By: Ashley McCubbin

Ed Carpenter Racing, Dale Coyne Racing, and now Juncos Hollinger Racing. Rinus Veekay will be back in the NTT IndyCar Series for the seventh year, but with a different team for a third straight year.

“To start with, we’ve had success together in the Road to Indy, which is a different ballgame. It wasn’t a super easy decision to make. I really weighed both being with Coyne and now JHR,” he said. “I think talking to the team, I got to see and hear what their off-season plans were, what their development was going to be like. That to me was just the better decision of the two.”

Veekay felt the opportunity was there to be successful this season, based on the speed shown by JHR last year with Romain Grosjean on the road courses and Conor Daly on the ovals. Now it is about putting together to have a chance at placing in the top-10 in the standings, with “a shot at winning races and being on the podium, not once, not twice, but more often.”

Veekay has shown promise over the past couple years, as evident by just missing the top-10 in the standings with finishes of 13th and 14th each season, while picking up a win in 2021 at the Indianapolis Grand Prix.

“I think one really big thing for championship points is top 5s. Just barely getting top 10s, it’s good for points, but where you really start to see a difference is top 5s,” he explained. “For me, getting consistently in the top 5 is a priority. I feel like at least five, six top 5s are going to be necessary to comfortably be in that top 10 in the championship. Probably when I’m top 10 in the championship, I want to be top 5. I’m always striving for more as a team.

“The top 10 in the championship is just the goal. Every single race, that can change according to what we do. We’re going to have to maximize everything we have. One weekend we might win, the other weekend it might be 12th is the best we can do. Yeah, I’ll have a really short-term mindset every race, just focus on the day ahead this season.”

For now, it is a single year contract which he has signed, but the opportunity is there to expand further should success be experienced in 2026.

“But for me, I want to win,” he commented. “We all share that feeling within the team, within JHR. If we can make that happen there, that’s all we want. They want their car to win. I want my car to win. The goal is to make it all happen together.”