The NTT IndyCar Series has an overabundance of high-caliber drivers who are signed or ready to step into the 27 full-time cars in 2025, but the same can’t be said for proven race engineers, who are among the most precious commodities within each program.
With turnkey race engineers in short supply, the hunt to find the right candidates is happening at Chip Ganassi Racing, which is looking for a race engineer to pair with sophomore Kyffin Simpson and work alongside the entries for Scott Dixon and Alex Palou, and at Juncos Hollinger Racing, which has a new race engineering vacancy to fill after Stephen Barker departed and is believed to have joined the new PREMA Racing outfit.
In light of the scarcity with those who are experienced with the unique IndyCar engineering demands posed by racing on ovals of three different sizes, plus road and street courses, teams in need of race engineers start by looking within the paddock for those who are available or wanting to make a move.
The next step is to look outside of IndyCar to IMSA, or Formula 1, or NASCAR, or the FIA WEC to find veterans, and if those explorations are unsuccessful, searching within the team to identify an assistant race engineer or performance engineer to promote is a common practice. The last step, which is a rarity in IndyCar, is to parse through the junior formulas — Indy NXT and Formula 2 — to take a chance on a rising engineering talent who lacks top-tier experience.
At Ganassi, a range of changes, including the downsizing of five full-time IndyCar entries to three, the shuttering of its IMSA GTP program, creation of a new two-car Indy NXT program, and the signing of Meyer Shank Racing to provide technical support — including two race engineers — has shuffled its engineering group and left the defending series champions with an unforeseen race engineering void.
“We lost two senior engineers at the end of the season, which we didn’t expect,” Ganassi managing director Mike Hull told RACER. “And yes, we reduced our reduced our entries to three because of the charter system. But we’ve replaced it with Indy NXT and we’ve taken on the Meyer Shank program, which is supplying engineering support for those two entries. So we’ve actually increased ourselves a fair amount. So by losing two engineers, we’ve been scouring the marketplace globally to try to find senior engineers, a senior engineer, or maybe more than one, in this case, to protect ourselves going forward.”
What is Hull looking for in his preferred candidate?
“The kind of engineer that you would like to have, it would be terrific if they had IndyCar experience,” he said. “And it would be terrific, frankly, if they’ve at some point in their life – even as a young person – driven a race car, because I think that gives them a different perspective on what the driver really wants from the cockpit outward, rather than from the data stream inward to the cockpit. Those kinds of engineers are very, very difficult to find, and rightfully so.”