Enlarge / A Lola Mk1 in the foreground and a Lola B12/60 from 2012 in the background. (credit: Lola Cars)

When I first heard of the plan to revive Lola Cars, I had some trepidation. In these days of SPAC-powered exuberance and blockchain hype, it would be pretty easy for a company to take the cynical approach: Design (if not necessarily ever build) a ludicrously expensive electric hypercar and maybe some NFTs and wait for the hype to roll in. Thankfully, those ideas couldn't be further from the new owner's plans.

"Simply put, our plan is to bring Lola back to a former version of itself. To me, that means being a design and engineering force in modern motorsport," explained Till Bechtolsheimer, an investor and amateur racing driver who bought the company's assets in June.

Older racing fans will know the Lola name. The company was founded in the UK in 1958 by Eric Broadley, and by 1962, it had entered Formula 1 as a constructor, though never with much success. A pair of second-place finishes for John Surtees that year were the best results Lola-built F1 cars could muster, and the company's planned return to the sport in 1997 with the backing of MasterCard was a complete fiasco that ended when neither of the company's cars qualified for that year's opening race in Australia.

Enlarge / One of my better data traces. (credit: Blazepod)

Fans of Formula 1 may have noticed that many drivers engage in reaction training before getting into their cars at the start of a race. For some, this is as simple as working with a trainer and some tennis balls . But you might have noticed 2021 champion Max Verstappen slapping some illuminated pods, like a wireless version of the old Simon game from the late 1970s.

They're called Blazepods, and they're Bluetooth-linked training lights that have their roots in an interactive playground in Israel. Blazepod's founder developed a series of exercises for the system, like capture the flag and relay races. "It was such a success, they knew they needed to make this wireless," explained Brian Farber, Blazepod's director of business development. "And then they started implementing [them] and understanding what the benefits were—everything from the cognitive to connecting the brain and the body together, decision-making, reaction time, and then actual analytics. It just kind of took off from there."

Max Verstappen might be Blazepod's highest-profile user. (credit: Blazepod )

Blazepod offered to send Ars a set to test, and since I've been in the middle of a fitness kick, and some distant part of my brain still thinks it can be a racing driver, I took the company up on the offer.

Enlarge / F1's young guns stare out from the cover of F1 22 (credit: EA Sports)

Earlier in July saw the release of F1 22 , the latest installment of the official Formula 1 racing game franchise. Unlike in years past, a lot has changed in the year since F1 2021 : radical new technical rules mean the cars are very different from the ones we've seen for several decades, several tracks have been revised, new tracks have been added, and the race format now includes the occasional shorter sprint race alongside the main feature race. All of this is faithfully reflected in F1 22 , and for some die-hard F1 fans, that will be sufficient to pick up a copy.

For everyone else, I'm not so sure. Some of that is down to the game itself. For the first time since EA Sports bought the Codemasters studio at the end of 2020 , we can see the influence of the behemoth games publisher at work, and it's not particularly positive. For example, the sheer frequency of exhortations to spend XP or purchase microtransactions will probably be enough for most Ars readers to dislike F1 22 .

But my frustration is not just with the game itself—at its core are still wonderful physics that translate to engaging handling, whether that's with a steering wheel or a controller. No, it's F1's new cars, which are larger and heavier than they've ever been , and, frankly, somewhat of a pig to drive.

Enlarge / Charles Leclerc of Monaco driving the (16) Ferrari F1-75 on track during the F1 Grand Prix of Azerbaijan at Baku City Circuit on June 12, 2022, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

The sport of Formula 1 racing went through a massive change at the beginning of this season as it introduced new cars that harness aerodynamic ground effects to push them down onto the track. The aerodynamic approach was last used in F1 in the late 1970s and early 1980s before being banned on safety grounds.

One issue, then, that perhaps should have been anticipated this time was a condition called porpoising, where the cars oscillate vertically at a rather high frequency while traveling at high speed, violently shaking the driver in the process. As this season has progressed, the Grand Prix Drivers' Association has become more and more vocal about the potential health risk this poses for these athletes. And on Thursday, the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (or FIA, the sport's governing body) announced it has a plan to do something about it.

What’s porpoising?

As the air travels underneath the body of an F1 car, it expands as it reaches the venturis at the rear of the car. The faster the car goes, the more downforce it generates via this expansion, until at a certain point the airflow detaches from the floor and stalls. This wipes out all the downforce immediately, and without that effect sucking the car to the ground, it raises up on its suspension.

Enlarge / In 2026 we might well see a Red Bull F1 car powered by a Porsche hybrid powertrain. (credit: Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

Rumors that Volkswagen Group is poised to enter Formula 1 have circulated for years. Every few months, often in a European car magazine, we'll read about an unnamed VW Group board member who says it's happening, then it all goes quiet for a few more months. But now it's really for real, says VW Group CEO Herbert Diess, as the 2026 rule change offers the perfect opportunity.

For a while, VW Group moving to F1 barely even made sense. The two high-technology, high-engineering brands in the group—Porsche and Audi—were both already spending F1-sized budgets to compete against each other in sportscar racing. That's a far more road-relevant form of motorsport, and one where both companies proved new technology that's now commonplace in their road cars.

But then Dieselgate happened, and Audi's diesel-powered hybrid Le Mans conquerer had to go . A year later, Porsche's even faster hybrid program was shuttered, having won everything there was to win . Across the group, brands scaled back their motorsports programs, focusing on electric ones like Formula E and VW's Pikes Peak champion .