u/Mikemat5150

Top 5 in the championship to set the stage partway through the season

Fittipaldi: 431

Kachow: 414

Johnson: 411

Taylor: 331

Hughes: 319

Alright, put on your team owner/ talent scout hat here. When looking at the Indy NXT championship with 5 races to go, I have been thinking about the championship standings versus each individual drivers situation.

The largest one is Fittipaldi’s experience and mileage relative to the field.

To put some years front and center, Fittipaldi drove his first F3 season (did 2) in 2020 and first (of 3) F2 season in 2022.

Kachow ran his first full season in cars post karting in 2022 and Johnson made his first starts in USF Juniors that same year.

I can’t help but think that both Tymek and Johnson are overachieving relative to their experience levels and Fittipaldi is underachieving given how much more experienced he is in faster machinery.

Curious what everyone else’s thoughts are put the question out, if you had the budget to run one of the top 3, who are you picking?

“…the race will run deeper into the evening and should see something in the range of six to seven pit stops – two or three more than last year – taking place.”

Excluding drivers there for their funding (Simpson and Johnson) or Veterans doing a ride share (Sato), Ganassi have often opted for untraditional drivers when one of their high value seats was open.

Roles have changed but this is not dissimilar to when the team was needing to fill a seat next to their lead driver Dixon.

They were running more cars but you have Lundqvist (NXT rookie), Armstrong (F2 Rookie), Palou (2nd year), Ericsson (Funded + F1), Felix (experience outside of INDYCAR), Ed Jones (2nd year).

The team was often not grabbing whatever the best free agent available was at the time going back a long time.

While I do think this time is different and it would be hard to pass up Lundgaard, I do think history shows their willingness to take chances.

They have Palou - who I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the success he has had which could also encourage the team to try something out of the ordinary.

With the announcements, I think there may be clarity soon but it does make for interesting speculation.

4th engineer of the season for Schumacher

According to the museum, the facility will include multiple restoration bays, detailing bays, and dedicated storage for vehicles not currently displayed in the main museum. But this will not be some sealed-off warehouse where priceless Indy cars gather dust under fluorescent lighting. The plan includes rotating exhibits and public tours, giving visitors a chance to see restoration work happening in real time

> “We were just happy to get on track. We weren't really ready to do any sort of trimming at all and just ran the whole time, and if we ended up in in clean air, I would run a couple laps, but that was that, because we were solely focused on our race program and running in dirty air.

Q: Are Robert Shwartzman and Callum Ilott doomed to be this year’s Theo Pourchaire? Caught out by a ride collapsing under them when it was too late to line up an alternative?

Where do drivers in their position go? WEC, maybe picked up by one of the new-for-2027 entrants? Except that they had just escaped WEC (with Shwartzman giving up what would have been a Le Mans-winning Ferrari last year).

Pourchaire wound up with WEC doormat Peugeot and attracted no interest in IndyCar this year.

One of that sad aspects of motor racing is that drivers who have more talent than financial backing are always just a fine line away from having their career blow up. Fernando Alonso and Juan Pablo Montoya are the only drivers who immediately come to mind who were able to make decent comebacks from career setbacks. But they were all-time greats. Anything less, I guess, doesn’t cut it.

Al, Boston

MP: Struggling to find the real parallel here, since Callum and Robert were fully aware of PREMA’s financial issues while last season was happening. Theo was dropped after being signed when a payday became possible for the car he was meant to occupy for the rest of the season.

I can’t say for Robert, whose manager was also a team leader at PREMA and left along with the rest, but Callum is known to have been owed a significant amount of his salary. From a strategy standpoint, the smartest thing for him to do was to wait and see if the team was able to return under new ownership, and if so, to collect what he was owed and possibly continue earning if he was retained for the rest of his contract. Running in IMSA, as he’s doing this year, which has almost no date conflicts, isn’t an issue.

But with PREMA appearing to be down for the count, it’s hard to say what legal recourse Ilott or Shwartzman might have. It sucks for them, since both have obvious talent, but of the two, only Ilott has remained in the U.S. and is making himself visible if a team might want to talk about the future.