AllRacing

Preparations underway for Schumacher’s IndyCar arrival

Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing has a growing to-do list for the inbound Mick Schumacher. The majority of the integration will take place in the new year as Schumacher steps into the third RLL IndyCar Series entry and prepares for the full 17-race championship where he’ll need to learn almost every track and how to compete on ovals.

“From a testing perspective, we’re looking at a four, two, and one kind of thing, with four ovals, two road courses, and a street course, with the street course being Sebring on the short course,” RLL president Jay Frye told RACER.

“So we’re starting to map out the testing program. We’ve already started going back and forth on some dates and some things from a testing perspective. That’s step one. Then also, too, obviously, it’s Thanksgiving. We have a couple weeks in December, then it becomes Christmas. We’ve got time to work on this until the calendar switches, you’ll back away for New Years, and then the first part of the year, we’ll get rolling.”

Schumacher’s oval education will be the most intensive part of his pre-season efforts.

“It will be all hands on deck to help and assist him,” Frye said. “There’s probably even some outside people that will get to come in to support it. We’ll do the simulator piece for him, and we’ve got to go somewhere to test on our own before the open test in Phoenix in February. So we’re looking at where we can go in January to go do that. So actually, the first test could be an oval test to get ready for the Phoenix Open.

“There’s only so many places, from an oval perspective, you can go in January that are warm enough to use, but we can’t go to Phoenix because there’s a rule that you can’t go to a place where there’s an open test prior to the open test. So we’re working on that answer and should have it first of next week. There’s the Sebring test in February and we might plug something in between the oval test and Sebring. It’s going to be busy times.”

RLL and Schumacher inked a one-year deal with options in place for more with the No. 47 Honda, and with approximately six weeks left before testing will commence, Frye and his leadership group will complete the process of building the mechanical and engineering team who’ll surround Schumacher in 2026.

“It’s going to be exciting,” Frye said. “He certainly really hit it off with the team. For the last month, every time I walk through the shop, if not every person, every other person asked me if we’ve got his deal done yet, right? That’s such a big piece of the puzzle about making this stuff work. We needed to get this done with him first, and now that it is, there’s some team members and people that we’ve talked to quietly as we went through this that we can start pulling the trigger on here pretty quick.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm by a lot of people to participate, to work with Mick. Obviously need to get through Thanksgiving, then I think a lot of stuff will start unfolding about how it will work. This is gonna be an A-plus effort, with a really great team, a really great group of people around it. A lot of it’s already in-house. There just might be a couple other pieces we go get.”