Rinus VeeKay continues to produce astounding performances in his first season with Dale Coyne Racing.
Coming off five years at Ed Carpenter Racing, where the young Dutchman stood out on a few occasions each year but rarely made big and sustained impressions, the 24-year-old is in the midst of a personal revolution – all while leading the Coyne team back to a state of race-day competitiveness it hasn’t known for many years.
From the eight races this season when he finished without a crash (Indy) or an engine issue (Detroit), VeeKay’s gone forward seven times, gaining a combined 65 positions. Four of those involved double-digit passes with 11, 12, 15 and, on Sunday at the Honda Indy 200, his largest improvement of the year at 17 with a hike from 26th to ninth.
Some of it has been down to excellent race strategy calls from DCR, which have required VeeKay to achieve the fuel and tire saving asked by the team, and in other instances, it has involved dialing up the pure speed and aggression and taking positions away from his rivals. VeeKay did this with former race engineer Ed Nathman through the Indy 500, and continued the proving-he’s-an-all-rounder routine with new race engineer Michael Cannon starting at Detroit. And with his sixth top 10 finish delivered for Dale Coyne from 10 races, VeeKay is centrally responsible for hauling himself and the No. 18 Honda up to 13th in the championship.
For a team that was unable to secure a single top 10 finish across nine drivers and 34 combined races in 2024 and had both entries finish deep in the 20s in the final standings, it’s starting to feel like the old days of 2019 when Sebastien Bourdais was 11th and Santino Ferrucci captured 13th in the championship.
Together, and quite unexpectedly after joining forces just 14 days before the start of the season, VeeKay and Coyne continue to author IndyCar’s feel-good story of 2025.
“Around the halfway point last year, starting at Iowa, I changed my approach,” VeeKay told RACER of adopting a driver-and-leader mindset. “Now, with this Dale Coyne team, we’re really a team, right? We don’t really have the resources that most other guys have, but we really have that team spirit. Yesterday, my outside rear tire changer Nico Don got his foot run over (by Chip Ganassi Racing’s Kyffin Simpson), and he was still the fastest of all the guys. So it’s just the determination here.
“Everybody’s presence in the team is just very, very well pronounced. It’s having Michael Cannon there, but just the whole team where everybody’s making decisions. And with this team, I feel so much more like a leader than before in a way where, like in Barber (where he finished fourth), I gave a strategy recommendation in the car, and we went with it.
“Yesterday, I saw Christian Rasmussen’s car next to the track and I said, ‘Hey, it’s probably going to go yellow. Let’s pit.’ And they called me in. So I feel like I have a bit more say, and I really have figured out the way to race in IndyCar.”
In the championship, VeeKay is eight points behind the highly-rated David Malukas from the Penske-affiliated AJ Foyt Racing team and 18 points shy of Penske’s Scott McLaughlin. Foyt’s Santino Ferrucci — another driver who’s having a breakout season — is 19 points away in 10th place. It’s heady stuff for the Coyne team, and VeeKay’s attracting interest from bigger teams who’ve recognized his remarkable output with IndyCar’s smallest program.
Heading into the Iowa Speedway doubleheader, keeping the momentum going in the No. 18 Honda and being thankful for all that Coyne has made possible is where VeeKay wants to keep his focus.
“I’m just having a blast,” he said. “The race last weekend in Mid-Ohio, it was a struggle coming out of qualifying, but we just had a plan. And we maximized what we had and raced it perfectly. So yeah, it just feels really good to catch some eyes again and be in a spotlight, and we have to keep going.
