Dale Coyne Racing officially confirmed, one day after a release was published and deleted, that they have signed Rinus VeeKay for the 2025 IndyCar season, completing the 27-car lineup with exclusively full-time drivers as the start of the 17-race campaign nears.
The move was several months in the making. VeeKay was replaced by 2016 Indy 500 winner Alexander Rossi after five years at Ed Carpenter Racing, and shortly after the 2024 season ended, he tested with Dale Coyne's Honda-powered team at Indianapolis Motor Speedway – so shortly after that he had to block the Chevrolet logos on his firesuit.
Though it was the final signing of the offseason, and a Dale Coyne Racing seat may have largely considered the least desirable seat on the grid after their backmarker-type 2024 season, the move might very well have been among the most intriguing confirmations of silly season.
Underrated free agent signs with underrated IndyCar team for 2025
After he was not retained by Ed Carpenter Racing for 2025 season, VeeKay's market was not what it probably would have been had he opted not to remain loyal to Ed Carpenter's team when he very well could have signed elsewhere following the 2022 season.
At that time, his name was even in the discussion as a potential Chip Ganassi Racing candidate, given the uncertainty surrounding Alex Palou's future after he signed with McLaren and attempted to vacate the No. 10 Honda.
VeeKay won a race for Ed Carpenter Racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course in May 2021 after securing his first career podium at the track the previous October. He added another podium finish on the Belle Isle street course that year, and he added another one at Barber Motorsports Park the following season.
His status as a top candidate for a number of rides throughout the rest of the paddock was well-earned.
But since then, it has been no secret that Ed Carpenter Racing have taken a step back in form, a reality made evident by their decision to drop Conor Daly during the 2023 season and replace him with Ryan Hunter-Reay, a former IndyCar champion and Indy 500 winner, who did not perform much better.
Still, the 24-year-old Dutchman was able to perform at a high level. Even going back to his Road to Indy career, he has never been beaten by a teammate in the point standings, and he has never lost the head-to-head battle to a teammate on race results.
Though he has just three top five finishes, including none in 2023, since May 2022, he has finished between 12th and 14th place in the point standings in all five of his seasons in IndyCar. And for a driver once known for his somewhat erratic on-track maneuvering, he was, at one point, the only driver with four straight top 10 finishes in 2024.
It's also worth mentioning that Ed Carpenter Racing drivers not named VeeKay have zero top five finishes since 2022 and zero podium finishes since 2019, to go along with zero wins since 2016.
Additionally, his Indy 500 qualifying form was never in doubt. His average starting spot is 3.8 in five starts, and that includes three front row starting spots and a worst start of only seventh place.
He's exactly the driver Dale Coyne Racing need, and they are the exactly the team he needs.
Dale Coyne Racing are coming off of a season in which it seemed that everybody was huddled around their phones every Tuesday afternoon for an out-of-left-field driver announcement for the following weekend's race. They totaled nine drivers in their two entries during the season, with neither car driven full-time.
None of their drivers finished in the top 12 during the entire season. The last time that happened, Coyne himself was the driver in 1987.
But is this more of a reflection of the drivers or the team? Was anybody really expecting Katherine Legge to battle it out for oval wins in her limited starts? Was Luca Ghiotto supposed to be on the podium, with or without running over Georgina?
The 2024 season was also their first season without a full-time driver since 2015, which had been, consequently, their most recent season without a podium finish. Funny how that works.
And interestingly enough, their top finisher that year was Tristan Vautier in fourth place. Vautier returned the series with Coyne for the first time since 2017 in 2024, and he actually ran as high as third on a weekend he started well off the pace and had very limited time to catch up.
Vautier seemed to adapt relatively quickly, despite having had no previous experience in the IR18 era. Again, is it really the team, or is it the drivers?
But in 2025, they have signed not one, but two full-time drivers. Their decision to sign 2024 Indy NXT runner-up Jacob Abel to drive the No. 51 Honda is believed to have given them financial benefits that allowed them to extend an IndyCar lifeline to VeeKay, who is clearly now in a position where he has something to prove.
And you could argue he's already long been trying to prove it. Even going back to that October test at Indianapolis, he was third quickest out of 11 drivers. He finished behind only three-time and two-time reigning series champion Palou and two-time reigning Indy 500 winner Josef Newgarden of Team Penske.
Though Dale Coyne Racing are one of the smallest teams on the grid, don't think for one second that anybody has forgotten about their innate ability to pull a rabbit out of a hat and run at the front at select races weekends.
Sebastien Bourdais won the season opener two years in a row, and although his 2018 win remains the team's most recent, he was back on the podium in 2019 before the team let him go.
In 2020, Palou scored a podium finish in only his third career IndyCar start. Romain Grosjean did the same in 2021 and added two more, and he nearly beat Team Penske's Scott McLaughlin to Rookie of the Year honors despite missing three races.
Most recently, David Malukas scored podium finishes in both of his starts at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway with the team in 2022 and 2023. In 2022, Takuma Sato finished the race in fifth place behind Malukas in second, and in addition to Malukas' third place finish in 2023, he also had a fourth at Texas Motor Speedway.
Now Dale Coyne Racing have reemerged as a team willing to invest the necessary resources to be able to sign a talented full-time driver, and they could not have landed a better – and more criminally underrated – fit than VeeKay.
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