Felipe Drugovich made a fast impression in his NTT IndyCar Series testing debut with Chip Ganassi Racing on Monday. The 24-year-old Brazilian fired around the rolling 15-turn Barber Motorsports Park road course with a best of 1m07.631s, which was a few tenths under the time set by Ganassi’s Alex Palou at a previous test with IndyCar’s hybrid engine package.
“It was a great day,” Drugovich, the 2022 Formula 2 champion and Aston Martin F1 test driver, told RACER. “Just getting to know the car, getting used to how the car feels, which is, I can say, pretty different to anything I’ve ever driven. Not in a bad way – it’s just quite different. The steering feel, and tires and engine. It took a few runs to get used to it, and the whole day went pretty well. In the afternoon, we went through more sets of tires just to get a few reads on some setup changes that they wanted to do, and everything went well. We managed to manage to test quite a few things, and I enjoyed it. That’s the most important thing.”
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The Ganassi team was impressed with Drugovich’s physical conditioning: the car’s high weight and high downforce, mixed with an absence of power steering, tends to leave first-time IndyCar testers physically exhausted.
“To be fair, I think we can put any driver in a Formula 4 car at Barber and they’re still going to be tired at the end of the day, so it’s, it’s a quite a physical track,” he said. “But yeah, it was a long time that I last drove a non-power steering car, and that gave me a hard time during the day. But obviously, we tried to stay prepared and ready for anything. So if one day I’ll be racing in IndyCar, I need to prepare a lot more there, but overall, there were no big issues. And obviously, having driven with Formula 1 quite a few times, my neck is quite okay, but here at Barber with his car, it’s very physical.”
Although Ganassi does not have any openings in its team for 2025, the squad used its last evaluation test day to get a feel for Drugovich’s pace and feedback.
“You never know when you’re when you’re going to have an opening, and you don’t always have a chance to test people when you do have an opening,” said Ganassi performance director Chris Simmons. “So it’s good to get this under our belts and keep Felipe in our contact list. And certainly, I think he showed the speed to be able to join the IndyCar Series in the future and do a real good job wherever he lands.”
Drugovich hasn’t done a lot of racing since completing his run to the 2022 F2 title. A seat with the Vector Sport European Le Mans Series LMP2 outfit has been a welcome development in 2024, as was another sports car outing at Le Mans with Cadillac in the Hypercar class, but the Brazilian has spent most of the last two seasons on the sidelines waiting for his next open-wheel racing opportunity.
Leaving Barber, Drugovich was a big fan of all he experienced in the No. 11 Ganassi Honda.
“I think that it was a good day for everything,” he said. “Trying out new things on the car, and for me to getting to grips with this car, getting the feeling, showing [the team] what I can do, and also me getting to know them and a little bit better.
“I think if, in the future, I have an opportunity to race for them, I will be very happy to do that. So many championships. It’s always a pleasure to work with teams like that. I enjoyed the people and it’s a good environment. It would be very cool to one day be with them.”