“But once again, Veekay feels like a man stuck in purgatory. It feels like Groundhog Day whenever his name comes up. He can’t be his best because he drives for Ed Carpenter, but he cannot do better because he drives for Ed Carpenter. It’s a drag. Veekay can leave at the end of 2025, and he needs to do everything he can to put himself in the shop window because this is a story we’ve all seen before already.” – Dre in Part 1
*6 Hours Later: Rinus Veekay leaves ECR*
SON OF A BIT-
Thank you to Ed Carpenter for making Part 1 of the Season Review out of date mere hours after I hit “publish”. Next time, have your people call my people. It’s me, I’m people.
As you’ve probably heard by now, Rinus Veekay has left ECR, which was a genuine shocker.
Rinus had a year left on his contract. There was the usual end-of-season talk about finalising budgets and plans from Ed but there was very little to indicate this was coming, and by all accounts, he seemed happy for both Veekay and Christian Rasmussen to return for 2025. A week later, the most tenured driver in Ed’s history not named after himself, is gone.
The reason? They got Alex Rossi in the #20 car, with Veekay now deemed expendable, Christian Rasmussen full-time in the #21 car, and Carpenter now as a 500-only entrant. On top of that, Ed’s managed to secure new co-ownership of the team via Ted Gelov; owner of Heartland Food Products (Think Splenda), and according to Racer.com, it’s a deal worth over $40 million and it’s all down to the confirmation of IndyCar’s new charter system and the security of a guaranteed entry for 25 out of the 2025 field’s 27 cars, Barring the 500. Everyone except for Prema, that is.
Having a chat in our Discord with co-host RJ O’Connell had us both saying the same thing – That if Alex Rossi is desperate for that second Indy 500 win, ECR is the best place for him to go after it. He’s a superb oval racer, and ECR’s white whale has been Indianapolis, where Rinus has averaged a Top 5 birth in qualifying for his career, and where Ed himself was second in 2018. It sucks that there’s still such a huge disconnect between the Indy 500 and Astor Cup, but that’s how IndyCar moves.
Alex Rossi is not the driver he once was (More on that in a bit), but he’s still Top 10 in the series right now, it raises your team’s ceiling and if you believe in Rasmussen’s upside enough to sign him to a multi-year extension, then moving Rinus aside does make some sense. Alex had to have been allured by the new ownership and investment too. A lot of positives here, probably more so than the strongly hinted original plan of Sting Ray Robb and Alex heading together to RLL (Under his Dad’s management).
If you’re Rinus, I don’t know what’s next. In a similar situation to Callum Illot last year, he’s essentially been blindsided given this was an 11th-hour deal after the season has finished. And the lay of the land doesn’t look pretty. Chip Ganassi Racing is almost certainly keeping Kyffin Simpson as his paying driver in the #8 car. He’s shipped Marcus Armstrong out to Meyer Shank, who is now full. Those would be the only seats left you’d probably want.
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing is the most likely landing spot given Lundgaard’s departure and you’re probably keeping Fittipaldi on for funding reasons. If not them, you’re down to the bottom-end seats like Dale Coyne, Juncos and Prema, and the latter has Robert Schwartzman likely to join from their alumni, and Conor Daly has to be a factor for Juncos given his incredible form to close 2024.
Simply put, it’s a difficult road for Veekay from here. Is he at the top of anyone’s list? He should be, but that’s not how this series works. Wish the Dutchman all the best.
Into Part 2 of my IndyCar 2024 Season preview, and it’s time we tackle the midfield. AJ Foyt, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing and McLaren all go under the microscope, where there’s some genuine hope, a lot of mediocrity, and why I’ve finally run out of patience with the Papaya…
AJ Foyt Racing
Season Highlight: Santino Ferrucci became the main character / Season Lowlight: Santino Ferrucci became the main character
I can’t believe that Foyt made Part 2. It’s genuine, I couldn’t even justify doing it as a joke. Let’s cut to the chase here, Santino Ferrucci was so good, it genuinely felt like an injustice to leave them in Part 1, because, for the first time in maybe a decade, there feels like there’s some genuine hope at Foyt’s team.
