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On Tuesday, we finally got confirmation on a matter we had been waiting on, and one of the items that was in my wish list for 2024. Santino Ferrucci has been confirmed for the No. 14 he drove last season, for AJ Foyt Enterprises. This was a case of a driver wanting to return, and the team wanting him back. The only thing standing in the way seemed to be money – as is usually the case.

The team definitely has work to do, to be competitive on the road & street courses, but they have clearly figured out the oval package. Ferrucci was fast throughout the Month of May last year, while driving for Foyt. Starting on the inside of the second row was no fluke. He ran up front all day and finished third, with a legitimate shot to win at the end.

Ferrucci is a throwback driver. His name indicates he may have come from Italy, but the twenty-five year-old driver was born in Woodbury, Connecticut. His primary background is in open-wheel formula-type cars, but he has driven in a handful of Xfinity races. He is also participating in this weekend’s Chili Bowl in Tulsa. It’s easy to see why AJ Foyt likes him.

Most impressive is his record in the Indianapolis 500. He has five starts with four different teams and has never finished outside the Top-Ten. As a rookie with Dale Coyne in 2019, Ferrucci finished seventh. He also caught the eye of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. on the NBC broadcast, and quickly became a favorite of the NASCAR star. He returned the following year with Coyne and followed up with an even more impressive fourth-place finish. He was in a third car with Rahal in 2021 and finished sixth – higher than the two fulltime Rahal cars. In 2022, he drove for Dreyer & Reinbold and finished tenth – before moving on to Foyt for 2023.

Larry Foyt confirmed that their driver lineup is now set for 2024. If you recall, when Sting Ray Robb was confirmed in the No. 41 Foyt car in December – Pedersen sent out the following statement via social media:

On Tuesday, Foyt was pressed about the role of Ferrucci’s teammate from last year, Benjamin Pedersen – who presumably had a multi-year contract with Foyt. His answer was short and sweet – “My agreement with Mr. Pedersen lapsed by its own terms. I wish him well in his future endeavors." Ouch!

No one seems to be sure what that means, but Foyt’s response makes it clear that the two have parted ways. If you listened to Trackside this week, you heard Curt Cavin and Kevin Lee speculate on what that could mean. Since no one has seen the terms of the contract between Pedersen and Foyt, speculate is all anyone can do. It could mean there was a clause in the contract regarding excessive crash damage. Based on Pedersen’s 2023 season, there was a lot of crash damage.

They kept focusing on the word “lapsed”, which could indicate that a payment either did not come or was late. As Kevin Lee pointed out, when things are going well and a payment is a couple of days late – it is usually overlooked. If a team needs an out and a payment is made one day past the deadline – that’s enough to satisfy the legalities of breaking a contract.

To be blunt, I never thought Benjamin Pedersen brought a thing to the table – except cash. He finished twentieth or worse in fifteen of the seventeen races on last year’s schedule. Although he was a rookie, he never seemed to improve as the season progressed. He was a plain vanilla interview and I rarely (if ever) saw him interact with fans at the track.

I guess he assumed that as long as he brought his family’s cash to the team, he had bought him a reserved spot on the grid for as long as he wanted. I thought his social media post about welcoming Robb to the team spoke of arrogance on his part, and I thought it was a bad look on his part. His intentions were clearly a shot across the legal bow of Foyt. I wouldn’t tangle with AJ Foyt in a barroom brawl, nor in court. This could get interesting. Stay tuned.

I’m not sure Sting Ray Robb brings much more to the team, but I think he did improve last year as the season went on.

But this is about Santino Ferrucci returning to a team that could be on the rise – and this time, we mean it.

For years, we have been teased how the Foyt team has finally found the right engineering staff or someone that will finally run things the right way. Then about a third of the way into the season, we realize we were duped again – as we look at the standings and see the Foyt drivers at or near the bottom of the standings.

What is different this year is that Foyt is now in a technical alliance with Team Penske. When this alliance or partnership was first announced, I feared that it was the junior team for Penske, much like the relationship between Red Bull and Toro Rosso in Formula One, and that Penske would mandate who Foyt’s drivers would be – to see if they are “Penske material”. If that is to be the case in future years, it doesn’t appear that The Captain’s team interceded in their lineup for 2024, which happens to be the first All-American driver line-up for Foyt since 2004, when both drivers had the last name of Foyt.

Kevin Lee had an interesting theory that Penske may have Foyt run a third car in selected races this season to evaluate Callum Ilott, for a possible future ride whenever Will Power decided to call it a career. That’s not a bad deal. Foyt gets expert technical assistance, and in return – Penske gets a place to evaluate drivers without trying them out directly.

I do think that AJ Foyt Enterprises will see immediate returns this season from some of this technical assistance. If Penske can bolster the road & street course performance at Foyt, we may look at that team in a whole new light. Getting Ferrucci back in the fold is a great way to start off 2024 for Foyt.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on January 12, 2024 at 4:04 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.