Oilpressure

I don’t think there is much argument that Meyer Shank Racing was the biggest disappointment of the 2023 NTT IndyCar Series season. With one championship and five Indianapolis 500 wins between them, much was expected of former Team Penske teammates Simon Pagenaud and Helio Castroneves. Even before Pagenaud’s frightening crash at Mid-Ohio that caused him to miss the second half of the season – both drivers were on a pace that would have seen them both replaced at the end of the season. Most would agree it was a season to forget at Meyer Shank.

With that being such an obvious answer for most disappointing, one of the other major disappointments had sort of slid under the radar – Ed Carpenter Racing (ECR). Like Meyer Shank, ECR lost a driver near the halfway point of the season. But their loss was due to Conor Daly being fired just after the Detroit race that saw Daly finish fifteenth. That was coming off of an eighth-place finish at the Indianapolis 500. As it turned out, that eighth-place finish would be the highest finish for an ECR car until September, when Rinus VeeKay scored a sixth at Portland.

Daly was replaced in the No. 20 car by veteran Ryan Hunter-Reay – a former IndyCar champion and Indianapolis 500 winner. A proven driver like Hunter-Reay could do no better than tenth in that car – and that was in the final race of the season at Laguna Seca. Take that result out of the equation and Hunter-Reay had an average finishing position of 20.0.For the record, Daly had an average finishing position of 17.7 in the first seven races of the season.

In the No. 21 car, driven by Rinus VeeKay; the results weren’t very different. Through the same seven races that got Daly fired, VeeKay had an average finish of 16.4. Through the rest of the season that saw Hunter-Reay as his teammate, VeeKay had an average finish of 13.5; bolstered by a late season surge that saw him finish eleventh, eleventh and sixth. For the season, VeeKay had an average finish of 14.1, that coincidentally saw him place fourteenth in the final championship standings.

Then there is the five race run that saw Ed Carpenter jump into a third car on the ovals, where he had finishes of thirteenth, twentieth, twenty-fourth, twenty-third and twenty-fourth. For those that don’t want to do the math, that’s an average finish of 20.8.

There was a time not that long ago, that ECR was feared on the ovals. Even this past spring, VeeKay put his car on the front row of the Indianapolis 500 for the third straight year. For the second straight year, he crashed out early. Except for VeeKay at Indianapolis, the ECR cars are considered an afterthought on ovals. Carpenter started thirteenth and finished twentieth, crashing on one of the late re-starts. Daly started sixteenth and finished eighth. A little more than a week later, he was out of a job.

I won’t pretend to know what all happened to bring on Daly’s dismissal. Not long ago at my own job, we had a top-performer let go simply because she and management didn’t see eye to eye on certain things. More times than not, management will eventually win those conflicts. I have an idea Daly’s demise wasn’t based strictly on performance.

Nonetheless, Hunter-Reay could not get the No. 20 car to perform as well as when Daly was in the cockpit. That tells me that it’s not who is driving the ECR cars – it’s who is setting them up. That, combined with an overall atmosphere on the team, could explain how far this organization has fallen in recent years.

This past year at Texas only magnified that decline. The team that once was highly respected for their oval prowess saw their fulltime drivers qualify twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. They were both out-qualified by their boss, who could only manage to start eighteenth.

For whatever reason, Daly has been made the scapegoat for the decline, while Rinus VeeKay has been given a pass – by media and fans alike. VeeKay is held up as a symbol of the up and coming talent, while not really having the recent results to back that up. He just completed his fourth full season in IndyCar, but his last two and a half years have been fairly pedestrian.

VeeKay won his one and only IndyCar race at the 2021 GMR Grand Prix on the road course at IMS. He followed that up with an eighth-place finish two weeks later in the Indianapolis 500, after putting his car on the front-row in only his second year. He put an exclamation point on his stellar Month of May with a second-place finish in Race One at Belle Isle, that vaulted VeeKay to fourth in the standings. Beginning with the next day, it all went terribly wrong.

