Public criticism is easy to throw against any sporting entity that isn’t performing well. Look no further than the Chicago White Sox, a team so bad in 2024 that their social media admin decided to be creative with doing final score social media posts.
Yeah. You get the idea.
In the NTT IndyCar Series, the same ridicule has often been hurled at Dale Coyne Racing (DCR). On the surface, no, the results weren’t good. There’s no denying that. In a racing series of mostly spec cars with the tiniest of margins, a team in a 27-car field having a best finish of 13th place will draw a lot of criticism the team’s way.
There are always reasons why teams don’t perform well, but in racing some of those reasons aren’t quite as visible as one might see in either football, basketball or another major sport. Let’s look into what happened at DCR in 2024.
A racing team is more than just the driver whose name appears on the back of a souvenir jersey. There’s a lot of personnel that work behind the scenes to make a car go fast, from mechanics to engineers and everyone in between.
After the 2023 season, Dale Coyne Racing lost all but two members of their engineering staff. A tremendous amount of institutional knowledge was no longer in the building, and that all couldn’t be placed at DCR’s feet. Sometimes there are situations where if a phone call comes from a certain organization, that’s one that you better pick up.
In 2023, Alex Athanasiadis was David Malukas’ race engineer. After Malukas ended 2023 with two top fives and six top 10s, Athanasiadis got a call to join Porsche Penske Motorsports in IMSA.
Don’t try to deny it, that’s a hard opportunity for anyone to pass up.
New crew members and engineers were hired, with most having no prior IndyCar experience. Most of the crew got their first experience at IndyCar’s unofficial “spring training” at Sebring at the end of February.
That gives the new team members time to figure out processes and other parts of the job, but they’re up against many teams that have had minimal turnover in the offseason and did more testing before everything shut down in the winter.
Turning to the drivers’ side of things, there’s no nice way of saying that the team needs money. During his tenure at DCR, current Andretti Global Chief Engineer Craig Hampson said that Dale Coyne probably puts more of his own money into his race team than any other team owner except…
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