the 2021 finale — as he copes with a subpar car after years of domination. Seven-time champ Lewis Hamilton isn't over it, either.
“I’m trying to take back the championship that was taken from me,” he says.
Of course, that doesn’t happen. Wolff’s simmering frustration boils over into some of the show’s most riveting footage at a team principals’ meeting ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix about the bouncing, or “porpoising,” effects Mercedes suffered from the most. Wolff loses his temper and tangles with arch-rival Christian Horner, the Red Bull boss, in an expletive-laden war of words.
Despite Red Bull’s crushing the competition, the season has dark moments for Horner as he contends with blowback after Red Bull marginally breached the spending cap. The season provides a window into how he sought to deal with the referees, reassure his team and keep Verstappen on his game, all at the same time.
Fans of the departing McLaren driver Daniel Ricciardo, who was cut from the team and won't have a race seat this year, will get a fitting farewell to one of the show's most beloved personalities.
Yet the new season leaves numerous stones unturned about teammate rivalries. What was up with Verstappen's refusal to return a favor to teammate Sergio Perez in Brazil? How did Hamilton feel about losing to his new, young Mercedes teammate, George Russell, and about failing to win a race all season for the first time in 16 years? Fans won't get much insight into those questions in the new season.
The show barely touches perhaps the biggest question in the sport: How much longer will Hamilton, 38, continue to race? His contract is up at the end of 2023. He says he will race at least this year and hopes to stick around “for a while.”
Hamilton recently revealed that he was offered the chance to play a fighter pilot in “Top Gun: Maverick” but was forced to pull out because the shooting schedule conflicted with racing season. One thing Hamilton says he won’t do for F1 again is turn down another opportunity to be in a “Top Gun” movie with Tom Cruise. | Autoracing |
The nephew of F1 legend Michael Schumacher broke his spine after a scary crash during a race.David Schumacher was competing in the Hockenheim DTM Saturday in Germany. At one point during the race, he and driver Thomas Preining crashed on lap six, according to a report from Motorsport magazine. Both cars went off the track. Norwegian driver Dennis Olsen also slammed his car into the barriers because of Schumacher and Preining's crash.CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM David Schumacher of Germany during qualifying ahead of DTM Nürburgring 2022 at Nürburgring race course Aug. 27, 2022, in Nürburgring, Germany. (Arthur Thill ATPImages/Getty Images)Olsen's Porsche briefly burst into flames.David is the nephew of racing legend Michael Schumacher and son of former F1 racer Ralf Schumacher.Responding medical personnel did clear David immediately following the wreck. But later testing showed he broke his spine. "When David came home, he was still complaining about back pain," Ralf Schumacher told the German news agency dpa, via Motorsport magazine. "It turned out that a lumbar vertebra was broken."MAX VERSTAPPEN WRAPS UP F1 CHAMPIONSHIP WITH RAIN-SHORTENED WIN IN JAPAN Former F1 pilot Ralf Schumacher with his son David Schumacher before the start of the DTM 2022 German Touring Car Championship at Norisring July 2, 2022, in Nuremberg, Germany. (Arthur Thill ATPImages/Getty Images)David will not need surgery, but he will be required to wear a back brace to recover from the fracture. He is expected to be fully recovered in around six weeks, according to a report from the New York Post.SERGIO PEREZ WINS SINGAPORE GRAND PRIX, MAX VERSTAPPEN'S F1 CHAMPIONSHIP CELEBRATION ON HOLD David Schumacher of Germany and Charouz Racing System (15) drives during practice Sept. 2, 2022, in Zandvoort, Netherlands. (Joe Portlock/Formula 1/Formula Motorsport Limited via Getty Images)Michael Schumacher is a seven-time F1 champion. During a 2013 ski trip in the French Alps, he suffered a serious brain injury.Since then, he has been recovering at his home in Switzerland. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPMicheal's son, Mick Schumacher, is an F1 driver for Haas. Chantz Martin is a sports writer for Fox News Digital. | Autoracing |
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