Oh, IndyCar. Our sweet disaster series. The disaster series for which Santino Ferrucci, who was suspended from and then cut by his Formula 2 team for intentionally wrecking his teammate post-race and texting behind the wheel, is going to be racing this season.
While he hasn’t officially been dropped from Haas’s Formula One driver development program, Connecticut-born Ferrucci is turning his sights to his national open wheel series. Dale Coyne Racing is expanding its current two-car team to a three-car team in order to field a car for Ferrucci at Sonoma and Portland, the final two races of the season. He’ll be teaming up with Sebastien Bourdais and Pietro Fittipaldi.
This isn’t the 20-year-old driver’s first IndyCar outing with Dale Coyne. He ran at both races during the Detroit Grand Prix in early June this year. Here’s what team owner Dale Coyne had to say:
“We were very impressed with Santino at Detroit this year, and not just by his performance behind the wheel, but also by his professionalism and maturity outside of the race car. We’ve had lengthy discussions with Santino in the past few months and we’re excited to have him back for the final two rounds of the season.”
Interestingly, Ferrucci crashed out of the first race, which took him out of the race. In the second race of the weekend, he also had an incident; it didn’t end his race, but it did see him finish a lap down. That doesn’t seem like a pretty impressive outing, but I’m not Dale Coyne, so I don’t get a say in this decision.
I love IndyCar with my whole entire heart, but this is definitely not the kind of good news I’d be hoping for regarding signing a driver. Ferrucci has shown he’s definitely, uh, not the best team player. It definitely looks like he secured a pretty attractive sponsorship deal with Cly-Del Manufacturing Company that made him more appealing than someone else.