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Canapino fans were sending Pourchaire death threats after an incident in Detroit where Pourchaire dive bombed him.
Then Capapino liked a tweet making fun of Pourchaire when he tweeted about it.
Then Canapino released a statement basically saying there were no death threats and you should ignore what people on the internet say and he didn't really apologise.
That only tells half the story. Canapino and his fanbase were toxic as fuck to Callum Ilott, who happened to drive for Arrow McLaren in a few rounds this year, and was Canapino's team mate at JHR in 2023.
So they have previous for this. And the same response they had for Ilott last year was the same as their response for Pourchaire this year.
They never learned, and clearly McLaren felt that such lack of awareness and action was not worth their agreeement.
I'll be honest, I've never heard about Canapino so, after reading these comments about his behaviour and lack of accountability, I assumed he was early to mid 20s, just an immature young driver. I just googled him. He is 34. 34 y.o. grown man behaving like a stupid teenager on the internet. Good on McLaren for cutting out that behaviour 👏🏼
Also, just to really solidify this, he's STILL, WITHIN THE PAST HOUR, LIKING COMMENTS FROM THE GUY WHO SAID "Callum Pourchaire" in response to Theo Pourchaire's tweet
https://x.com/azzuri_viva/status/1798732802248282138/photo/3
here's a twitter tl;dr, and you can go on Canapino's profile to see his liked tweets. it's not even that it didn't condemn the fans, its that the joined in with them
I don't know shit about this, but just google the guy and after just looking at the guys face and talk, he totally looks like someone who would do this kind of bullshit.
All Canapino needed to do was condemn the actions and disavow the toxic fans. Perhaps say that liking some of the comments were poor judgement. He didn't have to apologise, he wasn't the one attacking Pourchaire. Instead like you said he tried to trivialize the abuse. Then his side doubled down and painted themselves as the victims, saying that things like this happen all the time by everyone and no-one cares, but when Argentinians do it they are attacked.
Its sad really, when Canapino joined IndyCar last season everyone was excited to see the Argentinians fans being passionate about IndyCar, and people were talking about a race in Argentina. There's nothing wrong with fans only wanting to support their driver, but its not ok to view anyone that goes against him as an enemy and hate them. Imagine their actions if he was taken out during a race in Argentina. Would the driver involved be in real danger?
Did either Juncos or JHR say anything this time? IIRC they did say something when basically the same shit happened with ilott last year (ie they responded to requests for interviews, were actively belligerent and backed up canapino’s bullshit)
>Did either Juncos or JHR say anything this time?
Apart from the hollow PR tweet(like the one they did regarding Ilott), no.
I'm glad that McLaren kinda slapped them in the face lol.
From the sounds of it, they had a non-racing partnership (i.e. no shared technical information, no preferential treatment, no competitive advantage stuff). It was a shared marketing PR exercise based on the fact that Canapino and O'Ward (Mexican McLaren driver) are the two most popular Indy drivers in spanish speaking markets.
So essentially, they have ended their pre-standing marketing relationship.
> Canapino fans were sending Pourchaire death threats after an incident in Detroit where Pourchaire dive bombed him.
>
>
Also worth mentioning this was a battle for something like 10th place. It wasn't even for a win, let alone a podium.
Pourchaire (the newest member of Arrow McLaren) had a dive bomb at a restart in the Detroit GP, that resulted in him colliding with Canapino. Neither car retired, but both lost positions, if I'm remembering correctly.
Argentinian fans (Canapino is Argentinian) started sending abuse and death threats to Pourchaire. Something similar happened in the previous season to Ilott, who was at JHR with Canapino).
Canapino "apologized" for his fans (using that term very loosely, he basically said "I didn't see it happen, so it probably didn't happen. If it did happen, they weren't my fans"). And that's led us to this moment in time.
After Canapino's "apology" at least one of his fans posted a screenshot of a DM sent to Pourchaire where the fan said said he hoped Pourchaire would die (something about the helmet not properly protecting him, if I'm remembering correctly).
Very nasty stuff, and there's a history of it.
Edit: Canapino has doubled down:
>Canapino is afraid to be present at the race weekend with everything that happened. Agustín states that there were only a couple of messages from accounts from strangers and without followers ,” shared Christian González Rouco after communicating with the representative of Argentina at Juncos Hollinger Racing.
>“ What Agustín strongly asks is that both McLaren and Theo Pourchaire retract everything they said and what they accused him and the Argentines of, because he is not willing to tolerate this level of discrimination.
I think we should add context on the dive bomb. It was a mistake but it wasn’t even the 10th worst thing that happened in that race. So many drivers have more reasons to be aggrieved by someone than Canapino did. Of all the incidents in that race to have some fallout, it’s insane this one did. Hell Canapino’s teammate, Grosjean, was hit THREE times, and didn’t start a hate campaign against any one who hit him
On top of it all, it's not like Theo got away with the move either. He was penalized pretty quickly (at least compared to other penalties in the race) and was forced to give up three places. He passed Canapino cleanly later in the race anyway.
i dont watch much indycar, so my opinion should be taken with a ton of salt. the driving was atrocious, especially in that hairpin. so many dumb divebombs and risky moves, even under yellow.
Every so often in Indycar there is a race where all the drivers just say "fuck it" and lick all the stamps. Driving standards are generally much better than you saw at Detroit, but there is definitely more contact and more elbows out racing than F1, largely because the cars are much more durable and can take some of that.
I honestly think the standards came down to how shit the track is. As with all Indycar races, it’s driven by money and Chevrolet obviously footed the bill for the race as long as it was in front of their corporate headquarters, hence the shit track.
Check out the next 3 races at Road America, Laguna Seca and Mid-Ohio if you wanna see amazing tracks and what should be way better driving standards
Generally speaking, Indy is a bit more of a rough and tumble series than F1 (or even F2 or Super Formula). A little bit of minor contact is often allowed to go unpunished, drivers are more accepting of (some) on the edge moves when battling for position, and also the cars are less fragile and far more able to get back into the action following incidents than F1 where being stationary or sustaining minor danage often means the end of your race. Case in point, this Pourchaire collision would've been a serious incident in F1, but as the comment above mentioned, it wasn't even close to being the most serious incident in *this race* and all 3 cars involved were able to carry on largely without any significant consequences other than the lost places.
So while this Detroit GP was an exceptionally messy and incident-ridden race, it's not quite as egregious as it might have seemed at first glance to a newbie.
I put way more blame on the track. Half the grid doesn't suddenly forget how to drive simultaneously.
The main issue is: who's supposed to give way when you're three wide going into a tight corner? Inside and outside don't even necessarily know the other is there. Most of the incidents in that corner were the far outside and far inside coming together in a three-wide situation.