I talked about it back in Portland, but a lot of this is down to the technical partnership with Penske. I never thought I’d see the day both AJ and Roger would join forces, but it’s worked a treat. Michael Cannon, IndyCar’s favourite car whisperer has been huge in turning the team around, with shared setups, and Ferrucci delivering on that promise. Strong at the Indy 500 again too, even if the result wasn’t quite the podium of 2023.
They’re also moving their cars together to avoid that silly distant gap between developing them. They were able to tie Ferrucci down on a deserved long-term contract, and they snagged David Malukas on Roger’s dollar too. All of a sudden, Foyt has a formidable driver pairing and could be challenging the big hitters more frequently with two bullets in the chamber on all fronts. They remind me a lot of where RLL was when it was just Rahal and Sato, potentially knocking on the door of the big boys.
There’s a lot to like about Foyt going forward, even if their star driver completely leans into his villain arc… unlike Josef Newga- *shot*
Santino Ferrucci – 9th In Points (367), 1 Pole, 11 Top 10’s, Best Finish – 4th (x2) Average Finish – 10.9
Road Course Ranking – 14th / Oval Ranking – 5th
This is a complicated section. Purely from a performance standpoint, there’s no getting around it – This is a great season, the first truly great one in this review series so far. AJ Foyt has been at the ass-end of IndyCar power rankings for so long that I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen them legitimately in the Top 10 of the field again. The last time it did happen? Airton Daye in 2002. Santino’s pole position in Portland was Foyt’s first since Takuma Sato in Detroit a decade ago. On any level, he’s the spearhead that’s proven that the Penske collaboration is working.
Now, getting the criticisms out of the way – The Road Courses still need work. 14th overall there is pretty mid, even if it’s an improvement. And the qualifying is bad for someone at this level, an Average Start of nearly 15 is poor. Don’t let the Portland pole fool you, he only made Round 2 in Road/Street qualifying twice this season. But Top 5 in Oval Points is exceptional. It’s always been his bread and butter and while aggressive, it was never over the line and into dangerous. He scored more points on ovals this season than Colton Herta, Alex Palou, Alex Rossi and Will Power. Mad.
But I’m also going to be honest. I don’t feel great about it. Santino Ferrucci was one of the biggest smoking guns of NBC and IndyCar’s weird promotional tactics. From the constant gassing up of his petty beef with Romain Grosjean, to the series completely leaning in on the bit like it was Pro Wrestling. “Stirring up the hate cauldron”, “I’m not here to make friends”, and the constant social media posts.
NBC was desperate for a “heel” in a sea of generally good people. The problem is that Santino was no 2009 Randy Orton, someone who was so brilliantly dastardly as a villain you had to respect him, or even a Denny Hamlin, who leans into the jokes because he knows it’ll get a reaction, even if he’s a pretty chill and informative NASCAR figurehead behind it.
Santino gets “go away” heat, based off the actions that led him to IndyCar to begin with, and 2024 was a reminder of that in Detroit when he grabbed Kyle Kirkwood by the race suit and then made homophobic remarks about his fellow drivers afterwards. A reminder that in F1, Yuki Tsunoda said an ableist slur in the car and got fined 40,000 euros – Santino did similar and got a slap on the wrist from the series.
We’ll see if Fox handles him differently – Especially if Townsend Bell doesn’t move over with him. It’s a shame that Ferrucci was so good, and yet so frustrating at the same time. And one more potential cloud over everything – Was he genuinely this good, or was it all the Penske knowledge alongside him that made him a Top 10 runner? With David Malukas joining in 2025, I think we may be about to find out. The jury is still very much out, but it’s hard not to call this anything other than a great season. 8/10
Sting Ray Robb – 20th In Points (185), 1 Top 10, Best Finish – 9th, Average Finish – 19.4
Road Course Ranking: 22nd / Oval Ranking: 19th
I’m going to blow your minds, readers. I say this with full sincerity – Sting Ray Robb genuinely improved this year. It wasn’t by a huge margin, but it was worth acknowledging that by all measures, his second season was better.
It’s still pretty bad – He was the worst qualifier in IndyCar out of the full-timers with an Average Start of nearly 24 and there’s no way of making an average finish of 19 look good, but he was arguably a little unlucky not to make the Leader’s Circle, finishing just one point behind RLL’s Pietro Fittipaldi. We’ll always have the 9th-place finish in Gateway, his first Top 10 in the series.
