Here is a rundown of what got me thinking...
Max Verstappen won the race, but Lando Norris won the World Drivers' Championship in Abu Dhabi. Oscar Piastri is numb. Lewis Hamilton did not get one podium finish this season after never having fewer than five in any of his previous seasons. Formula Two didn't have the cleanest finish to the season, but Jak Crawford did finish second in the championship behind Leonardo Fornaroli. Sting Ray Robb was confirmed to be returning to Juncos Hollinger Racing for 2026. Will Power is going to run the 24 Hours of Daytona. The courtroom has been busy. We are firmly into December, and there is a lot to say before the year ends.
Emptying the Bucket
We are at the end of the year, and this is the last musings before the New Year. With the end of the year, we are at point where there is little time and lots to say, but not everything is fully fleshed out, or it doesn't require a full report. Some items don't quite fit.
However, with this being the end of 2025, I thought I would empty the bucket on thoughts, ideas, musings that didn't quite fit at some point in 2025. What we have here is a collection of thoughts that crossed my mind over 2025 and will see the light of day before the year comes to a close.
Why was Ryan Truex the reserve driver?
This goes back to the Mexico City NASCAR race. Truex took over the #11 Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing as Denny Hamlin missed the race due to the birth of his child. Truex got the call because he is the reserve driver for JGR, and he works in the simulator for the team. My question is why?
Truex is more than capable for the role, but the problem is Truex was not racing anywhere. His only race up to that point in 2025 was the Daytona season opener in NASCAR's second division. Why would any team have a reserve driver be someone who was not regularly competing? That driver should be race fit and ready to go. A simulator role is not enough preparation for a driver. If Truex is going to be a reserve, shouldn't Gibbs make sure he is competing and best prepared to be called in to run a Cup race?
This goes for any Cup team and any team in any series. I don't understand why a reserve driver would be doing nothing. In Formula One, that driver should be racing somewhere, whether it is Formula Two, sports cars, Super Formula, whatever that keeps a driver fresh. Standing at the back of the garage or only driving the simulator isn't enough. It would be best to make sure the reserve is at least competing somewhere.
IndyCar Didn't Lose Connor Zilisch
This comes up every now and then in IndyCar circles.
Young American driver succeeding in NASCAR, IndyCar fan base starts crying about how IndyCar lost that driver. It was the case for Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell, even Kasey Kahne and Ryan Newman to an extent a generation go. Now it is Connor Zilisch's turn.
One problem... Zilisch was never IndyCar's nor was he on that path.
Zilisch was racing Mazda MX-5 Cup when he started car racing. Name one IndyCar driver that started in Mazda MX-5 Cup. I will wait. Then Zilisch got an opportunity to run late models which turned into the NASCAR career that is starting to blossom. He is also a kid from the Charlotte, North Carolina-area. You know, NASCAR Country.
Not every young American driver dreams of being in IndyCar but especially those who are never on the path. IndyCar isn't the premier series in this country. A lot of that comes down to money. You can make a healthy living being average in the NASCAR Cup Series, better than being a regular winner in IndyCar. That is a deciding factor for people.
Zilisch is 19 years old and he is about to start raking in money. He has also had the support from day one. Trackhouse got behind him. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and JR Motorsports got behind him. IndyCar teams do not give that kind of support. You do not see a driver get two or three years in the ladder system and then another three or four years in the top series, all paid for, ever in IndyCar. You can prove your worth and still be forced to pay or teams will give up on you quickly. Look at how fast Sage Karam and Oliver Askew were cast aside, and both won in the ladder system.
The point is, Zilisch wasn't an IndyCar loss. If you are upset that the best talent we have seen in decades never was on the IndyCar path, that is one thing, but he was never heading that direction from his first time in a race car.
Throwback Weekends are a Distraction
Every year we get to a point in the IndyCar season and someone suggests there should be a throwback weekend where all the teams run a livery that pays homage to a car from the past. NASCAR ran a similar weekend at Darlington for the last decade.
It solves nothing.
It is a pure play on nostalgia, a distraction from the current state of affairs. It is something to talk about for a week, maybe two if done right, but it is self-serving. More people are not going to be tuning in because Josef Newgarden is driving a car that looks like Al Unser's 1987 Indianapolis 500 winner or Scott Dixon is driving a car that looks like Alex Zanardi's Target cars or the McLarens look like the McLarens from the 1970s.
