Romain Grosjean will not race full-time in IndyCar this year as he has taken the role of reserve driver for the new-to-IndyCar Prema Racing team.
Prema already has Callum Ilott and Robert Shwartzman signed to race seats, so Grosjean will act as their backup as well as fulfilling other duties with the team.
Grosjean made the decision to switch to IndyCar in 2021 after the conclusion of his Formula 1 career, which started in 2009 and came to an end after a fiery crash at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix.
He initially came to IndyCar part-time and excelled with the smaller Dale Coyne team, scoring two podiums and a fairytale pole at the Indianapolis road course.
Those performances yielded a plum seat at Andretti for 2022-23, and after a slow start adapting to the car in 2022 he improved and began the following year strongly.
But that was followed by a barren run in May, and Grosjean ultimately exited the team at the end of the 2023 season.
Grosjean entered arbitration after leaving Andretti, feeling he had earned a new contract and claimed he was offered one.
He joined Juncos Hollinger Racing for 2024 and delivered what he called one of his best seasons, finishing 17th in the standings. But he lost his seat for 2025 with Sting Ray Robb joining Conor Daly at the team.
His best years in terms of end-of-year standings were 2022 and 2023 with Andretti, when he finished 13th. He has six podiums and three pole positions in the series, with a best finish of second, delivered five times, and a top result of 19th at the Indianapolis 500.
During 2024, Grosjean also indirectly worked with Prema as it was an advisor to Iron Lynx on the Lamborghini sportscar programme Grosjean spearheaded.
He and his family have made Florida their home and Grosjean has spoken of how much he enjoys the United States.
What is this role for?
Given IndyCar has an extremely stringent testing regime, you may ask: what is the benefit of having a reserve driver?
There's a premium on proper simulator time, too. While the big teams may have sims, the proper top-level ones like you might see in F1 are at General Motors and Honda respectively. This means the top teams and drivers get priority for the time in there and, when you do get a slot, you want your race drivers, not reserves, in there.
However, Grosjean can still be of massive benefit to Prema.
First off, he's one of the best drivers on the market with IndyCar experience, certainly better than at least a few drivers who are on the grid full-time this year, and if anything did happen to Ilott or Shwartzman - and of course, we hope it doesn't - there can't be many better plug-and-play reserve options than Grosjean.
There's been such a high rate of needing reserves in IndyCar recently that having a driver of this calibre on standby is a massive benefit.
And then there's the fact that - although this Prema team will be made up of a lot of people from IndyCar or with IndyCar experience - there are plenty of people coming into this fresh with no foundation to build on, and Shwartzman is a total IndyCar rookie.
Ilott has a lot more experience, but he also didn't drive the car with hybrid power last year and has things to learn there.
Grosjean got on well with Ilott - even as Grosjean was being linked with a seat at Juncos while Ilott was still there - and he is just one of a group of people Grosjean has experience of and fits in well with.
For example, he would have worked last year with Steve Barker, Ilott's engineer in 2023, and with John McGill, who was advising on the Lamborghini project. Grosjean just…fits.
He does like to have the car set-up in a very specific way, but that doesn't matter so much if he's not driving it every week. If he's called upon, he'll adapt, and in any sim work, he's clever enough to know that he isn't developing the car for himself.
While seven-time IndyCar race winner Ryan Briscoe is a great addition to the team as a sporting advisor who can assist the drivers, Grosjean has much more recent seat experience that can help Ilott/Shwartzman.
Grosjean will do occasional sim work and act as a third opinion (after the race drivers) when tricky decisions crop up. And in a new team, there will be a lot of those.
Finally, Grosjean is box office. You might love him, you might not, but he's entertainment gold, on and off the track. And his story, that of 'the Phoenix', coming back from that awful Bahrain accident, is a brilliant one. It reminds us in motorsport there are second chances and ways to change the narrative.
