Part one of Ryan Hunter-Reay’s IndyCar career was wild.
In the cobbled-together team line-ups of Champ Car’s final years, he went from debuting with Stefan Johansson’s very short-lived American Spirit Team Johansson (and winning what turned out to be the last ever CART-organised race before it went out of business) to dominating at Milwaukee with the Herdez team that was once CART stalwart Bettenhausen and would cycle through many other identities including Minardi USA, to being dropped by Rocketsports before the end of 2005 in favour of future NASCAR driver Michael McDowell.
Grand-Am and an A1GP one-off filled some time in the year and a half before Rahal Letterman gave him an IndyCar Series shot in place of Jeff Simmons. He stayed on for 2008 and won a race, then lost his seat when a sponsor exit meant Rahal put its IndyCar team on ice.
On to Indy Racing League founder Tony George’s Vision Racing team in a new second entry that he somehow took to the St Petersburg podium but that generally proved so uncompetitive that George was happy to help Hunter-Reay exit for AJ Foyt Racing after Foyt’s regular driver Vitor Meira was injured at Indianapolis.
Finally in 2010 a top team chance, but a parlous one: an Andretti Autosport drive that only had funding for the opening handful of races.
But he won in Long Beach and impressed so much the money was found to keep him on, and a driver who shouldn’t even have done the full season finished seventh in the championship.
By the time Hunter-Reay got a stable IndyCar career opportunity, he was nearly 30 years old but already a four-time race-winner. With stability came success: champion in 2012, Indianapolis 500 winner in 2014, 14 more race wins during just over a decade at Andretti. Part two of his career was generally glorious. There was no shame in the fact his form eventually tailed off and he was replaced by Romain Grosjean for 2022.
Part three of his career has just taken an unexpected twist.
Until last week it had been pretty much what you’d expect for post-full-time IndyCar life for a driver with Hunter-Reay’s CV: a Cadillac sportscar programme with Ganassi (which also meant he would’ve raced for it in IndyCar had the Alex Palou contract row turned really sour in mid-2022), racing in Tony Stewart’s all-star SRX stock car series, a consultancy role at Juncos Hollinger, an Indy 500 one-off with Dreyer & Reinbold.
But this weekend at Road America he’s back full-time at the age of 42, 20 years after his IndyCar debut, replacing Conor Daly at a troubled Ed Carpenter Racing team whose form has meandered.
The friendship Hunter-Reay forged with Carpenter when they were briefly Vision team-mates had already led to him testing ECR’s car at the end of 2021. That and the fact he sees a situation where he can make a really valuable contribution is what’s tempted him back in a deal he describes as “honestly it’s race by race. We’ll see where it goes”.
“Ed is a good friend of mine. He called me,” Hunter-Reay said. “I was surprised when it happened. He said: ‘I need your help. Would you be willing to do this? This is the situation that we’re in’.”
And this is that situation: ECR looked like it was going places with Rinus VeeKay through 2021 and early 2022, but results have nosedived since last spring’s pole and podium at Barber Motorsports Park. VeeKay’s only 15th in the championship right now with just one top-10 finish, at the Indy 500 where ECR usually excels, and Daly was only 20th when he was dropped (though his eighth at Indy was the team’s best 2023 result so far). That’s despite Carpenter making significant investment in facilities and resources.
In short: it’s slow, it really doesn’t know why because it thinks what it’s doing should be having the opposite effect, and in that circumstance parachuting in a driver with Hunter-Reay’s experience and knowledge is a masterstroke.
“This is a unique scenario where myself, coming in at this point, it gives potentially the team and myself an opportunity to come at it from a fresh perspective, looking at things a little bit differently than how they have been for the last two or three years straight,” he said.
“Rinus VeeKay and Conor are great drivers, but sometimes in a team, especially in a series as competitive as IndyCar, you just need to mix things up a little bit, look at things in new ways, and it’s just the way the business rolls.
“I’m not really sure where it’s going yet, and I’m not really looking that far ahead right now. I am totally focused on getting to Road America, doing the best job I can for that group of people at Ed Carpenter Racing who I have a great relationship with, and that’s really where it is.
“It’s a lot of pressure on me, honestly, but at the same time, when I look at this pragmatically, I look at it from a realist point of view. There’s not a silver bullet here.
“This is a matter of us looking at how we can approach things differently. How do you approach a qualifying session differently, a race weekend differently? How can we tweak some things?
“Maybe some of the things I used to do in the past weren’t right. Maybe some of the things they’re doing now aren’t right. Maybe we could come together and maybe take a path that way.”
As a man who’s lost a fair few drives himself, one of them mid-season, Hunter-Reay is sensitive to the implications of his return for Daly.
“I’ve been on either side of this with the Rocketsports situation, then with the Rahal situation in 2007 coming in, so I have an immense amount of respect for either side of it,” he said.
Daly is keeping busy: he’ll be racing in Travis Pastrana’s Nitrocross series with Dreyer & Reinbold this weekend and has a NASCAR Truck Series seat lined up for Mid-Ohio next month.
But Hunter-Reay doubts the 31-year-old’s IndyCar career is over.
“I’m a big fan. He’s a scrapper, as am I, and he certainly is a part of IndyCar,” he said when asked by The Race what his advice to Daly would be.
“So I certainly hope that he’s back at some point. Hopefully soon.
“It doesn’t make the situation any easier for him. I’ve been through all of it. I’ve been replaced at one point, and then I didn’t drive for almost a year and a half back in 2005.
“The big thing is you just have to keep after it. This is for every driver, even the young drivers out there. You’re one weekend away from the next opportunity, and just keeping the confidence in yourself and being just tenacious and persistent has been what I’ve always done, and I have no doubt he will, as well.
“We’re definitely going to miss him at the moment, but I hope he’s back, and I have every reason to believe he will be.”
For now, it’s Hunter-Reay who is. In a different position to all those he’s held before, but very well-qualified to make it a success.
“I’ve had the opportunity to work with three different race teams within a calendar year,” he said.
“What that gives me is a broadened sense of… like, I keep saying ‘approach’, but each team approaches how they go about a race weekend completely differently.
“You would think it’s pretty straightforward, you put the wheels on the car, you go out on track, you test, all this stuff – and it’s not. Each team does things very differently.
“So I’ve had the opportunity to see numerous strategies when it comes to their implementation of a strategy of a race weekend. Not just a race strategy and when you pit and all that.
“I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve got to view it from, so to speak, 30,000 feet and see how these things operate, what are the positives, negatives, and I hope I can apply that to the situation.”
Part three of the Hunter-Reay story definitely won’t match part two’s results and probably won’t get near the heights of his best underdog successes amid all the uncertainty of part one. But if ECR and VeeKay actually start achieving their potential, it’ll be another achievement to be very proud of.
Keyword: A former star’s mission for his surprise IndyCar ‘threequel’