It has been a long time since Ed Carpenter sprayed champagne. With the changes and adjustments he’s made to his team during the offseason, which include the shutting down of a separate car for himself on the ovals in favor of sharing the No. 20 with Indy NXT champion Christian Rasmussen, the three-time Indianapolis 500 polesitter and three-time IndyCar race winner is focused on rediscovering his oval groove.
The last four seasons have been frustrating and unrewarding for the 43-year-old, and while placing fifth at Texas Motor Speedway in 2020 and fifth at the Indy 500 in 2021 were reminders of Carpenter’s oval prowess, there’s been little to celebrate after placing no better than 13th over the last two seasons.
And that’s where stepping out of the largely uncompetitive No. 33 Chevy entry, plus the recent addition of Indy 500-winning engineer Eric Cowdin, and the consolidation of ECR’s efforts to two cars for 2024 — barring Rasmussen’s shift to a third car at Indy — should contribute to making the team and its owner/driver more competitive.
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Wednesday’s rain-shortened test day at Indy didn’t tell us much, but Carpenter was back in familiar territory after posting the seventh-fastest lap of the day.
“I wouldn’t keep doing it if I didn’t feel like I was capable,” he told RACER. “It’s been a strange couple of seasons, just the way things have worked out. I think it looks a lot worse than it’s felt at times. Still, I have a ton of fun doing what I’m doing; more fun when we’re running better than what we have been. But I’m really happy with where the team’s at right now.”
ECR was among the welcome surprised to open the season at St. Petersburg with Rinus VeeKay in the No. 21 Chevy rating among the fastest entries during the event while rookie teammate Christian Rasmussen was smart and measured on his IndyCar debut. Their respective finishes of 10th and 21st offer promise of what’s to come from the team as it looks to fight among the bigger and wealthier programs.
“Rinus has made another step, and we haven’t fully shown yet with Christian but internally, we’re really happy with where he’s at,” Carpenter said. “You can see what’s going to be coming as he gets some more experience and gets fully acclimated to IndyCar. Rinus is off to a really competitive start. It’s still a small sample size this year, but every time we’ve been out, he’s been quick and consistent and the execution has been there. So we’re really encouraged with that, and excited for a Christian to show his full potential here soon.”
Most of the 2023 season was filled with disappointment for ECR as its cars were rarely found in the mix with drivers who were fighting for the championship. Left with a massive amount of improvements to make, next week’s race on the streets of Long Beach will give Carpenter more data to determine of his team’s efforts to find more speed on road and street courses has been a success.
“There’s credit to the drivers, and there’s credit to the group of people we have that have been working hard to make sure we put ourselves in a better position,” he said. “I don’t feel like there’s an area the team as a whole didn’t take very seriously and come up with a good plan in preparation to start the year. So that makes it exciting for me to get back to racing.
“Part of what has me excited too is we’ve added we added Eric (Cowdin), but other than that on the engineering side, it’s largely our same group of personnel. You know, we’ve added some young guys over the past couple of years, and we’re seeing them start to develop into confident, additive pieces. And Eric didn’t start until the last day of February, so I don’t really think we’ve started to feel his impact yet. So the fact that we’ve started the season better than we finished it, I think we still have room for growth, which is exciting.”