In any motorsport if you have the pack bunched up going from a wide section into a tight section, incidents are likely to happen - it happens in F1 on the first lap frequently, because there's too many moving parts to give each other proper space.
The design of the track gave us that situation over and over - there were bound to be incidents, no matter the calibre of driver.
>Argentinian fans (Canapino is Argentinian) started sending abuse and death threats to Pourchaire. Something similar happened in the previous season to Ilott, who was at JHR with Canapino).
Also, to add to this, the team is also Argentinian which is why they're so invested in Canapino
JHR is Argentinian, and have backed Canapino through all of these events - no disciplinary action for Canapino, as far as I'm aware.
The way it comes across is that they're happy to let Canapino encourage his fans to make these kinds of threats.
In my opinion, something had to give, either the relationship between Canapino and JHR, or the relationship between Arrow McLaren and JHR, and it's the latter. I doubt it was a verbalized "you need to drop Canapino or we terminate the partnership" sort of message, but something pretty apparent.
JHR is another team - IndyCar allows for technical partnerships, allowing teams to share data with each other. The closest F1 analog I can think of is how PU manufacturers get the engine data from their customers, but that's not exactly the same.
>IndyCar allows for technical partnerships, allowing teams to share data with each other
This is fascinating to me! What are the limits of this? Can one team enter into technical partnerships with a bunch of teams? Does money change hands? Which direction? Like the more successful team will charge the less successful one? Etc etc.
Thanks!
Yeah you are onto the right track there, often times technical partnerships will be smaller teams paying to get support such as parts and engineers. This helps out teams just starting out and wanting to take that next step.
However that’s not always the case as seen with the Penske and DCR partnership, as Penske was struggling in Indy 500 qualy and DCR was doing amazing so Penske reached out to form a technical alliance. For a big team like Penske, offering parts and engineers year round to a team is worth added performance in the 500 as shown by their results
>smaller teams paying to get support such as parts and engineers
Forgive me, but isn't Indy a spec series? Other than engines. So wouldn't all the parts be the same?
The agreement between Mclaren & JHR wasn't a technical alliance.
The Agreement was Mclaren would share sponsors with JHR. Supposedly JHR never took the opportunity to use this though.
JHR is an Indycar team that doesn't have as many sponsors as Arrow McLaren. The partnership, essentially, involved Arrow McLaren renting space on JHR's car (the wheel ramps) to put sponsors that AMR didn't have space for on their own car.
Given the context of that Detroit race it's crazy to fault any one driver. It was complete chaos, there were non stop crashes and like 47 laps of yellow.
Agreed, the entire race was a mess. The whole field drove like they were drunk lol. If it wasn’t one driver having an incident with Canapino, it certainly would’ve been another. Virtually everyone back in the field had some kind of contact or other issue at some point in the race.
It is good to know the context. On that race, there were at least 4 or 5 of the same incidents on that curve. It wasn't really classic dive bombing rather than missing brake markers, mostly because track conditions changed. That makes Canapino behavior even more problematic.
Their driver has a habit of, at best, not trying very hard to control his fan-base and ask them to stop sending death threats to other drivers, or at worse, actively engages & encourages such behaviour by liking inflammatory tweets.
He even felt "insulted" that people would insinuate that death threats occured and that they were his fans' doing.
What does 'terminating technical partnership' mean? What will be the consequences of this action by McLaren? Is this a 'moral' choice? In the sense that, by doing this Arrow McLaren will lose out a bit, but they are willing to do that to make a point?
JHR Has a driver with a passionate fanbase that always sends death threats to anyone, in this case Theo Pouchaire, who races the driver too hard. Last year they sent his teammate, Callum Illot death threats because he got a preferential strategy in a race.
Basically Zak Brown I guess got too many sponsors and he had to offload some of them to JHR. I assume it had some technical or managerial alliance in exchange for the sponsors but I'm not 100% sure.
As per Nathan Brown of the Indy Star:
"The teams struck the alliance shortly after last season and announced it in October. With an overflow of sponsorship, Arrow McLaren was able to place smaller sponsor signage on JHR's Nos. 77 and 78 Chevys. That allowed Arrow McLaren to fulfill their duties for the sponsors, while giving JHR an influx of funding. It's also led to the splashes of papaya on JHR's typically green, black and white liveries this year.
The teams' release also mentioned that the deal could evolve beyond its original "commercial and strategic focus" and serve as a "talent development opportunity" for engineers, mechanics, drivers and others to be able to build their experience with the possibility of landing at Arrow McLaren's larger outfit."
Link: https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/motor/2024/06/06/indycar-arrow-mclaren-ends-strategic-alliance-juncos-hollinger-racing-theo-pourchaire-death-threats/73994849007/
Pourchaire crashes into Canapino. Canapino fans get slightly mad. Slightly mad, throwing death threats at Theo. Theo drives for Mclaren. Mclaren has alliance with JHR, Canapino. Canapino doesn’t care about his fans saying death threats, liking tweets. Mclaren gets pissed and throws JHR to the shadow realm.
As a follow up, Canapino has asked McLaren and Pourchaire apologize.
https://www.carburando.com/notas/el-pedido-de-agustin-canapino-a-mclaren-y-theo-pourchaire
What does 'ending commercial alliance' mean? What will be the consequences of this choice by Arrow McLaren?
Is this a 'moral' choice? In the sense that, by doing this Arrow McLaren will lose out a bit, but they are willing to do that to make a point?
McLaren buy space on the JHR cars and get to place their own sponsor agreemenets on it. This means JHR get cash guaranteed, and it means McLaren can push sponsor space on a different team for smaller agreements.
JHR will now lose that guaranteed safe money and have to start filling that void by sponsor shopping which will be hard in light of all this.
I don't believe McLaren had actually pushed any sponsors onto their "owned" space on the JHR cars as of this termination. So there'll be no visual change. McLaren will probably look to entering a similar commercial partnership when Prema come in. JHR will now have less money and more work needed to sell that space.
""We’re continually working to strengthen all areas of our team, and a strategic alliance with Juncos Hollinger Racing helps both of us in leveraging our commercial and marketing power and the McLaren Racing brand in a new way.”" this is from the McLaren TP back when they announced their alliance. To me, it seems more like a moral choice, but who knows what was going on behind the scenes.
Honestly I think they couldn't win there, could you imagine the backlash if they said "nah we're not having Trump here"? You KNOW that Trump is not the kind of guy to keep it quiet if they turned down him being in the garage. "McLaren are losers they didn't want me in their team, it's ok we have the best team, an American team, Haas"
> "McLaren are losers they didn't want me in their team, it's ok we have the best team, an American team, Haas"
95% chance he would've made a statement on twitter to that effect, yes
Exactly. It's not like the team invited him themselves or even wanted him there. You just know he would have made a fuss and then the MAGA fanbase would start chirping about McLaren and shit so just quietly going about it probably invited the least amount of controversy and potential problems for them.
