Enlarge / After a 10-year gap, Lola is back developing an electric racecar, or at least the powertrain for one, as it will enter Formula E next season. (credit: Lola)

In 2022, we brought news that Lola, a once-famous racing company, was planning its renaissance . Lola never really cracked Formula 1, but it did have success in IndyCar and sports car racing with cars it designed and built from the 1960s until it ceased trading in 2012. Now, under new ownership, the company has been rebuilding its engineering facilities and expertise. And together with Yamaha as its technical partner, it has chosen Formula E for its official return to professional motorsport.

Formula E's dart-shaped electric single-seaters are getting a bit of an update before they start season 11 next year. We expect new bodywork, better tires, and perhaps the ability to use the front electric motor to send power to the wheels instead of just acting as regenerative brakes on the front axle, but those components are all spec parts, meaning every team has to use the same ones without modifying them.

That goes for the battery, too, but there is freedom when it comes to the 470 hp (350 kW) electric motor that powers the rear wheels. And then there's the software, without which the car won't go anywhere.

Enlarge (credit: Audi)

In August of last year, we were somewhat shocked when Audi confirmed that it would enter Formula 1 in 2026 . Rumors had swirled for many years that Volkswagen Group was considering entering the sport with one or more of its brands, even as Audi and then Porsche racked up win after win in other categories. But those rumors never seemed to go anywhere, earning a kind of vaporware status similar to the infamous Duke Nukem Forever .

That game did eventually see the light of day, though, and so too will Audi's F1 ambitions when it takes over the Sauber team as F1 ushers in a new set of technical regulations. We recently spoke with Oliver Hoffmann, Audi's board member for technical development, who told us more about the company's F1 plans and how entering that sport should help some of its road cars.

Audi will be new to F1 when it joins the sport in three years, but it's certainly not new to motorsport. In the 1980s, it made a name for itself—and its "quattro" all-wheel drive technology—in the World Rally Championship. More recently, it dominated endurance racing for almost two decades , winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans 13 times between 2000 and 2016, plus two World Endurance Championships and nine American Le Mans Series championships. While doing so, it proved the value of new technology that transferred to its road cars—direct injection gasoline engines, direct injection turbo diesel engines, hybrid powertrains, and laser beam headlights, to name just a few.

Enlarge (credit: Cadillac)

The world of Formula 1 got a shock on Thursday morning when General Motors announced it has plans to enter the championship. GM wants to go F1 racing with its Cadillac brand, partnering with a new Andretti Global team, assuming the sport's organizing body accepts the entry.

F1 has been fixed at 10 teams since Haas joined the sport in 2016. Since then, the series has introduced a new budget cap that has reined in some of the crazier budgets and made the prospect of operating an F1 team much less of a financial black hole. The exact amount of the cost cap is adjusted depending on how many races are planned for a year— for 2023, that should be $138.6 million —and even finishing in 10th place earns a team enough money to cover about 70 percent of those costs.

As a result, the sport is now a much more attractive proposition for new entrants than it was the last time we gained new teams in 2010, none of which survived. But there's a snag: You can't just turn up at the start of a season with a couple of cars and expect to go racing. The sport's organizing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), requires that any new team "buy in" to the franchise with a $200 million "non-dilution fee" meant to ensure a new competitor doesn't cost the existing 10 teams any of their income.

Enlarge / The exterior clues that this is a Porsche 718 GT4 ePerformance and not a 718 GT4 Clubsport are subtle; it's 140 mm (5.5 inches) wider, and the headlight projectors look more like a Taycan's than a Cayman's. But it's an all-electric car with more than a thousand horsepower on tap. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Porsche provided a flight from DC to Milan and back, and plus two nights in a hotel so we could get briefed on VW Group's next EV platform. We also saw the reveal of its new Formula E car, which you were able to read about last week . Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

FRANCIACORTA, ITALY—The auto industry is in the midst of a mass transformation as we move towards product lineups that are mostly or even entirely electric. Some are handling this transformation better than others, as supply chain problems caused by the pandemic and invasion of Ukraine add further complications. Witness the sorry state of Jaguar, which cancelled an electric replacement for the XJ sedan at the last minute, or the repeated electric vehicle-related missteps we've seen from Toyota , Honda , and Mazda of late.

There appear to be no such woes at Porsche, however. In 2019 it debuted the Taycan , a four-door electric sportscar that remains one of the best EVs on sale . Since then it's added new Taycan variants, two different flavors of EV wagon included, all built in a factory in Zuffenhausen, Germany that's already carbon-neutral . (Porsche's Zuffenhausen factory uses a very heavy mix of renewable energy and biogas from waste materials, and has been independently certified by Germany's DGNB.)

But Porsche isn't resting on its laurels. Fine though the Taycan is, it really is just the start of the OEM's electrified journey—as long as you aren't counting some of Ferdinand Porsche's very earliest vehicles, like the Egger-Lohner C2 Phaeton of 1898 . Future battery EVs from Porsche will use an all-new flexible architecture called PPE—for premium platform electric—which the company is developing together with fellow VW Group sibling Audi (with Porsche taking the lead here).