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“I don’t want 2025 to be my only shot at IndyCar”: Abel chasing the chance for a reset

As far as rookie IndyCar seasons go, Jacob Abel had a year to forget in 2025.

The Kentuckian arrived in the series on a wave of momentum after fighting for the Indy NXT championship in 2024, leading the standings on occasion with three wins before ultimately placing second to champion Louis Foster.

The latter signed with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing and placed 23rd in the IndyCar standings, which garnered the Rookie of the Year award, while Abel’s run to 27th in the championship with Dale Coyne Racing was fraught with disappointment.

With a multi-year deal at RLL in hand, Foster looks like a star of the future while Abel, who’s facing the possibility of being one-and-done in IndyCar, is scrambling to stay in the series and show he can be the version of himself that impressed in NXT.

“It would be an honor to get back with Dale (Coyne) and do a second season because IndyCar is where I want to be,” Abel told RACER. “It’s a bummer, right? Because the one outlier of a season I’ve had was the one that you’re under the biggest microscope by the whole entire motorsports landscape. I’m trying to remind myself, trying to remind everyone, ‘Hey guys, I’m actually a pretty good driver. I won some races last year, and we were fighting with the best teams in Indy NXT and the best drivers, and really had a good season.

“It’s hard to look back there, because you’re only as good as your last race, but I know I’m capable of a lot more and so it’s just trying to maintain that confidence in my head. And I feel like I can do that, for sure.”

Abel’s best chances to continue in the series rest with a return to Coyne, who signed 2025 Indy NXT champion Dennis Hauger as part of a new technical alliance with Andretti Global. Having worked with three different race engineers last season and struggled to adapt to the frequent changes, the Abel has spent the off-season deep in self-analysis and introspection to identify the lessons and improvements that would be needed for a sophomore IndyCar run.

“I think it’s easy for me to sit back and say that a bunch of things happened to me that were out of my control and just chalk up the whole season that way, but that wouldn’t be fair,” he said.

“There was still a lot of things that I can improve on. I think there’s a lot of things that I did improve on throughout the whole entire year. I think the biggest thing was just it was so hard to get any sort of momentum or consistency going.

“As soon as we would get a couple of good sessions and we’d start to get the ball rolling, something would happen, whatever it was. It just felt like we were under a dark, stormy cloud. I made mistakes. The team made mistakes. We can do better. But we also got the short end of a stick on a lot of different things when both of us didn’t make mistakes, which is why it felt like we had that dark cloud.”

Failing to qualify for the Indianapolis 500 while teammate Rinus VeeKay – a three-time front-row starter – scraped in on the last row was tough to process and led to a crisis of confidence that impacted the rest of Abel’s season. Restoring his natural joyfulness has been another personal project during the offseason.

“Racing, it’s super confidence-based,” he said. “My confidence was at an all-time low throughout the middle point of this year. And that’s something that was hard to avoid just based on everything that was happening. I believe in myself more than anyone, but it’s so hard to really fully digest all of that and get a fresh start, especially with the schedule being how busy it was weekend after weekend.

“You maybe have one or two days in between traveling and getting to the next track to take a breath and reset. And so that was really what I struggled to do, and I’ve taken that and learned from that experience. I’ve been having a reset, mentally, which I think is going to do just as much of good as anything else. I’d love to go racing again with Dale and take what I’ve learned and show what I know I’m capable of. It was tough to do that the first time around, and I don’t want this to be my only shot at IndyCar.”