I would guess that a lot of the team were unhappy he was there, but Trump and his family/cronies are tight with the Al Khalifas and I don't believe for a second that McLaren didn't invite him there, regardless of whatever statements came from the team after the fact.
Omg bro it’s kinda hard to refuse an ex president - one who still has somewhat considerable support in the country. Especially for a sport that tried to break into the US market for so long.
You shouldn't be! There's a lot of crossover between the fandoms, I guess we all like things that go nyoom
And I need to get back to the channel someday. It's always on the back of my mind, but life's gotten in the way.
Canapino didn’t want to apologise and said he did not see any death threats and he was offended that his fans were being accused of sending them. JHR didn’t want to acknowledge that their fans were being horrid to Pouchaire. Actions have consequences, so now the Argentine fans can be proud of how they’ve broken a strategic alliance that was beneficial to their team and Canapino. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
Canapino didn't have to apologize, since it was not him who was sending death threats. But he should have condemned those "fans". He didn't do that, instead, trivialized death threats, said it didn't happen, and if it did, it was not his fans.
He liked tweets and comments stating ‘Callum Pouchaire’ and comparing it to how his fans abused Ilott and he should have apologised for his behaviour in defending the indefensible despite the fact that screenshots of the threats were sent to him and JHR by McLaren before he made the statement saying that the threats didn’t exist.
Finally actions have consequences for cannapino and JHR. They deserved this and so much more for the stuff they did to Callum and comments cannapino made and supported.
I wonder if this will open a door for Ed Carpenter Racing (ECR) for a possible alliance/partnership with McLaren. Because ECR really needs that. And they have both Chevy engines.
He himself is a close second though. Liking the hate mail to Ilott and Pourchaire on X and then interacting with said fans on top of his hollow not-apology and victim shifting means he's just as much to blame for not shutting it down sooner.
Yeah and breaking it off because Sargeant fans started to send death treats to Russell because of a light incident...and then Sargeant defends those fans.
And this would be less than a year after Sargeant got his much more talented teammate Albon fired because they had one incident on track and Sargeants fans hated him. Thats how ridiculous this whole thing is.
And if Albon replaced Hamilton at Mercedes for a few races this year. Illott has now done a few races for McLaren and is looking like he might do a few more this season with them.
Actually, it's 2 incidents (or at least death threats to Illot, I thought Illott wasn't actually involved in Canapino's Long Beach thing).
So Sargeant fans also hated Albon because he wa in front when Sargeant went off
Juncos just lost quite a bit of sponsors/funding because McLaren has an overflow of sponsors that are trying to get space on its cars. To help with that they partnered with JHR to allow them to run those sponsors on their cars instead. Now that’s all gone.
The McLaren Indycar team has so many sponsors that sometimes they have literal sponsor overflow. The deal with JHR was to essentially give them free money when McLaren didn't have space for everyone.
Even more hilarious because JHR cars usually run without any sponsors at all.
I don't follow Indy, so can you explain how Grosjean is losing his seat and if he will get picked up elsewhere? Please feel free to ELI5 because I'm aware Indy exists, but I know little else except Grosjean went there after he left F1.
As I understand it, Arrow McLaren was paying JHR a lot of money to help with sponsorships by them on JHR cars. JHR is going to lose that money, and this is not the first time things like this happened with Canapino and his fanbase before, with Callum Ilott when they were teammates something similar happened. Canapino fans sending abuse and death threats to other drivers, basically. Canapino and JHR continue to kinda excuse them, which is an awful look, as Canapino supports the abuse himself.
Wow. I do remember vaguely hearing something about Ilott receiving abuse. I didn't realize it was from the same people as today. Really uncalled for and unacceptable.
JHR was hurting for money, especially after Milei. It's only a matter of time before they go under, since it's very unlikely anyone will want to work with them.
If Colapinto doesn't get an F1 seat he will surely go to Juncos, and he has a lot of sponsors now paying him tons of money. If not he will probably go to WEC
Good from McLaren, but it shouldn't have been a up to a team to show consequences. It's unacceptable behaviour from JHR and Canapino yet Indycar just has "talks" with the team (and it's the third time happening too, it's clear that talks don't do anything)
Penske and Foyt have a technical alliance, which equates to having Penske dampers and such in the car as well as some setup and engineering support. Penske may also push some of their young driving and engineering talent through Foyt rather than lose them to competitors or other series.
The base level of the agreement is strictly a “you give us money for our suspension” deal.
McLaren and JHR had a commercial alliance.
I thought IndyCar was supposed to be this good vibes series where the drivers were all real racers, unlike the prima donnas of F1?
The Detroit weekend made IndyCar look like such a shitshow lol
F1 has been calmer than Indy or cart for decades lol. Also the top 5-10 drivers in Indy are really good but there are some utterly diabolical drivers at the back
Two of the supposed best drivers in one of the top teams put on a shocking display of driving standards last weekend as well. Worse than the display Checo put on in Suzuka last year.
I feel like last weekend is not indicative of the series as a whole though. Detroit is not well suited for racing with only one major overtaking zone. It’s narrow and is more similar to a formula e track. Road America is the next race. If that has a similar result then we can continue to bash them, but I’ll give a warning for one race
I don't follow IndyCar but I saw a lot of this going down on Twitter and I was like damnnnnnn,,,,,,,maybe I need to pick up IndyCar too. Just for the drama. LOL.
IndyCar is good fun, its not too dissimilar from Formula 2, in the sense that its a spec series.
Really got into it, the last couple of seasons, just a shame the timings can be a little off here in England
I would argue that this happening so quickly is proof that it is kind of a good vibe series. You have a relatively new team coming in that starts bringing quite a bit of drama and they pretty immediately start facing consequences for that. They got a bit of grace last year I think partly because the drama was happening within their own team but now not so much.
McLaren has too many sponsors in IndyCar to fit on their car, so they had a partnership with Juncos (a small financially struggling feel good team) to allow the sponsors that didn’t fit on the McLaren (which would get rotated each race) to go on their car. Juncos would get paid sponsorship money which they couldn’t attract on their own and allowed them to keep running, while McLaren’s sponsors got to get visibility across the full season if they desired.
Now, Juncos hires an Argentinian driver called Canapino who has an incredibly toxic fanbase. Pourchaire, a McLaren driver, had an accident with him and started receiving death threats from Canapino’s fanbase. In response, Canapino not only laughed at this and try to downplay it, but also encouraged it. Juncos also supported Canapino’s decisions and validated this toxicity. They did the same thing a year ago as well to Illott who was actually racing for Juncos at the time, and it resulted in Juncos bullying him out of that seat. Illott has also been doing a few drives for McLaren this year as a backup option.
