Jack Hawksworth Leaves IndyCar For IMSA SportsCar Championship

After losing his seat at A.J. Foyt Enterprises, Jack Hawksworth is leaving the Verizon IndyCar Series and will race in the IMSA SportsCar Championship in 2017.

In all the talk about A.J. Foyt Enterprises overhauling its Verizon IndyCar Series program, one person was hardly discussed: Jack Hawksworth, who this week confirmed that he will not be competing in IndyCar going forward.

Hawksworth will instead join the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship next year. He will co-drive the No. 15 Lexus RC F GT3 with Robert Alon for 3GT Racing, as Lexus will be making its debut in the league.

The 25-year-old Briton leaves IndyCar after three seasons with two teams. His best IndyCar finish in 49 starts was third place in the second half of the 2014 Grand Prix of Houston with Bryan Herta Autosport.

He never reached the podium again, and his top results in 2016 were a pair of 11th place finishes, leading A.J. Foyt Enterprises to dismiss both Hawksworth and teammate Takuma Sato at the end of this season.

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As Autoweek reports, this isn’t an entirely new venture for Hawksworth. He has seven career IMSA WeatherTeam SportsCar Championship starts, including co-driving a class-winning Prototype Challenge entry for RSR Racing at the 2014 Brickyard Grand Prix.

But he leaves IndyCar with some surprising words to say about his open-wheel tenure; namely that he knew it wasn’t going to last past this year.

“I raced for them in 2015, and at the end of the year they had an option on me. And they took the option, and I committed to doing another year with them,” Hawksworth told Racer on Thursday. “But even then, I knew it was the wrong decision.

“There were certain things that needed to change there – especially on the 41 side of the garage – which I had asked for, and which everybody on the team was pushing for. Even when I signed at the end of last year, it was obvious that none of that stuff was happening. But I guess I signed the contract being a bit naïve; thinking ‘I want to stay in IndyCar for another year’. I didn’t sign for the right reasons, if that makes sense.

“So I was worried pretty early on. And then it went from bad to worse. So by April, May, I was already committed to looking elsewhere. And I obviously knew that my stock had plummeted in IndyCar, so there weren’t really any seats that I wanted that would have been available to me. So that’s when I started looking outside of the series, and this was an opportunity that I thought was a good one.”

That has to be frustrating for Hawksworth, especially when you factor in that his teammate Sato had an equally rough year but he was able to find a full-time ride with Andretti Autosport. Of course there were other factors that likely played a part in that – Sato’s extra years of experience, his cache with manufacturer Honda – but it’s still not an easy pill to swallow.

Hawksworth needs a fresh start somewhere, and while it’s unfortunate that it won’t be within IndyCar – especially if his downturn wasn’t entirely of his own making – maybe his jump to IMSA will be the break that he needs to move forward.

The other aspect that makes Jack Hawksworth’s move to IMSA intriguing is who he’ll be working with now. They won’t be in the same car together, but Hawksworth is now driving for the same organization as another former IndyCar driver: Sage Karam.

3GT Racing previously hired Karam – who lasted just part of one season as the driver of the No. 8 Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet – to co-drive their other Lexus sportscar entry. He and Hawksworth will at least have something to talk about.

Next: Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Quits Indy Lights

Jack Hawksworth joins Team Penske’s Juan Pablo Montoya as full-time IndyCar drivers in 2016 who have exited the series completely ahead of 2017.

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