Q: Next season, a notable last name will enter new boundaries. In 2025, Sebastian Wheldon will compete in the Italian Formula 4 and the three-weekend Euro 4 summer series with PREMA. Sebastian will have Andretti Global backing for his European debut. Not many U.S. drivers have this kind of opportunities. Young talent like Jak Crawford (Aston Martin) and Ugo Ugochukwu (McLaren) have team backing. And this is where Cadillac F1 comes in. Under FIA regulations, how long before a new team establishes a development squad before its inaugural season?
Sebastian’s father Dan had his vision about bringing IndyCar to Silverstone. It did not materialize. Now, Lionheart will be watching his son from the skies above hopefully fulfill his dream of competing in Formula 1 if he gets chosen by Cadillac, and racing at Silverstone in the future. Did Dan ever test a Formula 1 car back in the past before changing paths to IndyCar?
JLS, Chicago, IL
MP: No. Dan was never on a sustained path to F1. He arrived here in 1999 to race in USF2000, moved to the Toyota Atlantic Championship in 2000 where I competed against him as a race engineer for Hylton Motorsports with Hoover Orsi, and then he went onto Indy Lights and IndyCar — the Indy Racing League — so it was the Road to Indy for Danny Boy, not a rerouting to America after trying to get to F1, and while there was the offer of a test with BMW, he turned down. He remained 100-percent IndyCar.
Q: With 2024 over and done, what were the biggest racing stories of the year? The biggest surprise announcements in racing of the year? The race of the year? The team of the year?
Kurt Perleberg
MP: I put 20-plus hours into a story on that topic, so rather than rehash those items, here are a few that didn’t make it in:
• Penske dominating everything he touched in winning the IMSA GTP title? Check. Indy 500 win? Check. NASCAR Cup championship? Check. Rolex 24 At Daytona? Check. FIA WEC Hypercar championship? Check. The only things he didn’t win were the Daytona 500, 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the IndyCar championship.
• On the IndyCar side, Penske nearly won half the races — eight of 17 — but lost the title to a Chip Ganassi Racing team that won five, and didn’t earn a victory after June — over the last three months of the season. That one’s a head-scratcher and makes it easy to say Ganassi was the best of all teams.
• Race of the year is a tie with the Indy 500 and the Milwaukee doubleheader. Each race at The Mile was like a condensed Indy 500 of thrills.
• Who had a better year than Jonathan Diuguid? The former Penske IndyCar race engineer-turned-Porsche Penske Motorsport director presided over the IMSA and WEC championships, Rolex 24 win, and engineered Josef Newgarden to the Indy 500 win when Penske suspended his regular engineer after the push-to-pass scandal. What an incredible season for Diuguid.
• Over in IMSA, Robert Wickens being signed to race in the top WeatherTech SportsCar championship in a DXDT Racing Corvette Z06 GT3 using hand controls fill my heart.
• It felt like there were a thousand announcements last season, and none were more grand or important than the all-network FOX news. Slight caveat: With so many new sports deals getting done of late, all of which seem to have big or important streaming components, Penske appears to have come away with nothing here that would bring its product to more people via streaming at home or internationally. Looking at the insane streaming numbers the NFL just put up on Netflix for its two Christmas games — bought for $150 million — I couldn’t help but think what IndyCar is missing with streaming in its big new TV deal. Is this something that can be fixed?
Q: Understandably, there’s been a lot of chatter about the proposed, potentially, maybe, new IndyCar chassis lately, and what should power it. I thought of that when I saw Andy’s fabulous photo from 1981 a couple of weeks back of the BLAT Eagle and the last “real” Coyote. Two proper IndyCars!
Maybe we should roll one of those Eagles up to the Dallara factory and show them how Dan Gurney and his band of heroes produced a car 45 years ago that looked nothing like anything else in CART or F1 at the time. A car that was a race winner and one that could happily live with either a big monster stock block V8 or a smaller turbo V8 race engine in the back. If only we could update that concept.
On a serious note, two major manufacturer-backed series, the World Rally Championship and the British Touring Car Championship, have both announced that they are ditching their hybrid powerplants, citing costs and a push to 100% renewable fuels among the reasons why. Has this registered with the powers that be at IndyCar do you think, and what’s your take on it?
Peter Kerr, Hamilton, Scotland
MP: My mind started to wander as I finished your last paragraph, Peter, and I imagined the leaders at Penske Entertainment Googling, “What is World Rally Championship and the British Touring Car Championship?” I’m sure some in the organization have heard of those series, but the Penske Entertainment side, not the competition side at IndyCar, isn’t prone to following smaller (BTCC) or wholly unrelated forms of racing (rallying) to their and basing decisions on whatever a WRC or BTCC is doing.
General Motors races a hybrid Cadillac prototype in IMSA and in the WEC by choice. It’s entering F1 in 2026, a 100-percent hybrid formula, by choice. And it’s in IndyCar, now a hybrid formula, by choice. If hybridization was not of interest to GM, you’d see it in its choices of where it races. Same for Acura/Honda, with hybrids in the same three places.
From what Penske Entertainment has told me for years and continues to tell me, auto manufacturers say they want and need hybridization to go racing. NASCAR and the NHRA are the primal outliers, right? But the rest, for the most part, conform to the latest technology/promotional needs of the auto industry.