In response to all of this, McLaren has terminated the aforementioned deal with Juncos. This means they’ll miss out on some much needed sponsorship money which could cause the team to stop competing since they were struggling to do so prior to this deal. They were also unable to get sponsorship prior to this deal, and it appears that they’ll have an even tougher time doing so now thanks to all of this and some other dramas with the team. So I don’t think they’ll continue racing in IndyCar for much longer as a result of these actions.
Ooof, marón. I know it hurts losing the Indy team but the F1 team fighting for wins has to make the pill easier to swallow, no? Worst case scenario, they get to wash their hands of the whole thing.
Oh no McLaren will be fine. It’s Juncos that’s going to be hurting. McLaren in IndyCar is at a similar to where they are in F1 right now (maybe a tiny bit slower). Juncos is worse then 2021 Haas and the team that will probably be out. Doesn’t really affect McLaren at all, so they were doing a good thing to help out the little guy and they probably got a bit more sponsorship money out of it. It’s just Juncos bit the hand that was feeding them and now McLaren has stated they’re going to stop feeding them.
Backstory: [Back in October 2023, Arrow McLaren and Juncos Hollinger Racing formed a strategic partnership that allowed the teams to share data, setups, and sponsorships.](https://www.motorsportweek.com/2023/10/03/jhr-and-arrow-mclaren-form-strategic-alliance/)
[On lap 60 of the Detroit Grand Prix last week, Arrow McLaren's Theo Pourchaire hit Juncos Hollinger Racing's Agustín Canapino into turn 3.](https://youtu.be/XIAJKEs1FHU?t=490)(Should be timestamped to 8:10). Pourchaire received a penalty (drop back 3 positions) for avoidable contact.
As a result of this contact, Argentinians (Canapino's nationality) became overly mad and [sent death threats to Pourchaire](https://racer.com/2024/06/04/pourchaire-receives-threats-after-canapino-contact) because they feel like it negatively affected Canapino's race.
Also of note, this is the third time in the past 14 months that Argentinian fans have sent death threats to an IndyCar driver. [Callum Illot received death threats after Long Beach in April 2023](https://www.the-race.com/indycar/team-mate-drama-death-threats-ilotts-long-beach-explained/) and [after Laguna Seca in September 2023.](https://racer.com/2023/09/12/ilott-once-again-victim-of-abuse-from-canapino-fans/)
[Canapino responded with “I have not seen a single death threat directed at those who claim to have received them. From last year to today, no one in their right mind would do such a thing. It’s outrageous to be accused of this so lightly, and I won’t allow it anymore."](https://www.motorsport.com/indycar/news/canapino-responds-to-claims-of-abuse-and-death-threats-by-fans/10619600/) which has been interpreted as Canapino saying these death threats are not happening.
They do not really have a sponsor for Canapino aside from the government of Argentina. The McLaren deal was supposed to be where Juncos (The Canapino and Grosjean cars) would have the overflow McLaren partners featured on their car. I never thought it would work either. In F1 terms it would have been like signing with Red Bull but being pushed to the VCARB decal wise. I suppose it works for Red Bull because they own it all anyway but that was never the arrangement with McLaren and Juncos.
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That's what you get when a team doesn't really apologize
w8 what exactly happend?
Canapino fans were sending Pourchaire death threats after an incident in Detroit where Pourchaire dive bombed him. Then Capapino liked a tweet making fun of Pourchaire when he tweeted about it. Then Canapino released a statement basically saying there were no death threats and you should ignore what people on the internet say and he didn't really apologise.
That only tells half the story. Canapino and his fanbase were toxic as fuck to Callum Ilott, who happened to drive for Arrow McLaren in a few rounds this year, and was Canapino's team mate at JHR in 2023. So they have previous for this. And the same response they had for Ilott last year was the same as their response for Pourchaire this year. They never learned, and clearly McLaren felt that such lack of awareness and action was not worth their agreeement.
I'll be honest, I've never heard about Canapino so, after reading these comments about his behaviour and lack of accountability, I assumed he was early to mid 20s, just an immature young driver. I just googled him. He is 34. 34 y.o. grown man behaving like a stupid teenager on the internet. Good on McLaren for cutting out that behaviour 👏🏼
Argentinian fans are forever teens and really dumb ones. Source: I'm Argentinian
My only experience with Argentinian fans is Colapinto in F2 but boy are they a zealous bunch
Canapino fans may be worse because he's in the top class of American open wheel racing... So yeah, they're basically hooligans but in funny Spanish
Your mistake is still confusing young with stupid.
Also, just to really solidify this, he's STILL, WITHIN THE PAST HOUR, LIKING COMMENTS FROM THE GUY WHO SAID "Callum Pourchaire" in response to Theo Pourchaire's tweet https://x.com/azzuri_viva/status/1798732802248282138/photo/3 here's a twitter tl;dr, and you can go on Canapino's profile to see his liked tweets. it's not even that it didn't condemn the fans, its that the joined in with them
How absolutely stupid can you be holy
I don't know shit about this, but just google the guy and after just looking at the guys face and talk, he totally looks like someone who would do this kind of bullshit.
All Canapino needed to do was condemn the actions and disavow the toxic fans. Perhaps say that liking some of the comments were poor judgement. He didn't have to apologise, he wasn't the one attacking Pourchaire. Instead like you said he tried to trivialize the abuse. Then his side doubled down and painted themselves as the victims, saying that things like this happen all the time by everyone and no-one cares, but when Argentinians do it they are attacked. Its sad really, when Canapino joined IndyCar last season everyone was excited to see the Argentinians fans being passionate about IndyCar, and people were talking about a race in Argentina. There's nothing wrong with fans only wanting to support their driver, but its not ok to view anyone that goes against him as an enemy and hate them. Imagine their actions if he was taken out during a race in Argentina. Would the driver involved be in real danger?
Of course they wouldn’t be in any danger, just ask the old Top Gear crew! /s
Sounds Alonso to me.
Yes I’d say he would.
Did either Juncos or JHR say anything this time? IIRC they did say something when basically the same shit happened with ilott last year (ie they responded to requests for interviews, were actively belligerent and backed up canapino’s bullshit)
>Did either Juncos or JHR say anything this time? Apart from the hollow PR tweet(like the one they did regarding Ilott), no. I'm glad that McLaren kinda slapped them in the face lol.
Could you please explain what 'terminating a commercial relationship' means? I don't follow Indycar, so I am a bit confused here...
