It's been a wild season for IndyCar rookies. Some have been hired and fired and hired again, one lost their seat entirely, and another's managed a pole position and a podium.
After 12 of 17 races and with the season about to resume for its final run-in at Gateway this weekend, we have a big enough sample set for most of these drivers to be able to judge them effectively.
So, here's our ranking of the rookies so far this season, form worst to best.
We've excluded drivers who have competed in four or fewer races to make sure we have enough data to judge them on, but stick around until the end for more on one driver we couldn't rank but who has impressed.
6 Tom Blomqvist
Age: 30
Team: Shank
Points: 46 (28th)
Starts: 5
Best start: 12th
Best finish: 15th
Tom Blomqvist didn't have the best start IndyCar initiation in his 2023 cameos but, for someone who beat Max Verstappen in a Formula 3 season in 2014, we’d expected a stronger start to this year.
He might ultimately have rediscovered that single-seater form he was once capable of, but Meyer Shank Racing couldn't afford to wait.
Signing David Malukas - after it dropped Blomqvist following his Indianapolis 500 crash - has provided an immediate and enormous uplift for the team, which is fighting for a top 22 Leaders' Circle place that will earn it $1million from IndyCar at the end of the year.
Blomqvist needed more time, but was never going to get it with the form he was showing and the concern from Shank about not finishing in the top 22.
He's so good in sportscars, and will undoubtedly land on his feet there as Meyer Shank becomes the factory Acura-branded Honda team next year in the IMSA SportsCar Championship.
5 Kyffin Simpson
Age: 19
Team: Ganassi
Points: 133 (20th)
Starts: 12
Best start: 12th
Best finish: 12th
Ultimately, even now there are many drivers out there on the silly season market that you would take over Kyffin Simpson, and the family backing he has brought to Ganassi is what keeps him in this seat.
But this has been a better rookie year than many will have expected from him. His qualifying form leaves plenty to be desired but Simpson doesn't have the worst average finish on this list, and is ahead of Indy NXT champion Christian Rasmussen in the points.
Coincidentally, Simpson had been having one of his best races at Road America when Rasmussen spun him out, and had he continued there it would have boosted him further up the points order.
How harshly you judge Simpson and another Ganassi rookie coming later down the line is in part down to how good their equipment is versus what race-winning team-mates Alex Palou and Scott Dixon have at their disposal. Is the team spread too thin? Can it provide the same level of machinery for five cars? Should we be lenient on the drivers who aren't Palou or Dixon?
Regardless of those questions, Simpson hasn't been the best of this class, but he's not the worst rookie to come into IndyCar in recent years. And he's well behind many on this list in terms of age and years of racing experience.
Simpson is almost six years younger than the leader of the rookies' championship. So while he might not sprout into a future champion, there's plenty of time to grow.
His racecraft and instinct to get to the end of races have been a great start for him. He's completed the 13th-highest number of laps this year.
4 Christian Rasmussen
Age: 24
Team: Carpenter
Points: 109 (23rd)
Starts: 10
Best start: 8th
Best finish: 9th
If this ranking was base just on a driver showing impressive pace, Indy NXT champion Christian Rasmussen would be a lot higher.
It’s so tough to judge the Ed Carpenter Racing driver because it’s been such a rollercoaster year for his race-winning team-mate Rinus VeeKay that there’s not a solid enough comparison, but there have been flashes of excellent potential.
Rasmussen's poor results
St Petersburg: Clutch issue then pitlane speeding violation put him a lap down. Finished 20th
Barber: Pushed off track multiple times before a spin and late stall cost him. Finished 24th
Long Beach: Brushed a wall, broke suspension
Indy road course: Pit issue dropped him back. Finished 20th
Detroit: Running eighth when he had an engine issue
Road America: Running 10th before penalty for spinning Simpson. Finished 20th
Toronto: Crashed into by Marcus Ericsson
A few too many errors of his own put him behind the McLaren drivers on this list, but Rasmussen's certainly dealing with an inferior set-up compared to any of his rivals here, and has therefore done a solid job. He has the second-best finishing position of the drivers on this list and was robbed of a higher one, too.