VeeKay wrapped up Race Two with an eighteenth-place finish. During the two-week break between Detroit and Road America, VeeKay was cycling and hit a tree-root, causing his bicycle to crash. The result was a broken collarbone and missing the race at Road America. Whether it is coincidence or not, VeeKay hasn’t been the same since.

After Race One at Detroit in 2021 that saw him ranked fourth in the championship standings, VeeKay finished no better than sixteenth in the second half of the season. His average finish for the remainder of 2021, once he came back at Mid-Ohio, was 20.7. His poor finish for the second half of the season was attributed to his lingering injury.

VeeKay’s 2022 season started with promise that the promising driver was back to form, with a sixth-place finish at St. Petersburg. But that season was punctuated with inconsistency. He had five Top-Ten finishes, with one podium and another front-row start in the Indianapolis 500; but he also had seven races where he finished fifteenth or lower. It all added up to a very forgettable twelfth-place finish in points.

This past season things continued to devolve. VeeKay had two Top-Ten finishes for the season; a tenth in the Indianapolis 500 after starting second, and a sixth at Portland. Scattered amongst those two highlights were eight finishes of fifteenth or lower – leading to a fourteenth-place finish in points.

ECR has become something of an afterthought. Their cars are no longer taken seriously as contenders. Even VeeKay’s history at Indianapolis shows a pattern of throwing away a front-row start with a bone-headed move. His tenth-place finish at Indianapolis was marred by him losing control of his car, while exiting the pits on Lap 91 – collecting Alex Palou in the process. Both cars were able to continue, with Palou finishing fourth and VeeKay finishing tenth. Many believe that had VeeKay not collected Palou, that Palou would’ve won the race instead of Josef Newgarden.

I find myself forgetting about the ECR cars in any given race. Their presence on the grid has deteriorated to nothing more than field-fillers, in my opinion. Many, including some good friends, will be annoyed by that comment, as Ed Carpenter is a very popular figure among IndyCar fans and media; but they won’t be able to prove me wrong.

I put myself in that category of being an Ed Carpenter fan. Ed is a very likeable guy, and he was once an excellent IndyCar driver. He managed to win three IndyCar races, never with the best of equipment. But Carpenter will also be 43 before the start of next season. I’ve maintained for a while that Ed needs to stop chasing dreams and start focusing on running his race team. Nothing he has done in the last few years has changed my opinion.

Last week, ECR tested Oliver Askew and 2023 Indy NXT champion Christian Rasmussen for the No. 20 car. If you want my opinion, for whatever it’s worth – if the decision comes down to those two drivers, I would go with Askew. Oliver Askew is a talented driver who, I think, got a raw deal at McLaren. He has been driving in various series over the past few years, honing his craft. While I’m sure he would jump at the chance for any fulltime ride, I almost hate to see Askew try to salvage his IndyCar career with a team that is heading in the wrong direction.

I think ECR needs Askew more than he needs ECR. Rinus VeeKay hasn’t proven to me that he is a mature driver yet. No offense to Rasmussen, but I don’t think it would serve VeeKay well to be paired with a 23 year-old rookie (same age as VeeKay). I think he learned a few things from working with a veteran like Ryan Hunter-Reay. While Askew had an unimpressive rookie season with Arrow McLaren SP in 2020, he seems to be mature beyond his 26 years.

While it’s easier to change drivers, I think ECR needs to look deeper than who is in the cockpit of their cars. There is something fundamentally wrong at ECR, but I won’t pretend to know what it is. I know engineering staffs can have a significant impact on the cars, but we’ve also seen acclaimed engineers go to bad teams and not make any difference. Is it funding? If it is, one way to save cash is to scrap the No. 33 program for Ed on the ovals.

I’m not smart enough to know what the problem is at ECR, but I hope they figure it out. This team has been around in some form or fashion for almost twenty years, beginning with the Vision Racing days back in 2005. They need to be better than what we saw in 2023. It’s time for them to step it up.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on October 2, 2023 at 4:05 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.