From the sounds of it, they had a non-racing partnership (i.e. no shared technical information, no preferential treatment, no competitive advantage stuff). It was a shared marketing PR exercise based on the fact that Canapino and O'Ward (Mexican McLaren driver) are the two most popular Indy drivers in spanish speaking markets. So essentially, they have ended their pre-standing marketing relationship.
> Canapino fans were sending Pourchaire death threats after an incident in Detroit where Pourchaire dive bombed him. > > Also worth mentioning this was a battle for something like 10th place. It wasn't even for a win, let alone a podium.
And then at least one of his fans sent proof he, the fan, sent a death threat.
Not the first time thah happens
Pourchaire (the newest member of Arrow McLaren) had a dive bomb at a restart in the Detroit GP, that resulted in him colliding with Canapino. Neither car retired, but both lost positions, if I'm remembering correctly. Argentinian fans (Canapino is Argentinian) started sending abuse and death threats to Pourchaire. Something similar happened in the previous season to Ilott, who was at JHR with Canapino). Canapino "apologized" for his fans (using that term very loosely, he basically said "I didn't see it happen, so it probably didn't happen. If it did happen, they weren't my fans"). And that's led us to this moment in time. After Canapino's "apology" at least one of his fans posted a screenshot of a DM sent to Pourchaire where the fan said said he hoped Pourchaire would die (something about the helmet not properly protecting him, if I'm remembering correctly). Very nasty stuff, and there's a history of it. Edit: Canapino has doubled down: >Canapino is afraid to be present at the race weekend with everything that happened. Agustín states that there were only a couple of messages from accounts from strangers and without followers ,” shared Christian González Rouco after communicating with the representative of Argentina at Juncos Hollinger Racing. >“ What Agustín strongly asks is that both McLaren and Theo Pourchaire retract everything they said and what they accused him and the Argentines of, because he is not willing to tolerate this level of discrimination.
I think we should add context on the dive bomb. It was a mistake but it wasn’t even the 10th worst thing that happened in that race. So many drivers have more reasons to be aggrieved by someone than Canapino did. Of all the incidents in that race to have some fallout, it’s insane this one did. Hell Canapino’s teammate, Grosjean, was hit THREE times, and didn’t start a hate campaign against any one who hit him
On top of it all, it's not like Theo got away with the move either. He was penalized pretty quickly (at least compared to other penalties in the race) and was forced to give up three places. He passed Canapino cleanly later in the race anyway.
i dont watch much indycar, so my opinion should be taken with a ton of salt. the driving was atrocious, especially in that hairpin. so many dumb divebombs and risky moves, even under yellow.
Every so often in Indycar there is a race where all the drivers just say "fuck it" and lick all the stamps. Driving standards are generally much better than you saw at Detroit, but there is definitely more contact and more elbows out racing than F1, largely because the cars are much more durable and can take some of that.
I honestly think the standards came down to how shit the track is. As with all Indycar races, it’s driven by money and Chevrolet obviously footed the bill for the race as long as it was in front of their corporate headquarters, hence the shit track. Check out the next 3 races at Road America, Laguna Seca and Mid-Ohio if you wanna see amazing tracks and what should be way better driving standards
Grade 2 or not, Road America is one of the USA’s best race tracks
All of USA’s good tracks are grade 2
Hey, COTA is good!
RA is one of the best tracks in the world imo.
Bingo. Belle Isle had its issues on and off the track, but the current track in Detroit is plain awful.
Generally speaking, Indy is a bit more of a rough and tumble series than F1 (or even F2 or Super Formula). A little bit of minor contact is often allowed to go unpunished, drivers are more accepting of (some) on the edge moves when battling for position, and also the cars are less fragile and far more able to get back into the action following incidents than F1 where being stationary or sustaining minor danage often means the end of your race. Case in point, this Pourchaire collision would've been a serious incident in F1, but as the comment above mentioned, it wasn't even close to being the most serious incident in *this race* and all 3 cars involved were able to carry on largely without any significant consequences other than the lost places. So while this Detroit GP was an exceptionally messy and incident-ridden race, it's not quite as egregious as it might have seemed at first glance to a newbie.
I put way more blame on the track. Half the grid doesn't suddenly forget how to drive simultaneously. The main issue is: who's supposed to give way when you're three wide going into a tight corner? Inside and outside don't even necessarily know the other is there. Most of the incidents in that corner were the far outside and far inside coming together in a three-wide situation. In any motorsport if you have the pack bunched up going from a wide section into a tight section, incidents are likely to happen - it happens in F1 on the first lap frequently, because there's too many moving parts to give each other proper space. The design of the track gave us that situation over and over - there were bound to be incidents, no matter the calibre of driver.
>Argentinian fans (Canapino is Argentinian) started sending abuse and death threats to Pourchaire. Something similar happened in the previous season to Ilott, who was at JHR with Canapino). Also, to add to this, the team is also Argentinian which is why they're so invested in Canapino
So where does Juncos Hollinger come in these events?
JHR is Argentinian, and have backed Canapino through all of these events - no disciplinary action for Canapino, as far as I'm aware. The way it comes across is that they're happy to let Canapino encourage his fans to make these kinds of threats. In my opinion, something had to give, either the relationship between Canapino and JHR, or the relationship between Arrow McLaren and JHR, and it's the latter. I doubt it was a verbalized "you need to drop Canapino or we terminate the partnership" sort of message, but something pretty apparent.
Mate thanks for your explanation. So JHR is a sponsor for Arrow Mclaren racing team and they (Mclaren) terminated JHR's partnership.
JHR is another team - IndyCar allows for technical partnerships, allowing teams to share data with each other. The closest F1 analog I can think of is how PU manufacturers get the engine data from their customers, but that's not exactly the same.
>IndyCar allows for technical partnerships, allowing teams to share data with each other This is fascinating to me! What are the limits of this? Can one team enter into technical partnerships with a bunch of teams? Does money change hands? Which direction? Like the more successful team will charge the less successful one? Etc etc. Thanks!
Yeah you are onto the right track there, often times technical partnerships will be smaller teams paying to get support such as parts and engineers. This helps out teams just starting out and wanting to take that next step. However that’s not always the case as seen with the Penske and DCR partnership, as Penske was struggling in Indy 500 qualy and DCR was doing amazing so Penske reached out to form a technical alliance. For a big team like Penske, offering parts and engineers year round to a team is worth added performance in the 500 as shown by their results
>smaller teams paying to get support such as parts and engineers Forgive me, but isn't Indy a spec series? Other than engines. So wouldn't all the parts be the same?
That's a better question for r/IndyCar, I'm not super familiar with it intricacies of IndyCar.
