Ranking the 2024 IndyCar drivers from worst to best

It was another wild IndyCar season that featured 43 drivers across what was a 27-car grid for almost every race in 2024.

Whether it was Dale Coyne's week-to-week announcements of who would drive at each race (including some very random interlopers), McLaren signing four drivers to race the same car, or Penske having two cars disqualified for rules breaches, it's been a rollercoaster year for those racing in the series.

From those in the championship fight to those in the battle for last place in the Leaders' Circle table with $1million at stake, we rank all of the drivers that completed at least half of the 2024 IndyCar season - from worst to best.

26 Sting Ray Robb

Given his team-mate Santino Ferrucci bagged the AJ Foyt team's first top 10 championship finish since 2002, Robb had a poor season (he was 11 places and nearly 200 points behind, and didn't make the Leaders' Circle cut).

He's shown little to prove he belongs in IndyCar at this standard on merit, sadly.

25 Agustin Canapino

This was a really tough one because my gut feeling says that Canapino wasn't that bad, but the stats point to him having the worst points per race tally in the field.

Conor Daly, who replaced him at Juncos Hollinger for the final five races, scored almost double the number of points per race (18.6 to 9.9) which tells you Canapino was underperforming in the car. With $1million on the line for the places in the Leaders' Circle scheme, there's nowhere to hide in IndyCar.

Despite making a poorly received statement in the wake of his fans sending death threats to Theo Pourchaire after Detroit, Canapino was such a fascinating story and did a brilliant job in IndyCar given his tin-top background. It's sad it ended this way.

24 Kyffin Simpson

We need to make clear from the get-go that Ganassi's expansion from three to five cars was always going to be a challenge and meant that some of its drivers weren't going to get the quality of car, pitstops or strategy that Alex Palou and Scott Dixon get.

But even given that, Simpson was third from last in the points-per-race ranking in a car that finished first and sixth in the championship.

There's room to grow, and being taken out while challenging for a top 10 at Road America wiped a potentially encouraging result off the board. But 24th is a fair position.

23 Pietro Fittipaldi

You can point to ill fortune, but there's no way a driver who was in a Formula 1 car this year should be 126 points behind his IndyCar team Rahal Letterman Lanigan's best driver, with a top result of 13th - achieved once - from the season.

I get that Fittipaldi was learning some of the tracks and it was his first full season in IndyCar. But he had nine starts on a selection of tracks before this.

It was simply a poor season and if he keeps his seat, it won't be on the merit of his results in 2024.

22 Jack Harvey

I wonder if I've placed Jack Harvey too high here, but he is the first driver on the list not to have been outscored by a team-mate.

That was also possible because he's not had the same team-mate all season!

His strong end to the campaign, after he'd raced with a back injury that finally took him out of the seat for a race at Iowa, was at least something to show for a tough year at Dale Coyne. Without two solid drivers in the car all year it's hard to know where this team has fallen to in terms of performance and therefore how good Harvey has been.

Although saying that, he has been matched or beaten by some in the sister car, most notably Toby Sowery.

Harvey's IndyCar career showed so much promise early on at Meyer Shank but his stints at Rahal and Coyne will have done little to enthuse another team that he is worthy of a seat, and he doesn't bring the massive budget that others can either.

21 Nolan Siegel

Siegel failed to make the Indianapolis 500 when a Dale Coyne team-mate did, and had a best result of seventh once he'd made the switch to Arrow McLaren.

He never looked like beating his team-mates on raw pace, but he's young and relatively inexperienced so we're certainly not condemning his future. But this ranking isn't done on driver potential, sadly.

A steady start to an IndyCar career but he'll have to show more next year.

20 Christian Rasmussen

A rollercoaster year for the 2023 Indy NXT champion.

Rasmussen is so hard to place because it's tricky to know how good his Ed Carpenter team should have been this year and he had one of those seasons where plenty of incidents have taken him out, such as a clutch issue in St Petersburg, an engine issue while eighth in Detroit, and being smashed into the wall by Marcus Ericsson in Toronto.

But he made some rookie errors too.

It took a lot for Ed Carpenter to step aside for the last four races and put Rasmussen into what had been his car on ovals, and two top 15s from Rasmussen then guaranteed a spot in the Leaders' Circle when it looked like this team might miss out.

Given ECR appeared to struggle for sponsorship this year, that could be vital.

19 Graham Rahal

You could probably repeat the same entry for Fittipaldi here for the next RLL driver on our list. Without the 'being in an F1 car this year'.

For the second year in a row, Rahal's been beaten by team-mate Christian Lundgaard. He has definitely had more ill-fortune than Fittipaldi or Lundgaard, but in 2024 he didn't show many examples of the race pace that has often put him in contention for a top five.

18 Romain Grosjean

It's so hard to judge this year for Grosjean. He made some mistakes, but outperformed the car in a few races as well.

He's clearly worked very hard with the Juncos team behind the scenes to improve the car. On ovals especially it was much better as the season wore on.

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And he achieved that without a team-mate of the same level across the whole season.

But he was significantly outscored by new signing Daly in the last five races when Daly took over Canapino's car.