A throwback weekend is self-serving.
Plus, everyone will get bored of it quickly. NASCAR's throwback weekend is there in name only. It moved to the spring Darlington race and maybe a quarter of the teams participate. No participates in the theme aspect, changing their attire to fit a time period. It is hard to buy in every year to a costume party. Once you get through three decades everyone gets bored, and we come to realize there isn't that much that we ogled over. There were two or three great things that are stuck in our minds, but that is about it.
If it happens, do it once to get it out of your system, but acknowledge it can only be a one-time thing.
MotoGP Sprint Points
If sprint races are half-distance races, I think only half the sprint races should count toward a riders' championship points total. If there are 22 races, only 11 sprint race results can count toward the championship.
It makes the grand prix results matter more. You can only be bailed out with sprint results so often.
I was thinking this after 2024 when you had Francesco Bagnaia win 11 of 20 races but was second in the championship by ten points and you had Jorge Martín finish on the podium in 16 of 20 sprint races while winning only three grand prix the entire season. Martín did have 16 podium finishes in grand prix, but he scored 43 points more than Bagnaia in sprint races.
Sprint races are fine, but if you want the grand prix results to matter, there should be a limit on how many sprint races count toward the championship. It caps how many points can come from sprint races. Win 11 sprint races, congratulations, you have 132 points from sprint races, but that is the most you can earn. The incentive would still be there to get the best result you can to take points away from fellow competitors in sprint races. You wouldn't see riders not trying during the sprint races.
MotoGP has hit this patch with sprint races where they aren't standing out during a race weekend, and it is starting to feel excessive, especially if one rider is going to be dominating on Saturday and Sunday. It just puts the best further away from the rest of the field. Only counting half the sprint races toward the championship would at least limit the beat down.
NASCAR Overtime
This one stems a bit from the NASCAR finale, though I have been thinking this way even prior to that. If NASCAR is going to have it, there should be parameters that negates overtime. Not every football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse, soccer, whatever sport goes to overtime. or has the chance of going to overtime. Every NASCAR race has the potential of going to overtime no matter what happens during the race.
However, some drivers dominate a race, and that is clearly the best driver on the day. There should be criteria a driver can reach to negate any overtime. I am not sure what the marks should be, but if a driver leads the most laps or leads majority of the laps, that might need to be enough to negate an overtime should a caution come out in the closing laps with that driver leading.
Overtime, arguably, was meant to prevent good races from being ruined due to a caution, but that doesn't mean every race. If a driver has a two-second lead with five laps to go, that wasn't going to be a good finish. That race is under control. It is over. If a caution comes out, no one is losing an exciting finish. If a gap to second is that big, maybe that should be enough to clinch a victory.
Also, not every driver should be competing at overtime. The Nashville Cup race in 2024, which Joey Logano won while Zane Smith finished in the top five after spending most of the race outside the top twenty should never happen. The 25th-place runner at the scheduled should not finish in the top five due to overtime. There should be some incentive and protection for having a good race, and the end of the scheduled distance is a marker where you were either good or you weren't.
Overtime should be limited to the top ten drivers competing. One, it protects the drivers who had good races and keeps them from finishing worse than tenth. Two, it would allow overtime to be a reasonable finish and prevent these races where it takes 45 minutes to run two consecutive green flag laps, which do nothing to help viewership. You aren't going to have accident after accident with ten cars on track, nor would you have pile ups that require a red flag to clean up. Three, there should be a protection from pit stops.
I don't think one final pit stop should determine the race. Once a race hits the scheduled distance, drivers should have to finish with the tires they have. No team should get the benefit of saving a set of tires in the pit lane. If you want to win the race, beat the driver who was leading the race straight-up. Pass them with what you got. And in that case, if you make it the scheduled distance on the fuel you have, you shouldn't lose due to fuel mileage. The top ten should come down pit lane, top off on fuel, and then rejoin in the positions they were in.
This gets rid of strategy finishes in overtime and it makes every finish a true race to the finish with the leader not being put at a disadvantage. It actually gives the leader an incentive to be first, and we should want drivers wanting to be the leader. The leader should never be at a disadvantage.