Look, I think we’re just about done with Sting Ray Robb as an IndyCar driver. Even in slightly better circumstances, I can’t justify giving that man a seat, there’s too much better talent in IndyCar already, or talent I’d be intrigued to see have a go in the series. But as we all know, through his Catholic Church funding, he can essentially pay for his seat and/or someone else (His budget is rumoured to be around $9 MILLION), and that might be too tempting to resist if you’re for instance… Dale Coyne. So I wouldn’t be surprised if he shithoused his way onto the 2025 grid somewhere. 3/10
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing
Season Highlight: Christian Lundgaard is still him / Season Lowlight: I started a campaign for him to leave and it worked
Ooft. We could probably cut copy and paste what I said about this team last year here again and you’d hardly be able to tell the difference. Let’s try it! *dream sequence music plays*
“The three-car expansion feels like it’s stretched RLL to its limits and it’s shown on the track. This team is erratic. This garage has one of the drivers of the year as a neighbour to a driver who was bumped from the Indy 500, and another who was sacked with two races to go because the car was on the brink of falling out of the Leader’s Circle (And was only saved thanks to a quirk in the rules).”
…Yeah, that feels about right.
Like ECR in Part 1, RLL feels like a team that’s just stagnant and going nowhere fast. I’ve said for years that expanding to three cars was a mistake, and now it seems like gaining an extra charter might be the only real positive to take away from doing so.
Graham Rahal looks demotivated and he honestly might be cooked. Pietro Fittipaldi was the definition of a paying driver who didn’t give you much else beyond the cheque, and even Christian Lundgaard got bogged down a bit compared to his bonkers 2023 season, and deservedly, he got snapped up by a better team in McLaren. You still absolutely reek at ovals too, and they took up a third of the calendar this season.
And that leaves RLL in a bind. Lundgaard is gone and there’s only one driver who might be on his level to replace him – If Bobby Rahal doesn’t go in for Rinus Veekay after missing out on the Rossi/SRR double deal, then he’s mad. But with Fittipaldi and Rahal likely to stay, I don’t see a huge scope for improvement for this team either. It’s just so stretched between their three-car team and their IMSA BMW partnership (At least that came through at Indianapolis a fortnight ago).
And I’ve not even mentioned the friggin’ FBI raided them last week, with Racer alleging that a staff member the team poached from Andretti may have been using copyrighted data from his old team. AND THEY WERE SOMEHOW WORSE ON OVALS. WHAT THE FU-
This team is still a mess. Something drastic needs to change at RLL and I’m not sure where it’s going to come from.
Graham Rahal – 18th In Points (251), 1 Fast 6, 5 Top 10’s, Best Finish – 8th, Average Finish – 15.6
Road Course Ranking: 16th / Oval Ranking: 20th
Oh dear. Graham’s worst full-time IndyCar season since 2014. And even then he had a podium finish to write home about. This was just brutal and the fifth consecutive season where Rahal’s Championship ranking has fallen.
And the worst part is, he looks mentally checked out. He barely made the Indy 500 via the Last Chance Qualifier for the second year running and felt more sorry for Nolan Siegel getting bumped than relief over the fact that he made it. I remember after he was taken out at Milwaukee by Christian Rasmussen, he bared his soul during the TV interview, talking about how the new hybrid cars were the worst he’s ever driven on ovals, that the team have tried everything to improve and has failed and he looked lost as to what he can do.
Graham should still have some juice left in the tank. This was only his Age-35 season, which is relatively young for an IndyCar driver in a series where Power and Dixon are in the Top 6 and are almost a decade older. But once the motivation goes, it’s hard to get that back and I wonder if that’s taking over for Graham. Even last year he had that shot in the arm late on in the season where he was unlucky not to win the second Indy Road Course race and the Portland qualifying effort. Where’s the next shot in the arm going to come from?
18th in the standings is shocking for a driver who we know can and has won at every discipline in the series, even more so when Lundgaard has beaten him silly for two years straight. He’s considered it before, but is it time for Graham to leave his father’s team? 4/10
Pietro Fittipaldi – 19th in Points (186), Best Finish – 13th, Average Finish – 19.6
Road Course Ranking – 19th / Oval Ranking – 24th
Want to know an easy way to know if someone’s season was bad? Look at his name again – I tried to find some accomplishments like Fast 6 appearances or a Top 10 next to it to big up someone’s positives… there wasn’t any to note. Even Sting Ray Robb had his 9th. There just wasn’t anything to write home about here for Pietro Fittipaldi and his season rings typical of a paying driver, as much as I can’t stand the stereotype.
