IndyCar: Four possible landing spots for Tony Kanaan in 2018

Tony Kanaan will not be racing with Chip Ganassi Racing in the 2018 IndyCar season. However, he will still be in IndyCar. Here are four possible landing spots for him.

While it won’t be with Chip Ganassi Racing, Tony Kanaan, 42, will be returning to the IndyCar Series in 2018 with a salary. In fact, he will be doing the same in 2019, as his new deal is a two-year-deal. However, we still don’t know which team he will be driving for over the course of the next two seasons.

At Pocono Raceway, Chip Ganassi Racing parked Max Chilton in the middle of the race since they claimed that they didn’t feel as though he could make up any positions. At Gateway Motorsports Park the following week, the team did the same thing with Tony Kanaan, apparently for the same reason.

So even before this recent news of Kanaan’s new deal, there was no reason to believe that he was coming back with Chip Ganassi Racing next season. Teams don’t just park drivers in the middle of races because they don’t feel they can make up positions.

In racing, you don’t quit, especially driving for a highly successful team like Chip Ganassi Racing, the team that has won six of the last nine IndyCar championships. The fact that the team only started parking drivers toward the end of this season is telling to begin with, as it shows that Chilton and, more specific to this article, Kanaan, are not a part of the team’s vision beyond the conclusion of the season.

After four seasons with Chip Ganassi Racing, a span during which he was able to win just one race at Fontana more than three years ago, Tony Kanaan is moving on. However, as referenced above, he will still, in fact, be driving in the IndyCar Series in both the 2018 and 2019 seasons.

The question is, which team will he be driving for? Here are the four main, and really the only four legitimate, options that he has for next season. Spoiler alert: Chip Ganassi Racing is not one of them, in case you have yet to figure that out.