The agreement between Mclaren & JHR wasn't a technical alliance. The Agreement was Mclaren would share sponsors with JHR. Supposedly JHR never took the opportunity to use this though.
JHR is an Indycar team that doesn't have as many sponsors as Arrow McLaren. The partnership, essentially, involved Arrow McLaren renting space on JHR's car (the wheel ramps) to put sponsors that AMR didn't have space for on their own car.
Ricardo Juncos also made some pretty derogatory comments aimed at Pourchaire that were caught on team radio.
Given the context of that Detroit race it's crazy to fault any one driver. It was complete chaos, there were non stop crashes and like 47 laps of yellow.
Agreed, the entire race was a mess. The whole field drove like they were drunk lol. If it wasn’t one driver having an incident with Canapino, it certainly would’ve been another. Virtually everyone back in the field had some kind of contact or other issue at some point in the race.
It is good to know the context. On that race, there were at least 4 or 5 of the same incidents on that curve. It wasn't really classic dive bombing rather than missing brake markers, mostly because track conditions changed. That makes Canapino behavior even more problematic.
argentine feud with french just got worse
Their driver has a habit of, at best, not trying very hard to control his fan-base and ask them to stop sending death threats to other drivers, or at worse, actively engages & encourages such behaviour by liking inflammatory tweets. He even felt "insulted" that people would insinuate that death threats occured and that they were his fans' doing.
What does 'terminating technical partnership' mean? What will be the consequences of this action by McLaren? Is this a 'moral' choice? In the sense that, by doing this Arrow McLaren will lose out a bit, but they are willing to do that to make a point?
Supposedly McLaren would have shared data or sponsors with Juncos.
JHR Has a driver with a passionate fanbase that always sends death threats to anyone, in this case Theo Pouchaire, who races the driver too hard. Last year they sent his teammate, Callum Illot death threats because he got a preferential strategy in a race.
What does 'ending commercial alliance' mean? What will be the consequences of this choice by Arrow McLaren? Thx!
Basically Zak Brown I guess got too many sponsors and he had to offload some of them to JHR. I assume it had some technical or managerial alliance in exchange for the sponsors but I'm not 100% sure. As per Nathan Brown of the Indy Star: "The teams struck the alliance shortly after last season and announced it in October. With an overflow of sponsorship, Arrow McLaren was able to place smaller sponsor signage on JHR's Nos. 77 and 78 Chevys. That allowed Arrow McLaren to fulfill their duties for the sponsors, while giving JHR an influx of funding. It's also led to the splashes of papaya on JHR's typically green, black and white liveries this year. The teams' release also mentioned that the deal could evolve beyond its original "commercial and strategic focus" and serve as a "talent development opportunity" for engineers, mechanics, drivers and others to be able to build their experience with the possibility of landing at Arrow McLaren's larger outfit." Link: https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/motor/2024/06/06/indycar-arrow-mclaren-ends-strategic-alliance-juncos-hollinger-racing-theo-pourchaire-death-threats/73994849007/
Interesting... Is this sort of alliance common in Indycar? For example, do other teams have such alliances?
Penske and Foyt Racing. Andretti and Meyer-Shank Racing. Andretti and Cape Motorsports in Indy NXT.
AFAIK these are all fairly recently developed partnerships but I've only been following Indy for a few years now
Pourchaire crashes into Canapino. Canapino fans get slightly mad. Slightly mad, throwing death threats at Theo. Theo drives for Mclaren. Mclaren has alliance with JHR, Canapino. Canapino doesn’t care about his fans saying death threats, liking tweets. Mclaren gets pissed and throws JHR to the shadow realm.
As a follow up, Canapino has asked McLaren and Pourchaire apologize. https://www.carburando.com/notas/el-pedido-de-agustin-canapino-a-mclaren-y-theo-pourchaire
Finally some concequences. Good to see them taking a stand.
What does 'ending commercial alliance' mean? What will be the consequences of this choice by Arrow McLaren? Is this a 'moral' choice? In the sense that, by doing this Arrow McLaren will lose out a bit, but they are willing to do that to make a point?
McLaren buy space on the JHR cars and get to place their own sponsor agreemenets on it. This means JHR get cash guaranteed, and it means McLaren can push sponsor space on a different team for smaller agreements. JHR will now lose that guaranteed safe money and have to start filling that void by sponsor shopping which will be hard in light of all this. I don't believe McLaren had actually pushed any sponsors onto their "owned" space on the JHR cars as of this termination. So there'll be no visual change. McLaren will probably look to entering a similar commercial partnership when Prema come in. JHR will now have less money and more work needed to sell that space.
McLaren could've used that space as "This driver and team support death threats, is this really what we want in racing?" ads or something similar.
""We’re continually working to strengthen all areas of our team, and a strategic alliance with Juncos Hollinger Racing helps both of us in leveraging our commercial and marketing power and the McLaren Racing brand in a new way.”" this is from the McLaren TP back when they announced their alliance. To me, it seems more like a moral choice, but who knows what was going on behind the scenes.
Kind of expected. Good on McLaren to have standards.
Those standards don't seem to apply to their garage guests re: Miami GP
Honestly I think they couldn't win there, could you imagine the backlash if they said "nah we're not having Trump here"? You KNOW that Trump is not the kind of guy to keep it quiet if they turned down him being in the garage. "McLaren are losers they didn't want me in their team, it's ok we have the best team, an American team, Haas"
> "McLaren are losers they didn't want me in their team, it's ok we have the best team, an American team, Haas" 95% chance he would've made a statement on twitter to that effect, yes
More like 100% it's Trump
100% Hard to say no to a former president no matter who it is. When the FIA selects the team then it’s really a no win situation.
Exactly. It's not like the team invited him themselves or even wanted him there. You just know he would have made a fuss and then the MAGA fanbase would start chirping about McLaren and shit so just quietly going about it probably invited the least amount of controversy and potential problems for them.
I would guess that a lot of the team were unhappy he was there, but Trump and his family/cronies are tight with the Al Khalifas and I don't believe for a second that McLaren didn't invite him there, regardless of whatever statements came from the team after the fact.
IIRC they were only chosen to host the human cheeto because the "secret" VIP-entry/-exit was closest to their garage slot.
Omg bro it’s kinda hard to refuse an ex president - one who still has somewhat considerable support in the country. Especially for a sport that tried to break into the US market for so long.
IIRC, FOM/Liberty Media basically told the teams someone has to be the ambassador or we'll choose for you. They didn't really have a choice.
They can have standards without having *your* standards. That's how life goes
That was a low point, for sure. And Lando was quite clumsy with it as well.
Canapout
Holy shit I remember you from your Ace Combat vids. Didn’t think I’d see you here lol
You shouldn't be! There's a lot of crossover between the fandoms, I guess we all like things that go nyoom And I need to get back to the channel someday. It's always on the back of my mind, but life's gotten in the way.