The Road Courses weren’t dreadful, he largely kept his nose dry and didn’t have too many really bad days apart from when Pato O’Ward took him out in Barber. The Ovals… phew. 24th is horrible. There were drivers on part-time schedules or missed races and still comfortably outscored him (Daly, Siegel and Malukas). Milwaukee in particular was shambolic, a run so slow in qualifying that Louis Foster almost went faster than him in his Indy NXT car. I’m not pinning it all on him because he’s a symptom of RLL’s continued oval pains, but I can’t say anything nice about it either.
Pietro will likely stay on next year and I’ll always be curious as to what he can do with a second full year, but I’m not exactly jumping up and down with excitement about it either. 3/10
Christian Lundgaard – 11th In Points (312), 3 Fast 6’s, 1 Podium, 5 Top 10’s, Average Finish – 13
Road Course Ranking – 9th / Oval Ranking – 14th
He’s still him. This was the worst RLL has looked on paper for some time and while Lundgaard wasn’t at the stupid level he was in 2023, this is still a pretty damn good season, especially given the state of the team.
Making three Fast 6s is more than enough proof the outright speed is still there, including that podium finish at his stomping ground at the Indy Grand Prix, where once again he came so close to a win. Honestly, the 14th place on the Ovals isn’t half bad. Sometimes it pays just to keep it clean, don’t overexert yourself and bring the car home; sometimes a decent result falls your way. That same Milwaukee weekend with Fittipaldi’s embarrassing run? Lundgaard finished 9th in Race 1 simply by letting the race come to him.
He’s earned his new gig at McLaren, which on paper should be better for him and with a little luck, some oval speed might come with it, which is still the biggest hole in his game. But this is a man who made RLL his team via sheer force of will and he’s taken to IndyCar like a duck to water. The real test starts now. #LundgaardIsFree. 14/10 8/10
Arrow McLaren
Season Highlight: Pato O’Ward is also still him / Season Lowlight: The #6 Car
Every year we talk about this being the year that McLaren breaks out and cracks the Penske/Ganassi stronghold at the top of the series, it’s another year of disappointment. And being completely honest, I’ve run out of patience. This team has been an internal mess off the track this year and disappointing on it.
The big story was their juggling of the #6 seat. David Malukas was hired as the Alex Palou seat filler and never actually raced for them due to a wrist injury he suffered in pre-season that took too long to heal. With so much hinging on the Indy 500 it was (almost) understandable McLaren had to punt him, but it was an ugly PR move given everything the team did to try and keep him, including flying him out to Brazil for stem cell treatment. Callum Illot filled in briefly and had a solid 11th-place finish, with F2 Champion Theo Pourchaire imported from Sauber’s Academy to race the rest of the season… until he didn’t.
Tony Kanaan had his eyes turned by Nolan Siegel’s crash determination during Indy 500 Qualifying and pushed all out to bring him in immediately, with Pourchaire gone after just five races, a sixth coming later in Toronto when Alex Rossi broke his thumb in Toronto.
Nolan Siegel was signed on a multi-year deal as a “can’t miss prospect” according to the PR spin within the team, with TK staking his job as General Manager on the line. I’ll get to Siegel in a minute but safe to say, he’s not set the world on fire yet.
Then there are the other seats. Pato O’Ward had a title campaign-level season that was brought down by poor reliability on the inside, not to mention a bitter Indy 500 defeat, and Alex Rossi was also driven out citing age when he was still more than good enough to justify keeping. It’s all bizarre and ultimately, this time slipped behind Andretti in the series pecking order.
McLaren remains a frustrating team, and they need to stop talking and focus on executing as a team, because this season was one of disappointment and chaos, when they could have had so much more.
Pato O’Ward – 5th in Points (460), 4 Fast 6’s, 3 Wins, 6 Top 5’s, Average Finish – 10.1
Road Course Ranking – 6th / Oval Ranking – 3rd
I feel sorry for Pato O’Ward this season. It was very much a boom or bust kinda campaign where when he was good, he was untouchable, and when it was bad, it was awful.