William Byron Would Have Raced Differently
At the NASCAR finale in Phoenix, William Byron had a tire failure while running in the top five with three laps remaining. At the end of the race, Kyle Larson was champion, and based off of the full season points aggregate, Larson would have also be champion based on that metric. The two systems produced the same champion, so that means everything was alright... right?
Except no, because entering Phoenix Byron would have had an 11-point lead over Larson based on the full season aggregate. If Byron had an 11-point lead, he would not have been racing the way he did at Phoenix, which led to the blown tire.
As it played out, Byron wasn't leading the championship at the time of the tire failure, but trying to chase down Denny Hamlin, who was leading and in turn leading the championship. If Byron had an 11-point lead over Larson, he would not have been pushing to beat Hamlin, especially since Hamlin would have been 103 points behind Byron in seventh and would have been mathematically eliminated prior to the finale.
Byron would have also scored stage points and he would have had 18 points after winning the first stage while finishing third in the other. Larson would have scored only 12 points. That means Byron's lead would effectively have been up to 17 points.
Byron could let Larson ahead at that point. He would have had a 16-position cushion to play with. Byron could have taken it easy and instead of running in the top five, could have been fine running eighth or ninth. If he was driving that way, he likely doesn't lose a tire, he doesn't have an accident, and he likely would have done enough to win the championship.
This is why we cannot just take the results as they play out in this system and say if there was a full-season aggregate the champion would have been this or that driver. Based on the points, Larson would have been champion, but if Byron had entered the finale with an 11-point lead over Larson instead of being equal with Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell also contending for the championship, he would likely not have been in that exact same position that led to a flat tire.
The Interlagos Obsession
This came to mind this weekend during the Formula One finale.
Many were bemoaning another dud of a race from Yas Marina, and rightfully so. The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix has been on the calendar for nearly 20 years now, and Yas Marina has never produced a truly good race. That is with multiple regulations and rulesets. At some point, it is the racetrack that is the issue.
At the same time, there was that crowd saying essentially they would chew their arm off to have Interlagos return as the finale and calling it Interlagos' rightful place for the finale...
But is that true?
Interlagos didn't host a Formula One finale until 2004. It then was the finale from 2006 through 2008 and then returned to the finale spot from 2011 through 2013. That is only seven seasons with Interlagos hosting the finale.
Is the desire for Interlagos to be the finale because of tradition or because it hosted the 2007 finale, where it was a three-driver fight and Kimi Räikkönen won the title entering third; it hosted the 2008 finale and the famous "Is that Glock?" moment with Felipe Massa being champion for about 30 seconds before Lewis Hamilton swept through; and it hosted the 2012 finale where Sebastian Vettel spun early and then had to fight back in changing conditions to defeat Fernando Alonso for the title?
I think we have a collective that remembers three races and thinks that is how every Interlagos finale played out. The 2004 finale was a dead-rubber. The 2006 finale saw Fernando Alonso leading Michael Schumacher by ten points and the only way Schumacher could win the title was with a victory and Alonso failing to score a point. The 2011 race is the one where Sebastian Vettel had a gearbox issue and limbed to second while Mark Webber won. The 2013 race capped off Vettel's nine-race winning streak.
The truth is Interlagos is more likely to produce a competitive and thrilling race than Abu Dhabi, but let's stop acting like we lost a tradition. Formula One had completed over 50 seasons before Interlagos ever had a finale. Adelaide hasn't been on the schedule in three decades and it has still hosted more finales than Interlagos. Mexico City has hosted more finales than Interlagos, and it last hosted the final race since 1970.
I am tired of Abu Dhabi as well. I wish there was another venue that was hosting the final race. But stop acting like the finale not being at Interlagos is some travesty and rejection of tradition. It was never a tradition.
Winners From the Weekend
You know about Verstappen and Norris, but did you know...
Arvid Lindblad (sprint) and Joshua Dürksen (feature) split the Formula Two races from Abu Dhabi.
Jake Dennis won the São Paulo ePrix.
Coming Up This Weekend
The Asian Le Mans Series opens with a pair of four-hour races from Sepang.