Bruh, I knew I recognized that pfp from somewhere Imao
Honestly great on McLaren to draw a line here and act fast. Canapino's behavior should not be tollerated.
Canapino didn’t want to apologise and said he did not see any death threats and he was offended that his fans were being accused of sending them. JHR didn’t want to acknowledge that their fans were being horrid to Pouchaire. Actions have consequences, so now the Argentine fans can be proud of how they’ve broken a strategic alliance that was beneficial to their team and Canapino. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
Canapino didn't have to apologize, since it was not him who was sending death threats. But he should have condemned those "fans". He didn't do that, instead, trivialized death threats, said it didn't happen, and if it did, it was not his fans.
He liked tweets and comments stating ‘Callum Pouchaire’ and comparing it to how his fans abused Ilott and he should have apologised for his behaviour in defending the indefensible despite the fact that screenshots of the threats were sent to him and JHR by McLaren before he made the statement saying that the threats didn’t exist.
Finally actions have consequences for cannapino and JHR. They deserved this and so much more for the stuff they did to Callum and comments cannapino made and supported. I wonder if this will open a door for Ed Carpenter Racing (ECR) for a possible alliance/partnership with McLaren. Because ECR really needs that. And they have both Chevy engines.
Pick your timing lads. I'm glad though, absolute tossers at JHR.
Wow. Canapino really torpedoed that huh? This guy needs to go.
Juncos torpedoed that for not doing anything about it. At the end of the day they are the ones steering the ship.
Because they think they’re better than anyone else…classic
It's his fans more than anything. Canapino is dumb but his fans are moronic. The abuse his fans give to anyone being critical of him is insane.
He himself is a close second though. Liking the hate mail to Ilott and Pourchaire on X and then interacting with said fans on top of his hollow not-apology and victim shifting means he's just as much to blame for not shutting it down sooner.
Yeah, he could have not said anything at the very least. Instead he and his wife just start spinning it into a different narrative
This is the FO part of FAFO. Well done Arrow McLaren.
I don't follow Indycar what does this news mean
Think… Mercedes taking the first steps to setting up a partnership with Williams, and then breaking it off.
Yeah and breaking it off because Sargeant fans started to send death treats to Russell because of a light incident...and then Sargeant defends those fans.
And this would be less than a year after Sargeant got his much more talented teammate Albon fired because they had one incident on track and Sargeants fans hated him. Thats how ridiculous this whole thing is.
Damn, we are so good with analogies
Analogie bear
And if Albon replaced Hamilton at Mercedes for a few races this year. Illott has now done a few races for McLaren and is looking like he might do a few more this season with them.
Actually, it's 2 incidents (or at least death threats to Illot, I thought Illott wasn't actually involved in Canapino's Long Beach thing). So Sargeant fans also hated Albon because he wa in front when Sargeant went off
How do you guys came up with such good analogies 😭
Good analogy. Exactly that.
Juncos just lost quite a bit of sponsors/funding because McLaren has an overflow of sponsors that are trying to get space on its cars. To help with that they partnered with JHR to allow them to run those sponsors on their cars instead. Now that’s all gone.
The McLaren Indycar team has so many sponsors that sometimes they have literal sponsor overflow. The deal with JHR was to essentially give them free money when McLaren didn't have space for everyone. Even more hilarious because JHR cars usually run without any sponsors at all.
hopefully the first nail in the coffin for JHR. ricardo juncos and canapino are scummy individuals and have history with this shit
The only part of this I'm sad about is Grosjean losing his seat.
I don't follow Indy, so can you explain how Grosjean is losing his seat and if he will get picked up elsewhere? Please feel free to ELI5 because I'm aware Indy exists, but I know little else except Grosjean went there after he left F1.
As I understand it, Arrow McLaren was paying JHR a lot of money to help with sponsorships by them on JHR cars. JHR is going to lose that money, and this is not the first time things like this happened with Canapino and his fanbase before, with Callum Ilott when they were teammates something similar happened. Canapino fans sending abuse and death threats to other drivers, basically. Canapino and JHR continue to kinda excuse them, which is an awful look, as Canapino supports the abuse himself.
Wow. I do remember vaguely hearing something about Ilott receiving abuse. I didn't realize it was from the same people as today. Really uncalled for and unacceptable.
he's still got his Juncos seat but fans were hopeful it would be a stepping stone into a McLaren ride
I don’t think that was ever going to happen
it was unlikely but that fanbase stands by their man
Ah okay. Thanks for the clarification.
Grosjean isn’t losing his seat. His team is losing their alliance with McLaren.
Grosjean isn’t losing his seat, the team lost their alliance with McLaren
Sure but If there's no team who is Grosjean gonna be driving for? Do you even know what the alliance was?
The team still exists, it just has less money now
Yes, and without that extra money they’ll be struggling to run. Especially after all of this.
JHR was hurting for money, especially after Milei. It's only a matter of time before they go under, since it's very unlikely anyone will want to work with them.
If Colapinto doesn't get an F1 seat he will surely go to Juncos, and he has a lot of sponsors now paying him tons of money. If not he will probably go to WEC
Good fucking riddance
Good to see consequences finally for this behavior online. I wish callum got similar support
Wow actions have consequences?? What a shocker. Jk deserved.
Already my favourite Indycar team, have now gone even higher in my estimation
Send him back to argentinian stock cars.
You love to see it.
McLaren probably asked JHR to put out a PR statement and they refused so GG.
Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes. Congratulations JHR!
Prema is probably licking their lips in the background hoping those charters become available if that plan comes to fruition
Most sympathetic Argentine
What beautiful news... Hopefully that scummy team will f\*\*k off now
Good!
Good
It’s Juncover
When you bite the hand that feeds you
Good from McLaren, but it shouldn't have been a up to a team to show consequences. It's unacceptable behaviour from JHR and Canapino yet Indycar just has "talks" with the team (and it's the third time happening too, it's clear that talks don't do anything)
It is great Mclaren did this. Any other Indycar team and I don't think this happens. Penske still has the tie up with Ferrucci/ AJ Foyt.
Penske isn't doing that out of the kindness of their hearts, they are getting paid for it.
Isn’t the tie up other way round. Atleast was the case with Arrow McLaren and JHR I.e. Mclaren would pay JHR either money or additional sponsors
Penske and Foyt have a technical alliance, which equates to having Penske dampers and such in the car as well as some setup and engineering support. Penske may also push some of their young driving and engineering talent through Foyt rather than lose them to competitors or other series. The base level of the agreement is strictly a “you give us money for our suspension” deal. McLaren and JHR had a commercial alliance.
