While in motorsport it’s often the team with the most resources that wins the race, IndyCar as a whole is obsessed with the contrary and last year’s Indianapolis 500 was the perfect example.
Two full seasons into its IndyCar career, Meyer Shank Racing won the 500 in its first race running two cars, with veteran part-timer Helio Castroneves taking it to victory.
But you didn’t have to look much further down the order for another incredible giant-killing result.
Having finished in the top 10 only twice in 12 attempts since the current IndyCar chassis was introduced in 2012, Dreyer & Reinbold Racing took a brilliant seventh place with IndyCar mainstay and now esports ace Sage Karam.
It was a result that certainly went against all expectations.
Having shrunk from two cars to one for 2021, the team struggled to work through the experimentation needed in practice to be ready for qualifying and the race.
Karam narrowly qualified the car, having gone through the pressure-sensitive ‘bump day’ knockout, but once the race came he was much more confident.
Everything went right and he became the event’s biggest mover up from 31st to that top-1o finish.
Now, the team has scored a huge coup for 2022, signing a driver who’s become an Indy 500 standout since his event debut in 2019: Santino Ferrucci.
“So actually last year, I went out and I almost signed with them, I was at their factory, just looked at their cars,” Ferrucci tells The Race in an exclusive interview discussing his new home.
“You can just always tell visually, when you’ve been around long enough, how good the equipment is and how much time and care they put into it.
“I could clearly tell Dreyer & Reinbold was putting together a really good programme. I just had a different opportunity that came along, obviously with Rahal, and I wanted to go that route.
“So when Dreyer & Reinbold called me towards the end of ’21, I didn’t really need to think about it much.
“It’s also really good to get this deal announced early because we also want to build a very good engineering crew and pit crew and you know, get the right people and start working on this as soon as possible and not be fumbling around into March to try and get people. It made sense.”
Ferrucci has finished seventh, fourth and sixth at the 500, but perhaps his most impressive run was last year, considering he crashed and hurt his leg in practice.
He’d joined Rahal Letterman Lanigan at the last minute in the team’s third car, having switched to NASCAR as his main focus following his two full-time seasons in IndyCar with Dale Coyne.
That’s another reason why he is buoyant at sorting this deal soon because he can purely focus on the task in hand, spend time in the workshop and also avoid racing in a NASCAR as much – which ultimately he reckons contributed to his Indy practice crash last year because of how much oversteer the Xfinity Series cars are driven with.
While Ferrucci acknowledges D&R is a smaller team than some others out there, he’s confident of the advantages that brings, especially when it comes to being one of the few purely Indy 500-only entries in IndyCar.
“You have to remember everybody that’s a full-time effort is putting together a full year,” he says, “so they’re focused on the 500, but not as much as an Indy-only team would be, which is nice.
“You also can pick and choose who you want working for the team because I feel like there’s more people that would prefer to just do Indy only that are incredibly gifted mechanics and engineers and such that have just been doing it and been in the sport for such a long time. The convenience of it.
“If you look last year Helio was in an Indy-only car and, don’t get me wrong Meyer Shank has a fantastic programme. But when’s the last time we’ve seen an Indy-only car win the 500?
“And that obviously turned into more races for him [Castroneves is full time in 2022 with the team]. So it’s cool to see those third car programmes and Indy-only teams getting more competitive every year.”
Karam adds a layer of consistency to the line-up, as he’s making his eighth 500 start with the team with confidence based on last season.
He’s not quite as positive over the drawbacks of being an Indy-only team as Ferrucci, but is hopeful with an added entry and given last year’s performance that Dreyer & Reinbold is trending forwards.
“For us, being a one-off team, a smaller team, going to Indy and having to take the fight to the big names like Penske, Ganassi, Andretti, you’re always kind of starting out a little disadvantaged only being a one race effort,” he tells The Race.
“With me last year only being a one-car team, we don’t have data and stuff from a team-mate.
“When you’re doing qualifying sims and race running and stuff, the whole running through the list of set-up stuff is a lot slower when you’re only one car.
“If you have two, three, four cars, one guy can go out there and do aero, and the other guy can do springs, and stuff like that.
“We were a little disappointed with where we qualified, starting 31st. We want to qualify better and with this era of IndyCar racing, qualifying is so important at the Speedway.
“When I first got into Indy, you could start anywhere and passing was quite easy, but now it’s quite difficult. So qualifying is more of a premium. So we were pretty disappointed where we qualified.
“But then race day came and just everything went our way. We didn’t make any mistakes.
“A few guys had pit speed limit violations, we didn’t have any of those. Pitstops were flawless. Made some on track passes, caught a break with a yellow and just pretty much everything that could go our way went our way that day and finished seventh.
“It felt like a win obviously for us. But, we do show up to win, so there’s definitely still unfinished business there. But it definitely makes us go into 2022 with a lot more confidence.”
Perhaps one of the areas that has helped smaller IndyCar teams be successful is the shift we’ve seen in the approaches of the engine manufacturers in recent years.
Honda especially has brought all of its engineering, design and construction in house and its simulator is there too.
Chevrolet – which powers Dreyer & Reinbold – has been moving towards a similar approach. It’s perhaps because the engine marques have done all they can with the nearly 10-year-old 2.2-litre engine and are now looking for ways to develop the rest of the car in conjunction with the engine to create a better all-around package.
Development in sim accuracy has played a big part in that too.
Perhaps in the past, some of the bigger teams would have undertaken some of this extra and expensive refinement work, but with the manufacturers handling a lot of it now, the information trickles down to their respective customers including low-resource teams like D&R.
“We were able to get down there to the Chevrolet sim and worked on a lot of stuff that we found worked in real life. I think that basically led to us finding some good things that worked for us in 2021,” adds Karam.
You might say winning is the goal for any team, but you have to think that some drivers and operations know they aren’t going to have a shot at victory some (or many) weekends. That’s just how motorsport works.
But team boss Dennis Reinbold is as passionate as he’s ever been about wanting to win an event he grew up watching, the Indianapolis 500.
“It’s his biggest dream, biggest goal as a team owner,” adds Karam of Reinbold.
“He makes sure every box is checked before we show up to the Speedway, that’s going to give us the best shot to win the race.
“He knows if we can have two cars out there, it’s better for him. He’s got two bullets in the chamber there basically.
“He wants drivers in the cars that he thinks can win this race for him since he only runs one race a season in IndyCar, he’s showing up to win so he’s not going to do anything that’s going to hinder his confidence in that.”
While Karam’s seventh and Castroneves’ win in the Indy 500 last year might both be false dawns, it does feel like there is a tangible shift in the series whereby smaller teams can be competitive in a number of races even if they can’t manage that over a season.
For Dreyer & Reinbold though, it doesn’t have to because Indy is its only focus. The signing of Ferrucci may well push this team even further forward than last year.
