Motorsport Media Hub

Tag: MMR

  • Ford Racing Drop Nate Cicero Following Abrupt Retirement, Departure From McCumbee McAleer

    Ford Racing Drop Nate Cicero Following Abrupt Retirement, Departure From McCumbee McAleer

    On the heels of the announcement that McCumbee McAleer Racing and driver Nate Cicero had severed professional ties, Ford Racing have now also confirmed that they’re ending their partnership with the 21-year-old, dropping him from their team’s junior development program.

    In a quote provided to SportsCar365.com, Ford kept things short and to the point in regards to Cicero’s standing with the brand, stating pointedly that the now former GS points leader in the Michelin Pilot Challenge series is no longer associated with the dev program.

    The statement reads –

    “Ford Racing holds every member of our program to a high standard of conduct, on and off the track. Effective immediately, Nate Cicero is no longer part of the Driver Development program.”

    In directly related news, McCumbee McAleer Racing announced that Finn Wiebelhaus will be the one to replace Cicero alongside Robert Noaker, with the move being ready and in place for this weekend at Virginia International Raceway.

    The team will be looking to finish out the Michelin Pilot season as GS champions, as the MMR Mustang GT4 currently leads the title fight by 100 points over both Turner Motorsports and Auto Technic Racing, who are both tied for second place with 1710 points a piece.

    For an introduction to Wiebelhaus, the 20-year-old is a rising talent in the GT landscape and is already rated as a Silver driver by the FIA. The young German is currently competing with Haupt Racing Team in both GT World Challenge Europe and in DTM as a rookie. Wiebelhaus has scored a P3 and P2 finish in his first-year campaign in the DTM circuit, while last season he secured the ADAC GT Masters championship alongside teammate Salman Owega, also racing for HRT.

    As for Cicero, the immediate and sudden fall from one of the more engaging personalities on the IMSA/GT4 grid to a complete banishment across the board in his professional career brings way more questions than answers at this point in time. We aren’t in the business of alluding to sources or things we hear when we ever do have something of substance, and this is by no means going on the record with reporting any sort of update (are those enough qualifiers?) but what we can contribute is that from what we’ve heard through people with knowledge of the happenings, we can confidently say that the responses by both MMR and Ford Racing are certainly justified and warranted if these things turn out to be accurate.

    It’s unfortunate for a variety of reasons from the people involved to the damaged professional relationships and beyond, but again, the actions of MMR and Ford will surely be looked at as swift and responsible once all of the facts come out, whenever that may be.

  • Nate Cicero, Co-Leader In GS Championship Fight, Takes Shock Leave From Racing

    Nate Cicero, Co-Leader In GS Championship Fight, Takes Shock Leave From Racing

    In a story that has raised way more questions than answers to this point in its very early lifecycle, we surely haven’t heard the end of the sudden fallout between Nate Cicero and McCumbee McAleer Racing.

    Back on August 8th, Nate Cicero posted on his Instagram page a brief, out-of-the-blue message that he is taking a leave from racing to focus on “personal matters,” asking those in the world to appreciate his privacy as he works through whatever he’s dealing with, with the 21-year-old ending the post with a blended present and past-tense message of “I want to thank everyone who supported me over the years.”

    Fans began offering their support for Cicero on different posts and racing channels due to the fact that comments were made unavailable to leave on the post itself. Naturally, when you hear something worded like that, you start to imagine the worst when it comes to bouts of depression, the state of someone’s mental well-being, etc.

    For Cicero, he’s been on an amazing trajectory in his racing career since claiming Rookie of the Year honros in 2023 in Mazda MX-5, while in 2025 he joined McCumbee McAleer Racing alongside Jensen Altzman halfway through the campaign, managing to claim three pole positions and a race win at Road America.

    Paired up with Robert Noaker for 2026, to date the pair had performed consistently all season to the tune of a first place positioning with 1810 points to their name, 100 ahead of both Dillon Machavern and Luca Mars of Turner Motorsports, and funny enough, Roland Krainz and Cicero’s boss Stevan McAleer, of Auto Technic Racing.

    However, now with just three races to go in the season, the partnership is severed between Cicero and MMR, had the team has since released their own version of the happenings on their social pages:

    Yeah, like we said, that absolutely doesn’t read like the two parties have parted ways because of mental health concerns.

    We’re not here to speculate, but in these sort of instances across all professional sports, when something like this goes down 90% of the time its related to either the contract and a breach of terms, or there was an inappropriate relationship that went down between people or peoples. If it’s the contract side of things, perhaps some conversations were had regarding seats for next year, switching teams here at this time, etc., which depending on how advanced and detailed those talks may have been, it would give MMR the out to sever ties immediately with Cicero.

    The next race for Michelin Pilot Challenge is coming up next week at VIR, and we’re gonna guess that we’ll have a better sense of what happened in this bizarre story by the time we get to racing on the weeknd of the 22nd..