Three wins is as good as anyone in the series this year, and they were brilliant wins. Dominant in Milwaukee when he was trying to stick it to the man, an inherited win when Penske cheated at St. Pete, and him being Alex Palou straight up in a tyre war in Mid-Ohio. And of course, the gut-wrecher of being beaten by an inspired Josef Newgarden and one of the greatest 500-winning moves of all time. He was in tears when he got out of the car and it was hard to blame him given it was the third time he’s finished as runner-up.
He was right in the thick of title contention before he spun out in Toronto, suffered an engine failure in Gateway and McLaren was collectively poor in Portland. The gearbox failure in Milwaukee Race 2 was the final death knell. Pato owes a small amount of accountability because he hasn’t been perfect (The aforementioned Barber punt on Pietro), but this wasn’t a Championship car in my opinion.
Off the track, Pato has fought hard to promote the series to the masses and had no problem doing the dirty work in getting people to notice. On it, he’s been superb, and I admit, I’ve come around to him as a driver. I think if he was in a Ganassi or a Penske, he’d have won an Astor Cup by now. I’m not sure he’s ever going to win one if he’s loyal to McLaren. Just a thought. 8.5/10
Alexander Rossi – 10th in Points (366), 1 Fast 6, 1 Podium, 10 Top 10’s, Average Finish – 10.4
Road Course Ranking: 11th / Oval Ranking: 8th (16 Races)
Again, Alex Rossi was probably a little unlucky that his numbers weren’t a little better. He missed Toronto with the broken thumb and if he showed up, he’s ninth ahead of Ferrucci. Also interesting that he was the consistent one at McLaren, given his average finish was only 0.3 worse than Pato O’Ward, who finished nearly 100 points and five places higher in the standings.
Once again, I have to say, the elusive former Alex Rossi ceiling he used to have just doesn’t seem to be there, at least not consistently. There are a lot of good points days, but the only time I felt like he could have won a race this season was Laguna Seca before the Luca Ghiotto caution scuppered him strategically and opened the door for a Palou flattening.
Do I think he deserved to lose his job? Only if you signed him with the intention of him being a Top-level driver like he was in his prime at Andretti. Even then, McLaren doesn’t have the luxury of cutting solid Top 10 drivers, even if Lundgaard could be another. I think they’re both pretty similar in terms of where they’re at on outright ability. And if 32 is considered too old in the McLaren house, Sam Bird may need to find houses outside of Woking. Alex Rossi is still a good upper-midfielder, but at this point in his career, ring-chasing might be in his best interest. 7/10
Nolan Siegel – 23rd in Points (154), 1 Top 10, Best Finish – 7th, Average Finish – 17.5
Road Course Ranking: 27th / Oval Ranking: 18th (13 Races, 10 w/McLaren)
Now, we have to be fair here, Nolan’s 13 drives are all over the place, with 2 at Dale Coyne, 1 with Juncos and the final 10 with McLaren. But if we look at Theo Pourchaire’s cameo in the same setup:
Theo Pourchaire – 28th in Points (91), Best Finish – 10th, Average Finish – 14.8 (6 Races)
Everything suggests McLaren made the wrong decision here, with Pourchaire’s floor being a fair bit higher. If we give Pourchaire twice as many races to play with, he’s almost certainly ahead of Siegel on paper. Now Siegel is only 19 and this was his first season in the big leagues, but as the formbook suggested, Pourchaire was just the better talent right now, and McLaren wants to try and go forward by going backwards.
Nolan was fine. Nothing special, his big days came as a result of pack reshuffles on ovals where strategy gave him the rub of the green, that happens in IndyCar sometimes. He was a pretty typical rookie, and honestly, that’s fine. I want to properly reassess Nolan after he gets a full off-season and second year in that camp and go from there.
I don’t want to be that guy who calls this a pay-driver hire because I’ve not seen any hard signs that Arrow is moving on from McLaren yet or that the team needs one in general (Why sign Pourchaire to a full year when he had no funding?), but I’d be lying if I said the early vibes were great, even more so with Pato O’Ward and Christian Lundgaard in the other cars, likely fighting for the Championship. 4/10 (Pourchaire: 4.5/10)
Part 3 is on the way later this week, featuring thoughts on Andretti, Penske and Ganassi, and my general thoughts on IndyCar as it heads into 2025. See you then.
