How a fresh start with Coyne put the spring back in VeeKay's step

03/28/2025 02:02 PM

Just before the 2020 season, Will Power provided some observational evidence that Rinus VeeKay's career momentum was set to continue unabated as he moved up to the "big cars." The former karting sensation had finished runner-up in USF2000 in 2017 — the year he changed his last name from the Dutch original, van Kalmthout — while driving for Pabst Racing. He had graduated to Pro Mazda (these days known as USF Pro 2000) with Juncos Racing, clinched the 2018 title comfortably, and then remained with Juncos while moving up to Indy Lights (now known as Indy NXT) and finishing second in points. Now here was IndyCar's fastest driver singing VeeKay's praises after watching him test at Sebring.

"You know when you're watching a driver and he just looks ****ing fast right out of the box?" said Power. "Well, that's how VeeKay is. He's good, especially for a rookie. How did he not win the Indy Lights championship last year?"

Well, he wasn't in the best car. He was in a very good Juncos car, but in Indy Lights in 2019, Andretti Autosport had the edge over all its rivals, and it was clear from trackside that VeeKay was demanding more of himself and his tires to turn the same lap times as another former karting ace, Oliver Askew, in an Andretti machine. It was a tribute to VeeKay that he scored only one fewer win (six) than Askew, matched him for poles (seven), and ran him close for the championship.

Ed Carpenter Racing, after testing 19-year-old VeeKay at Portland, had no doubts about his potential and signed him up. The Sebring test the following January seemed to confirm that IndyCar's only current driver/owner had pulled off a masterstroke, and had, in one veteran's words, "found his new Newgarden." Carpenter had lost Josef to Team Penske at the end of 2016 and had missed his sparky brilliance over the next three seasons. Here was his spiritual successor.

And then IndyCar and the rest of the world stood still due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Testing was off the cards, race weekends were minimized, track time was at a premium, and the rookies inevitably suffered most. Yet in his second-ever IndyCar race, on the Indianapolis road course, VeeKay finished fifth; when the series returned to the same venue in the fall, he took pole and finished third; and less than seven months later, he scored his first win there.

Soon, he added a runner-up finish at Detroit, a missed race at Road America due to a broken collarbone (legacy of a cycling accident), and the following spring, there was a pole and podium at Barber Motorsports Park. But a second win never looked so close again, and a mere clutch of top-six finishes over the next two-and-a-half seasons had a dire effect on VeeKay's career momentum. Could a driver who once sat on the cutting edge of IndyCar's next-gen talent, alongside Colton Herta and Pato O'Ward, have turned blunt?

No, the fact that he had generally outpaced all of his teammates and developed a tremendous finishing record — he completed more laps than anyone in 2024 — would imply it was the team rather than the driver that had stalled… which also suggested he was worth keeping. Sadly, that wasn't a view shared by Carpenter, who last September released him after five seasons.

Who knows? Perhaps the change will work out for ECR: VeeKay's replacement Alexander Rossi is a proven winner, and his teammate — series sophomore Christian Rasmussen — may start fulfilling the potential we all saw in junior formulas but was difficult to spot between incidents in his rookie IndyCar foray.

But ECR's decision can also work out for VeeKay, who is now lead driver at Dale Coyne Racing. He qualified 12th and finished ninth — just ahead of Rossi, ironically — in St. Petersburg, the 2025 season opener, while last weekend at Thermal he started 13th and could have landed another top-10 finish, but ended up on an odd tire strategy that consigned him to 17th. Ah well, there will be days like these for drivers in any team other than Penske and Ganassi.

Best of all, it's good that VeeKay's talent isn't lying fallow during an enforced sabbatical, and that his cheery grin is back on show. Aside from driving for Coyne in the hybrid test at Indianapolis Motor Speedway last October when he wound up third fastest, the off-season was understandably difficult for him. His IndyCar career hung in the balance from the moment ECR delivered the bad news.

"I was very upset," he tells RACER, "first of all because I didn't see it coming, and also because of the timing — after last season was over. It was very challenging to have to start the process of finding a drive for 2025. Understand, I am really happy to be with Dale, but if there had been some warning from ECR, I'm sure Dale Coyne Racing would have been one of a few options."

As it is, Coyne has yet again thrown a career lifeline to a talented young driver. And, by the way, VeeKay wants to stress the "young" part of that sentence.

"I don't know if the beard has confused people, but although I have five years of IndyCar experience, I am still only 24!" he notes with a smile. "So whatever the circumstances of how we ended, I am still grateful to Ed for giving me that opportunity to start my IndyCar career with him and get my first win. Now I am grateful for this new opportunity.

"My teammate Jacob is obviously a rookie, so this is my chance to lead a team, to take the reins and go, so I feel very at ease in pushing the team. And I'm pushing myself, too: I'm working harder than I've ever worked to make things better. I feel every time we're on track, we end up a lot better at the end of a day than how we start, so I feel like the things we're chasing are the right things and then the moves we make are the right moves."

Coyne, who has employed two veterans of the sport as his race engineers for 2025 — Ed Nathman on VeeKay's car, John Dick on Abel's — says VeeKay's approach to testing impressed, right from that Indy run last fall.

