Public criticism is easy to throw against any sporting entity that isn’t performing well. Look no further than the Chicago White Sox, a team so bad in 2024 that their social media admin decided to be creative with doing final score social media posts.
Yeah. You get the idea.
In the NTT IndyCar Series, the same ridicule has often been hurled at Dale Coyne Racing (DCR). On the surface, no, the results weren’t good. There’s no denying that. In a racing series of mostly spec cars with the tiniest of margins, a team in a 27-car field having a best finish of 13th place will draw a lot of criticism the team’s way.
There are always reasons why teams don’t perform well, but in racing some of those reasons aren’t quite as visible as one might see in either football, basketball or another major sport. Let’s look into what happened at DCR in 2024.
A racing team is more than just the driver whose name appears on the back of a souvenir jersey. There’s a lot of personnel that work behind the scenes to make a car go fast, from mechanics to engineers and everyone in between.
After the 2023 season, Dale Coyne Racing lost all but two members of their engineering staff. A tremendous amount of institutional knowledge was no longer in the building, and that all couldn’t be placed at DCR’s feet. Sometimes there are situations where if a phone call comes from a certain organization, that’s one that you better pick up.
In 2023, Alex Athanasiadis was David Malukas’ race engineer. After Malukas ended 2023 with two top fives and six top 10s, Athanasiadis got a call to join Porsche Penske Motorsports in IMSA.
Don’t try to deny it, that’s a hard opportunity for anyone to pass up.
New crew members and engineers were hired, with most having no prior IndyCar experience. Most of the crew got their first experience at IndyCar’s unofficial “spring training” at Sebring at the end of February.
That gives the new team members time to figure out processes and other parts of the job, but they’re up against many teams that have had minimal turnover in the offseason and did more testing before everything shut down in the winter.
Turning to the drivers’ side of things, there’s no nice way of saying that the team needs money. During his tenure at DCR, current Andretti Global Chief Engineer Craig Hampson said that Dale Coyne probably puts more of his own money into his race team than any other team owner except maybe Roger Penske.
The team needed drivers with some form of funding to help keep the team afloat, which is why nine different drivers started a race for the team in 2024.
Jack Harvey contested all but three races in the No. 18 Honda, only for Nolan Siegel to attempt to qualify for the 2024 Indianapolis 500 in that entry, but more on that later. Conor Daly and Hunter McElrea also filled the seat when Harvey wasn’t racing.
The No. 51 entry was a bit more chaotic, with Katherine Legge contesting the ovals in that car and a mix of Colin Braun, Siegel, Luca Ghiotto, Tristan Vautier and Toby Sowery sharing the car on the road and street courses.
No two drivers have the same feedback style, so mechanics and engineers have to decipher what each driver means when they say the car is performing a certain way.
“If you’ve been with a driver long enough, you can almost tell from tone of voice or they’ll have one or two special words or something that you go, ‘Oh, I know exactly what you mean,'” said one DCR team member. “Where you just streamline the whole process and if you’re at Mid-Ohio, they’ll say, ‘Oh, remember that thing we did at Barber? This is exactly what it was doing at Barber.’ And remember that thing we did, there’s multiple levels there. Where continuity is just such an advantage. Now, it forces you to be generic.
“When you’re doing a setup, you have to be generic. We have a fair degree of confidence in this platform that it’s a good starting spot, but you’re doing that at every event. That’s a good starting spot when you’re typically about six changes away from qualifying, if you look at the first practice and if you have two practices before qualifying, you’re six, seven changes away [from an optimal setup]. Starting generic uses up a couple of those changes straight away.”
With someone like Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing has an established baseline for a track based on a large notebook of information and has a very small amount of turnover from season to season in their technical department, so feedback and preferences are known to everyone working on that car. That wasn’t a luxury DCR had for 2024.
“It’s just like starting fresh every time,” said the DCR team member. “And you have to be super conservative. You can’t really try to optimize anything because you don’t know what the target is.”
So to recap, an overwhelming majority of new engineering staff had no prior IndyCar experience and were starting the season off having worked together for the first time at a track only the month before.
Oh, and then there’s the Indianapolis 500. You know, the Memorial Day classic that the series is based around. DCR had Siegel in the No. 18 entry partnering Legge and the team had some preparation issues. With the new gearboxes for 2024 ahead of the hybrid implementation at Mid-Ohio, the gearboxes from 2023 weren’t be usable anymore.
The team didn’t have a good superspeedway-prepared gearbox for May. Combine that with Siegel’s crash on Fast Friday, the team had to go to a backup tub that didn’t have nearly the kind of body fit that the primary car had, which wasn’t up to what it had been in previous years when Sebastien Bourdais drove for the team several seasons ago.
And then there’s the fact that Siegel’s a rookie who just had a major crash at IMS and now he has to try and do a qualifying run fast enough to get into the field.
“Put yourself in Nolan’s shoes, you know, your first time at the whole thing and you’ve just crashed his car the day before,” said the DCR team member. “He actually did a really good job getting himself back up to speed. Every run he did after the accident was basically a qualifying run. That’s hard, you know. You just put a car in the wall at 230 miles an hour. Then we’re standing there telling him, ‘Go out and do four good ones,’ the next time he’s in the car.”
With Siegel’s crash during his final Indianapolis 500 qualifying run, the No. 18 entry failed to make the starting field, not helping that entry’s chances of making the Leaders Circle prize-sharing fund.
In fact, neither DCR entry made the Leaders Circle cutoff after the 2024 season.
But given the rotating cast of drivers out of necessity and a nearly all-new technical staff, there shouldn’t have been very high expectations for the team, which is why Harvey’s 13th-place finishes at Barber and Nashville and Sowery’s 13th-place finish at Mid-Ohio should be celebrated.
Because a lot went on behind the scenes that nobody knew about and there was a lot to overcome.
But maybe 2025 can bring a bit of a fresh start for the team. Only time will tell.
Christopher DeHarde has covered IndyCar racing and the Road to Indy for various outlets since 2014. In addition to open wheel racing, DeHarde has also covered IMSA and various short track racing events around Indiana. Originally from New Orleans, DeHarde moved to the Indianapolis area in 2017 to further pursue a career as a motorsports writer.