Fundamentally, if you look at the cars ahead in the standings, I don't think you'd expect a Juncos Hollinger car to finish ahead of any of them realistically. So it was a good first season with this team for Grosjean but definitely not perfect.

17 Marcus Ericsson

Ericsson is low in this ranking and that's probably unfair given like many others he had a lot of issues out of his control that cost him dearly.

But there were too many occasions where he made errors and given Andretti paid for him to come over from Ganassi with high expectations, it was a disappointing season. Especially when his team-mates were so strong.

16 Linus Lundqvist

I found it so hard to separate Lundqvist and his Ganassi team-mate Marcus Armstrong. More on the latter in a minute.

Rookie of the year Lundqvist scored two podiums and a pole in his first full season, and I have no doubt he deserved more given how many races went against him this year.

He was taken out of that pole at Road America and crashed at the start of the second Milwaukee race and that's two top fives straight out of the window.

Of course, all drivers can explain away results on things out of their control. But Lundqvist's peaks were very high and he doesn't deserve to fall out of IndyCar. But without budget to bring, he'll struggle to stay in the series for 2025 as Ganassi cuts back to three cars.

15 Marcus Armstrong

Armstrong grabbed his first IndyCar podium in his second season, but in terms of peaks he was outperformed by team-mate Lundqvist.

If Lundqvist was an inexperienced rookie I'd have put him ahead but he's not, having had a few IndyCar outings last year and plenty of time on most of these tracks in the feeder series. Armstrong did provide better consistency over the course of the season as proven by scoring 19 more points.

He too had some events go against him and could have finished higher. It was a good season on the whole and some of his oval performances were particularly impressive given his lack of experience.

14 David Malukas

I feel like this will be one of those placements where some people are screaming he's too low, and others will be shouting he's too high.

Malukas has a lower points per race total than at least two drivers lower on the list, but he matched Meyer Shank team-mate Felix Rosenqvist's score over the time he spent in the car from Laguna Seca onwards after returning from a wrist injury. Given Rosenqvist was 12th in the championship, you wonder where Malukas could have ended up with a full campaign.

He had to start mid-season - when he was struggling to even turn the wheel at that stage in his recovery - against drivers already bedded in, and had to learn a new team, but his qualifying performances were epic and a couple of high-profile things going against him robbed him of strong top-five and top-10 finishes in a few races.

Given what Malukas was up against, this was a brilliant comeback even if some of the results should have been better. A puncture at Laguna Seca, a stall in the pits while in the top five at Mid-Ohio, a silly mistake at Iowa and a crash at Gateway that certainly appeared more Will Power's fault than his are just some of his travails.

13 Rinus VeeKay

It was another season where VeeKay saw off a team-mate and delivered a solid championship finish (13th this time).

But without a team-mate of his calibre across the season, it's hard to know whether he has been treading water or got the most out of this car.

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ECR hasn't been able to invest in and add to its engineering ranks as much as some other teams and is running on a tight budget, so I lean to the side of VeeKay excelling above what the car should be doing - especially as he had the fifth-best average finish on ovals this season, above two Penske drivers and a host of other top challengers.

We need to see him elsewhere to know how good he really is. A race winner shouldn't be 'just' finishing 13th every year without the chance to show more.

Unfortunately, he may struggle to stay on the grid next season with Carpenter going a different direction and dropping him last minute.

12 Felix Rosenqvist

A poor end to the season robbed Rosenqvist of the celebrations of the first half where he and Meyer Shank were extremely impressive on the road and street circuits early on and scored a first series pole, at Long Beach.

Malukas's similar performances when he joined show in part that both had results slip away from incidents out of their control, but neither was perfect this season either.

There's work to do but this was such an enormous step forward on 2023 for Meyer Shank and Rosenqvist spearheaded that for the team.

11 Christian Lundgaard

I'm glad next year we'll get to see Lundgaard in new equipment when he moves to McLaren.

RLL hasn't felt like a race-winning force at any stage this year and appears to be unable to fix its inconsistency. And Lundgaard was still the sixth-best driver on road courses this season.

After watching him take an incredible ninth and 12th at Milwaukee in a RLL car not fit for purpose on an oval, it felt like this season he was constrained by this team. A driver who should be fighting for wins and the title in a flailing sleeping giant.

I hope RLL improves for competitive purposes, but it feels like a chicken-and-egg situation of needing more/better engineers and struggling to attract that talent because of its slump and a general shortage of personnel in the paddock.

10 Alexander Rossi

I feel bad placing Rossi behind Santino Ferrucci because Rossi had the better points per race score, and had even been ahead of Josef Newgarden but slipped behind after the last race at Nashville.

And the reason he missed a race this year in the first place in Toronto was because he crashed - a mistake of his own.

The really frustrating part of Rossi's season is that he was actually much closer to McLaren team leader Pato O'Ward than people might think - just 0.4 worse off than O'Ward in terms of average finish - but the lack of peak results meant a deficit of five places to his team-mate in the championship standings.