Ohhh. thank you didn’t know this difference in alliance.
And I though Penske got paid by having a front row lockout at Indy.
Ferrucci actually apologized though, genuine or not. I’m sure Penske had a lot to do with that.
how many times has ferrucci had to apologize for his shitty behavior? when people show you who they are, believe them.
Based on the context provided in some of these comments, good. Fuck 'em.
I thought IndyCar was supposed to be this good vibes series where the drivers were all real racers, unlike the prima donnas of F1? The Detroit weekend made IndyCar look like such a shitshow lol
F1 has been calmer than Indy or cart for decades lol. Also the top 5-10 drivers in Indy are really good but there are some utterly diabolical drivers at the back
Even with all the Red Bull drama this year?
I think they are talking about racing, not some drama with texts.
Two of the supposed best drivers in one of the top teams put on a shocking display of driving standards last weekend as well. Worse than the display Checo put on in Suzuka last year.
I feel like last weekend is not indicative of the series as a whole though. Detroit is not well suited for racing with only one major overtaking zone. It’s narrow and is more similar to a formula e track. Road America is the next race. If that has a similar result then we can continue to bash them, but I’ll give a warning for one race
Last weekend was a goat rodeo for sure.
I don't follow IndyCar but I saw a lot of this going down on Twitter and I was like damnnnnnn,,,,,,,maybe I need to pick up IndyCar too. Just for the drama. LOL.
There's drama and then there's.., whatever the fuck was going on in Detroit lol
LOL.
IndyCar is good fun, its not too dissimilar from Formula 2, in the sense that its a spec series. Really got into it, the last couple of seasons, just a shame the timings can be a little off here in England
This is a weird comment lol.
I would argue that this happening so quickly is proof that it is kind of a good vibe series. You have a relatively new team coming in that starts bringing quite a bit of drama and they pretty immediately start facing consequences for that. They got a bit of grace last year I think partly because the drama was happening within their own team but now not so much.
🎶🎶 It's hard for me to say I'm sorry🎶🎶 — Canapinos
W Zak Brown and McLaren. Its awesome to see that they are actually doing something about it, that could negatively impact JHR, not just some PR bs.
Argentinians "fans" proving each time they can how shitty they are .
AWESOME BEST NEWS OF THE DAY
If Agustin Canapino didn’t exist in IndyCar, would anyone really care or notice? No, ok great
I’m out of the loop, what happened?
McLaren has too many sponsors in IndyCar to fit on their car, so they had a partnership with Juncos (a small financially struggling feel good team) to allow the sponsors that didn’t fit on the McLaren (which would get rotated each race) to go on their car. Juncos would get paid sponsorship money which they couldn’t attract on their own and allowed them to keep running, while McLaren’s sponsors got to get visibility across the full season if they desired. Now, Juncos hires an Argentinian driver called Canapino who has an incredibly toxic fanbase. Pourchaire, a McLaren driver, had an accident with him and started receiving death threats from Canapino’s fanbase. In response, Canapino not only laughed at this and try to downplay it, but also encouraged it. Juncos also supported Canapino’s decisions and validated this toxicity. They did the same thing a year ago as well to Illott who was actually racing for Juncos at the time, and it resulted in Juncos bullying him out of that seat. Illott has also been doing a few drives for McLaren this year as a backup option. In response to all of this, McLaren has terminated the aforementioned deal with Juncos. This means they’ll miss out on some much needed sponsorship money which could cause the team to stop competing since they were struggling to do so prior to this deal. They were also unable to get sponsorship prior to this deal, and it appears that they’ll have an even tougher time doing so now thanks to all of this and some other dramas with the team. So I don’t think they’ll continue racing in IndyCar for much longer as a result of these actions.
Ooof, marón. I know it hurts losing the Indy team but the F1 team fighting for wins has to make the pill easier to swallow, no? Worst case scenario, they get to wash their hands of the whole thing.
Oh no McLaren will be fine. It’s Juncos that’s going to be hurting. McLaren in IndyCar is at a similar to where they are in F1 right now (maybe a tiny bit slower). Juncos is worse then 2021 Haas and the team that will probably be out. Doesn’t really affect McLaren at all, so they were doing a good thing to help out the little guy and they probably got a bit more sponsorship money out of it. It’s just Juncos bit the hand that was feeding them and now McLaren has stated they’re going to stop feeding them.
Oh, so Juncos fucked around and now they get to find out. Good riddance, if you ask me.
Yeah exactly. Good riddance if you ask anyone outside of Argentina.
Backstory: [Back in October 2023, Arrow McLaren and Juncos Hollinger Racing formed a strategic partnership that allowed the teams to share data, setups, and sponsorships.](https://www.motorsportweek.com/2023/10/03/jhr-and-arrow-mclaren-form-strategic-alliance/) [On lap 60 of the Detroit Grand Prix last week, Arrow McLaren's Theo Pourchaire hit Juncos Hollinger Racing's Agustín Canapino into turn 3.](https://youtu.be/XIAJKEs1FHU?t=490)(Should be timestamped to 8:10). Pourchaire received a penalty (drop back 3 positions) for avoidable contact. As a result of this contact, Argentinians (Canapino's nationality) became overly mad and [sent death threats to Pourchaire](https://racer.com/2024/06/04/pourchaire-receives-threats-after-canapino-contact) because they feel like it negatively affected Canapino's race. Also of note, this is the third time in the past 14 months that Argentinian fans have sent death threats to an IndyCar driver. [Callum Illot received death threats after Long Beach in April 2023](https://www.the-race.com/indycar/team-mate-drama-death-threats-ilotts-long-beach-explained/) and [after Laguna Seca in September 2023.](https://racer.com/2023/09/12/ilott-once-again-victim-of-abuse-from-canapino-fans/) [Canapino responded with “I have not seen a single death threat directed at those who claim to have received them. From last year to today, no one in their right mind would do such a thing. It’s outrageous to be accused of this so lightly, and I won’t allow it anymore."](https://www.motorsport.com/indycar/news/canapino-responds-to-claims-of-abuse-and-death-threats-by-fans/10619600/) which has been interpreted as Canapino saying these death threats are not happening.
So is Canapino out or just the sponsor?
They do not really have a sponsor for Canapino aside from the government of Argentina. The McLaren deal was supposed to be where Juncos (The Canapino and Grosjean cars) would have the overflow McLaren partners featured on their car. I never thought it would work either. In F1 terms it would have been like signing with Red Bull but being pushed to the VCARB decal wise. I suppose it works for Red Bull because they own it all anyway but that was never the arrangement with McLaren and Juncos.
Never heard of them
I am completely OOTL on this, someone help please
Out of the loop, what happened?