Six years ago in the Portland paddock, on the Thursday setup day for the NTT IndyCar Series weekend, Santino Ferrucci sat in the back of a nondescript administration trailer, the kind you’d see on a construction site, and spoke about the career he hoped to revive back in America.
The Woodbury, Connecticut native had done a thorough job of ruining his name and reputation while chasing the dream of reaching Formula 1. Boorish behavior and a generally bad attitude towards his Formula 2 teammate Arjun Maini led to being dropped by his team during the summer, and with the door closed in Europe, Ferrucci headed back to the U.S. and reconnected with the Dale Coyne Racing team.
He’d done two races for Coyne at the Detroit doubleheader in June, a month prior to his meltdown in Silverstone, and shown well. Embarrassed and remorseful, Ferrucci sat in that trailer in September of 2018 with two more races to run for Coyne and spoke of hoping to earn a second chance in the sport. And namely, to make IndyCar his home.
Fresh from earning his first career pole in IndyCar for an A.J. Foyt Racing team with his personal sponsor Phoenix Investors adorning the sidepods for the first time on the No. 14 Chevy, that dream from more than a half-decade ago started to come full circle on Saturday at Portland.
“That was six years ago, and man, there’s a lot of emotion at this place,” Ferrucci told RACER. “For people to be taking a chance on me, to be making it in the series as long as I have, to be with this Foyt team, it’s meant everything.
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“Now to get my first career pole is the cherry on top of the cake. We’ve been struggling with qualifying all year. I think that’s no secret, but the race pace has been insane. Now we get to take the field to green and see what happens.”
It was a career first for his race engineer James Schnabel, whose talent is a perfect match for Ferrucci. Foyt technical director Michael Cannon, who joined the team 19 months ago and oversaw the connection with Team Penske in a new technical alliance, has been a massive part of the team’s transformation from being the worst team in the series as recently as 2022 to one that’s had Ferrucci holding 10th in the championship standings entering Portland.
Throw in his Indianapolis 500-winning chief mechanic Dider Francesia and all of the strong players throughout the No. 14 Chevy program, and the team, like its driver, is the embodiment of how much progress a program can made with the right people and support.
“Just working with James has been incredible,” Ferrucci added. “[Race engineer on the sister No. 41 Chevy] Mike Armbrester and Cannon, they’re just powerhouse people. Adam Kolesar is my performance engineer, and he’s so overqualified to be doing what he’s doing. It’s amazing to turn this place around and to be fighting it out for wins and be doing this on a consistent basis. Look at next year. It’s just gonna get better.”