9 Santino Ferrucci

Sadly, without an IndyCar-calibre team-mate, we won't know how good Ferrucci really was this year. But given it's Foyt’s first top 10 since 2002, it's hard to imagine he’s left much on the table. He was 19th last year!

Part of that is Foyt's excellent recruiting drive and Penske technical partnership, which also deserves a mention.

I could have easily placed him much higher because of his achievements but without the comparison of a decent team-mate, it didn't seem fair to the drivers he could have usurped.

Especially as, in his own words, he's got a car with access to Penske parts and information.

8 Kyle Kirkwood

Splitting this top 10 has been near impossible and in various drafts Rossi and Ferrucci have been ahead of Kirkwood.

But Kirkwood's done everything asked of him this year. He has been criticised in the past for being inconsistent, and this year he's been very consistent. In fact, he has a better average finish than three drivers who finished ahead in the championship (who all won multiple races).

Best average finish in 2024

Alex Palou 6.53
Colton Herta 7.41
Will Power 8.65
Kyle Kirkwood 8.71

The roles have been reversed at Andretti from last year, when Kirkwood won two races and Colton Herta won none, and Kirkwood was a step off Herta in the second half of this season.

It's a great foundation, because we knew he can win races, and now we know he can be consistent. He just needs to put the two together to end up where Herta did.

7 Josef Newgarden

Newgarden called his season "disastrous" and without his Indianapolis 500 win he would have been struggling to make the top 10 in the rankings.

The St Petersburg disqualification fiasco hurt his championship position and points - causing plenty of distress, too - but it's just been one of those years where little seemed to go right for Newgarden. Especially in key moments.

It's his first result outside of the championship top five since joining Penske in 2017. Given the fierce competitor he is, watch out for an all-guns-blazing Newgarden next year.

6 Pato O'Ward

This was another tough choice as O'Ward finished ahead of Scott Dixon in the championship standings.

But this feels like 'what could have been' for Pato. I think a host of late-season failures and issues would have ruled him out of contention, but he would have been much closer without a string of early-season errors.

His Indy 500 run was breathtaking and deserves a mention, even if he was passed for the win, but there have been many highs this year and once again he was by far clear of any other driver who set foot in a McLaren entry. And there were many.

5 Scott Dixon

This season just sort of melted away for Dixon, but he didn't make any high-profile errors unlike every other driver in championship contention.

Most of his poor results came from strategy miscues, tyre issues or the hybrid problem that ruled him out at Mid-Ohio. Between that instance and getting dumped off at Portland on the first lap, he basically lost two full races.

After finishing second last year, this will be a disappointment and another year of failing to bag a seventh title. Although he was the best street racer this season with two wins, and second on oval results.

Again, in other drafts I had him as high as second because of his dearth of errors and his ability to save fuel - one of the only skills where you can legitimately say that Dixon is unrivalled and unique. In those scenarios he can do something others can't.

4 Will Power

Even before Scott McLaughlin jumped ahead of him in the points standings at the last race I had Power behind his Penske team-mate in my rankings.

Given what Power went through last year when his wife was ill, he's done amazingly to come back in the way that he has to fight for the title.

But for me, the title was there for the taking. When the opportunities arose, Power made too many errors. He was the only person in the Penske camp who could make real use of a stretch of ovals to finish the season and he failed to do so.

A brilliant year on paper given what had happened the year before, but I'd be kicking myself to come so close and make big, high-profile errors that hurt my efforts.

3 Scott McLaughlin

Losing second in St Petersburg for the push-to-pass infraction - which he only activated briefly - definitely hurt McLaughlin's season. In fact, it cost him the championship taking purely the end of season tallies into account.

A gearbox issue in Long Beach and being dumped out of the top five by Power in Toronto (McLaughlin returned the favour at Laguna Seca) certainly didn't help, but he also threw away big results in Detroit and at Laguna Seca himself.

To be four years into his IndyCar career and the best driver statistically on ovals this year is an achievement that's hard to overlook, though. He's the least experienced of the drivers in the top 10 but operating at an absolutely elite level.

He's perhaps 1.9 seconds of illegal push-to-pass use off being your 2024 champion.

2 Colton Herta

Herta was right to point out he was upset with some previous results after he won the series finale. At the Indy 500, he crashed while third; in Detroit, he went off with a silly error. Those two missing results could have won him the title.

Still, no one is perfect - not even Alex Palou - and what Herta and Andretti achieved this year was really impressive.

Clear of his team-mates and blending wins with consistency, Herta deserves his props for making a step forward and delivering the first IndyCar season worthy of his driving talent.

1 Alex Palou

What is there left to say?

Palou actually made a proper mistake this year, crashing at Iowa, but his rivals failed to capitalise even though they had the chance.

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Off-track troubles continue with the McLaren court case, but on-track he just gets stronger, more assured and seemingly he is totally invincible.

That Iowa error aside, this was Palou's most assured year in IndyCar, especially given there were six drivers other than him who all won two or more races in 2024.

A total of 14 out of 17 races finishing in the top 10 (alongside the Iowa crash, he had a collision in Detroit and a battery issue messed up Milwaukee) and an average road course finish of 2.5 are just two stats showing how frankly ridiculous Palou was this year.