Engineering shortage leaves IndyCar teams scrambling

Yesterday at 04:57 PM

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."

Unlike Ganassi, which has a specific space to fill, Juncos Hollinger has yet to decide its race engineering assignments for Conor Daly and Sting Ray Robb. Where the best available engineers tend to flock towards the Ganassis and Penskes and other title-winning teams, the up-and-coming teams who aren't a threat to the big programs tend to attract older race engineers — the well-traveled types — or are willing to give newer talent a shot at helping them to escape the midfield or lower.

"The interesting bit with a smaller team is that typically your hunting ground is a Purdue, or any of the decent universities," said Juncos Hollinger team principal Dave O'Neill. "We have a decent amount of young students within our business, but it comes with a lack of experience, but a lot of enthusiasm. And somewhere in between, you have to achieve a balance. Of course, the other bit you’re looking for is someone with the experience, who knows when not to panic. You want the youth and enthusiasm, but you also want the steady hand on the shoulder as well.

"With having a new team that's effectively three years old, the difficult bit is having anyone there with some substance that’s, been around for a decent amount of time, so you have a limited amount of IP to draw from."

For O'Neill, who joined Juncos Hollinger during the 2024 after a long career in Formula 1, IndyCar's engineering challenges make his job in trying to recruit a new race engineer far more difficult than anything he faced in hiring for similar roles in F1.

"It's difficult to pick people from other series because of the ovals," he said. "This is new to me, because I’ve only done the ovals for a year, but it’s so complicated when it comes to getting it right the first time on an oval. A person who is new to oval engineering is going to have a hard time getting it right when they've never done it before, and that affects the entire team.

"If you can have stability within your engineering program, you start each weekend with a more of a level playing field. But you can't always find that experienced person, and have to look inside to a junior engineer to bring up, or look to university, and just see who you can find that's the right fit for your team. So we're searching, and with a new car coming down the road, you'd like to have someone who can build with you and be part of the process of changing over to a new car and making the most out of it."