His 12th-place finish in the Indy 500 was a standout and races like Detroit where he was eighth before an engine issue would have boosted him into closer rookies' championship contention.
It's been a little too scrappy, but Rasmussen has showed he has what it takes to race at this level.
3 Nolan Siegel
Age: 19
Teams: Coyne, Juncos, McLaren
Points: 88 (25th)
Starts: 7
Best start: 11th
Best finish: 12th
Nolan Siegel's 2024 has been wild. It started with five slated appearances for Dale Coyne Racing, but Siegel has ended up securing a plum McLaren seat and posting decent numbers in that car for the period he has been in it.
His Indy 500 feels like a blot on the record book as he failed to qualify after crashing in practice. It's clear the Coyne cars were bad, but team-mate Katherine Legge coped OK.
But apart from that, Siegel is the best driver on this list on oval finishes this season after a strong Iowa weekend.
Comparatively, his road and street course average finish isn't great, but there's been nothing that tells you that this driver isn't cut out for this level, or that he won't improve significantly with age and experience.
2 Theo Pourchaire
Age: 20
Team: McLaren
Points: 91 (24th)
Starts: 6
Best start: 7th
Best finish: 10th
I’ve tried not to let feeling sorry for Theo Pourchaire over his lack of a seat for the rest of the year lure me into ranking him too highly.
In terms of average finish and points per start he's top of the rookies who have done five or more races, and that includes an 11th in Long Beach when he hadn’t driven the car before and a 14th in Toronto after travelling 4000 miles overnight to get in the car for qualifying at a track he'd never driven, even on the simulator.
Whether Pourchaire could find the next step with better preparation and more time in the car is another question, but in terms of what he has done and the circumstances he has done it in, he's been very impressive.
His qualifying hasn't always been the best, but he shows up and brings home a clean car on race day.
1 Linus Lundqvist
Age: 25
Team: Ganassi
Points: 173 (18th)
Starts: 12
Best start: 1st
Best finish: 3rd
Where to even start with Linus Lundqvist's season?
It looks like he might be out of a seat at Ganassi next year and struggle to find one elsewhere with paying drivers on the market, but it will be a travesty if he is off the grid in 2025.
Lundqvist's poor results
St Petersburg: Taken out by Romain Grosjean while 12th
Indy GP: Didn't get enough fuel at a pitstop. Finished 24th
Indy 500: Taken out at the first corner on lap one
Detroit: Caught up in multiple crashes. Finished 22nd
Iowa race one: Mechanical issue
His best start was his pole at Road America, and the next-best driver on this list can only boast a seventh on the grid. He has a podium, and the next-best driver's highest finish is ninth.
The only real question is whether he has performed at the maximum this car and team is capable of.
There have been mistakes, but anyone who doesn't think Lundqvist deserves another chance in IndyCar needs to look at his form a bit closer.
The wildcard who would be top
Toby Sowery has started just two IndyCar races, so it's not like we have a massive data set, but coming into 2024’s worst-performing team and bagging a 13th and a 15th is certainly no feat to be underestimated.
It makes you wonder: has Coyne made good choices with its driver line-up earlier in the season? Are these the results it was capable of all along?
Of course, two races is not a big enough sample set to decide that. But Sowery had only done one test with another team in an IndyCar, with Rahal last year at Sebring, before stepping in with Coyne at Mid-Ohio.
Luca Ghiotto drove that car earlier in the year and had a best finish of 21st, and he's a very accomplished driver.
There’s only one road course race left so Sowery might not have enough chance to impress to secure a full-time seat next year unless it's with Coyne. Sowery is also one of the drivers in the market not able to bring a massive budget.
But his performances have certainly turned heads, especially given how episodic his single-seater career has been, and a reminder of the strong impression the now-28-year-old made in the junior ranks in the UK in the mid-2010s.