"We called Rinus up at the last minute and we ended the day P3 with an older-spec engine, when the two faster cars had the newer spec," says Coyne, whose sixth and most recent IndyCar win came seven years ago. "And we really liked the way he gave feedback. He didn't tell us how to improve the car, he told us what the car was doing, so we could decide how to fix it. That was refreshing. And his feedback was obviously accurate because he went quicker and quicker, so we were pretty high on him from that point."

"That's good to hear," says VeeKay. "Yeah, I'm not going to tell an engineer what springs we need or things like this, but I have enough experience now where I can tell him beforehand what I need to feel from the car, how it needs to behave to get the most speed from it. And then when we are out on track I can see if the car is behaving this way or that way, with a full fuel load, light fuel load, how it's using its tires, and then report everything it's doing.

"Over the last five seasons I've developed the knowledge of what we need to do to be more competitive at each track. Sometimes fixing one thing fixes another, sometimes fixing one thing makes another thing worse: I can help speed up the process of finding what works and what doesn't. That's something I feel I bring to the team: being able to turn the big spotlight beam into a focused laser. And that's important when we don't get much track time.

"Basically, every lap we run in practice — or in testing when we have it — we are aiming to build the best possible car. It may start off feeling like riding a bull, and what we're aiming for is to feel like riding a perfectly domesticated horse. When it's like that, it's so much easier to be smooth, not lose time getting too sideways, look after the tires."

That said, there are many times during an IndyCar season when a driver has to grab the proverbial bull by the horns because he can't find the perfect compromise of handling, damping and power delivery. He has to take the car beyond its limits and to the edge of his own in order to find those last couple of tenths in qualifying.

"Oh, definitely I can still do that," says VeeKay. "Actually, I think it makes you better as a driver to not have the best car. But still you want to build the best car possible, and I think we as a team have that ability. Remember, we've had hardly any testing, and I don't mean just me: Ed and John as engineers are only just getting back into the groove of IndyCar racing and we've also still got to learn things about each other, learn each other's language. When we rolled off the truck at St. Petersburg, we were slow but then we sat down as a team and had a good discussion and figured things out, and we made the right adjustments. Second practice, we were second fastest, and then we got into the top 12 in qualifying."

Is that very different from how things were in his previous team? VeeKay pauses before answering.

"Hmm… the idea is the same," he says. "But at ECR, they rely a lot on the resources they have — they build their own dampers, they have a lot of simulation tools — and I think sometimes we had so much fancy stuff going on that we could get lost and went around in circles. Here, Dale has kept it very simple, which also keeps our thinking logical and our processes very clear. It goes back to basic engineering and understanding car dynamics.

"And look where we are already: I know the results don't look amazing yet, but if you consider that we're just learning about each other and we're already in the top half of the field, in a grid as tight as this. Plus, we're up against teams that are in alliances — Foyt with Penske, Meyer Shank with Ganassi — so there's a lot of shared engineering knowledge out there, whereas Dale is an independent. So I think we're already OK but when we have worked together some more, I think our potential will be very good."

In a branch of the sport that works to such fine margins, even learning how best to work with an engine's power delivery characteristics can make a difference to qualifying position. VeeKay, after 80 races with Chevrolet, describes the transition to Honda as "pleasant."

He goes on: "I'd heard the stories that the switch from Chevy to Honda is easier than the other way around, and now I understand why. The Honda drivability is better, which is especially good for street courses. It has a smoother throttle application. There was a bit to learn because Honda has different names for everything and slightly different procedures — how to save fuel under caution, for example. But I'm fine with the switch."

Most assessments of the relative merits of IndyCar's two engine suppliers, from year to year, are usually based on their performance at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and that will remain an unknown at least until "Fast Friday," the day before qualifying weekend for the 109th Indy 500. There are reasons to be optimistic for Coyne and VeeKay.

"We've had some very good cars for the Speedway over the years, with a few exceptions," says Coyne, "and Rinus has the best average qualifying spot in Indy out of everyone here, doesn't he? Last year was the first time he didn't qualify in the top four — and he qualified seventh! I know Ed's team gave him good cars, but Rinus knew how to get the most out of them and he now knows how a good car needs to feel for qualifying and the race. I think that will be very helpful. We had Romain Grosjean and Rinus as options for this year, and they're both very good on road and street courses but I think Rinus makes us stronger on ovals, particularly the Speedway. I think we could have a strong month of May."

And beyond. The VeeKay-Coyne deal is currently only for one season, but neither side is ruling out the possibility of remaining together for longer.

"It's early days, but Rinus seems very happy here," says Coyne, who also serves as his strategist. "We listen to him, we care about him, we respect his input, and he feels that. He also trusts us to give 100 percent, be it the car, the strategy, and so on. We won't always get it right because no one does, but we will always make maximum effort, like he does in the cockpit."

As for VeeKay himself, he wants "another 20 years in IndyCar," so feels he can afford to wait a little longer for an opportunity with one of the top teams. He has also set himself the target of helping to turn Dale Coyne Racing into a winning team "like Justin Wilson and Sebastien Bourdais did."

He continues: "Now I've seen from the inside how this team operates, how Dale runs his team and his desire for success, I really think he deserves to be in that position again, standing in victory lane. And I really want to make that happen for him and for everyone here, as well as for myself."