Ryan Hunter-Reay will be returning to full time IndyCar driving this weekend after being called up to replace Conor Daly at Ed Carpenter Racing.
Despite only having a couple weeks to get acquainted with the team and work out all the little details that need to be arranged before a race weekend, Hunter-Reay feels more comfortable due to familiar faces all around him.
The veteran has been in IndyCar more or less consistently since 2007, and he raced in Champ Car for three seasons before that. He has gotten to know a lot of people in the paddock in that time, which helps him for situations like the one he finds himself in now.
His recent Indianapolis 500 outing with Dreyer & Reinbold Racing was helped by his relationship with the people on that team, just as his new task will be helped by the people he already knows at ECR.
“Like I had said during the month of May at Indy and how much I enjoyed working with the people at Dreyer & Reinbold, it was about the people,” said Hunter-Reay.
“I’ve got a great relationship with Ed [Carpenter], but I also have had working relationships and really strong relationship currently with the team manager at Ed Carpenter, Matt Barnes, the engineer, my engineer, Pete Craig. I’ve worked with them before.
“My current crew chief on the #20 was my crew chief on the #28 at Andretti Autosport, so I just know a lot of the people there. They were in the position where this was something that needed to happen for the team.
“When they reached out and when Ed reached out, it was something that, ‘Hey, this is what I love to do.’
“I just came off Indy and had a great time there, really enjoyed it, and this is what I do for a living. I’m in a position where I could potentially contribute to the team as a whole. Why not? What are the why nots? What are the whys?
“Just putting all that together, and in the end it ended up coming down to the people.”
Hunter-Reay was adamant that he was not brought into the team in order to produce better results than the ones Daly was achieving, but rather to help the team find its identity.
Each team approaches a race weekend differently and has its own workflow, and ECR has fallen out of the groove this season. The team’s only top 10 results came at the Indy 500, with its drivers finding themselves in the middle or back of the pack at every other event this year.
Hunter-Reay’s task will be to use his experience to help settle the team, with race results being a secondary goal at this time.
“Right now honestly it’s race by race. We’ll see where it goes. Ed [Carpenter] is a good friend of mine. He called me. I was surprised when it happened. He called me and said, ‘I need your help. Would you be willing to do this? This is the situation that we’re in.’
“I had driven for Vision in ’09. Ed was my teammate. I had tested with the team in 2013. I tested with the team in 2021. So this is over a decade-long relationship and friendship that kind of got us to where we are at this point, and it’s a unique scenario.
“I’m not really sure where it’s going yet, and I’m not really looking that far ahead right now. I am totally focused on getting to Road America, doing the best job I can for that group of people at Ed Carpenter Racing who I have a great relationship with, and that’s really where it is. We’ll see where it goes.
“And yeah, it’s a lot of pressure on me, honestly, but at the same time, when I look at this pragmatically, I look at it from a realist point of view. There’s no silver bullet here. This is a matter of us looking at how we can approach things differently.”
