Ed Carpenter Racing hires Christian Rasmussen to run road, street course races, 500 in 2024

Ed Carpenter Racing will slim down its IndyCar efforts for the 2024 campaign, running a third entry solely at the Indianapolis 500, the team announced Wednesday. Recently crowned Indy NXT champion Christian Rasmussen will run the 11 road and street course events in ECR’s No. 20 Chevy next season (plus the non-points-paying All-Star round at The Thermal Club), with team-owner Ed Carpenter manning the entry’s six oval races. Additionally, the 23-year-old Danish driver will also run a third yet-to-be-numbered car for ECR in the 108th edition of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

The addition of Rasmussen, who won five races this season en route to his third Road to Indy championship in four seasons to next season’s IndyCar lineup gives the series four contenders for the full-season Rookie of the Year race and six for the Indy 500.

A month ago, Rasmussen took part in a full-day test with fellow Indy NXT (then-Indy Lights) champion Oliver Askew, as ECR management had zeroed in on the pair to complete its 2024 driver lineup that also includes full-season driver of ECR’s No. 21 Chevy Rinus VeeKay.

“This is a dream come true and something I’ve been working towards for a long time now,” Rasmussen said of Wednesday’s news. “I want to thank Ed Carpenter and (team president) Tim Broyles for the opportunity, and I’m ready to get to work and show everyone what we can do.”

ECR’s opening was created when the team released series veteran Conor Daly from his full-season ride following the June Detroit Grand Prix. The team plugged in Ryan Hunter-Reay, who ran last May’s 500 for Dreyer and Reinbold Racing but who had been absent from IndyCar in 2022, for the remaining 10 races to take advantage of his wealth of knowledge of running a decade with one of the series’ top teams (Andretti Autosport) in hopes of improving everything from ECR’s setups to race weekend processes.

Still, the No. 20 Chevy entry’s results were rocky at best in the season’s closing stretch, logging a second top-10 for the year at the Laguna Seca season-finale – the other coming with Daly at the 500 – coupled with four finishes outside the top-20 and just two top-15s. Daly logged three top-15s and two finishes outside the top-20 in his seven starts with the team in 2023.

After Laguna Seca, Carpenter told IndyStar that part of the team’s struggle for consistent results in 2023 may have been due to a relatively inexperienced group. He said the team plans to target more seasoned additions to its engineering and crew rosters, even as it scales back in its total number of races after previously running a third car in all the oval races.

Rasmussen’s speed – illustrated by five Indy NXT poles during his title run – and adaptability while making his way up the Road to Indy ladder since moving to the U.S. from Europe for his 2018 season in Formula 4 U.S. no doubt plays into ECR’s goals of finding better form soon.

“Christian is someone we have had our eye on for quite a while,” Broyles said in the team’s release. “He has proven that he is qualified to be a part of the IndyCar series, and we are pleased that Ed Carpenter Racing is able to provide him with this well-deserved opportunity.”

IndyCar veteran inks new deal: Graham Rahal, RLL reach agreement on contract extension

Why is ECR scaling back?

In an IndyCar series that no longer has any teams running just one full-time entry and that has seen five full-time cars added to the grid since the end of the 2019 season, teams scaling back is fairly uncommon of late.

But it's what, after an intense summer-long introspection period, ECR needed to ultimately improve its results, Carpenter told IndyStar on Wednesday. After a 2022 campaign where VeeKay logged a career-high five top-6 finishes and landed 12th in points -- his second consecutive finish there -- the 2019 Indy Lights runner-up dropped to 14th and was only 12 points clear of 17th. Four top-15 finishes over the last five races -- including 6th at Portland -- helped stave off that slide.

But it was enough to show Carpenter that less may very well may be more, particularly after "operating pretty lean for a long time" and finding it tough "to continue to punch above our weight without added depth" throughout the team.

"This series is so competitive now from top to bottom, and for us, it was as much as anything about making sure we're using the resources we have with all our personnel, cars and preparation and putting our best foot forward," Carpenter said Wednesday. "We staffed up more for our third car (for the 2023 season) than we had in the past, and we still were probably less than what other two-car teams would average.

"We weren't happy with how we performed last year overall, and doing the same exact thing again wasn't going to be the ultimate fix. If we could have gotten enough additions into the team on all sides, from engineering to the mechanics, maybe we would've come to a different conclusion, but the competition isn't just on-track. It's off-track as well, and it's very hard to get new people into the building and away from other teams."

More IndyCar silly season news: Pietro Fittipaldi returns as full-time driver in RLL No. 30

Why not let Rasmussen run the full-season and have Carpenter only run the 500?

The short-story on this is simple: Carpenter is the boss -- and the only driver/majority team owner in the series -- and he believes he has a lot of runway left in his driving career at 42. Additionally, running more than once a year helps keep him fresh and in the groove as he continues to pursue his dream of one day winning the 500. As we've seen before, one-off victors aren't impossible but drivers always say the more running you can do, the sharper you'll be.

Next year's schedule and the loss of Texas means Carpenter's first race will be the 500, but he'll then race five more times in less than two months at the end of the calendar.

And doing so as part of the No. 20's full-season program means he'll no longer have to qualify for non-500 ovals at the front of the line -- which typically means slicker track conditions with which to turn the fastest possible lap. The order for single-car qualifying for ovals is set from the reverse order of the current points rankings, meaning a part-time entry like Carpenter's would virtually always have the fewest points. Though he did manage to start 4th at Iowa last year, qualifying results like that have been tough to come by. He's seen a lull in results of late, with just one top-10 finish since the start of 2020, outside the 500, in 16 starts -- and only two overall in those four seasons.

From his standpoint, this arrangement puts the team in the best position to score points and log solid results, with him running the No. 20's ovals instead of a rookie like Rasmussen.

"I can still enjoy all this greatly, while also being greatly frustrated by it, depending on how we're running," Carpenter told IndyStar last month of his rough run of oval results in recent years. "But yes, I still really enjoy it, and I feel like I'll be able to go out and be an asset for my team and my teammates."

For Rasmussen, Carpenter told IndyStar on Wednesday that the team's deal with the young Danish driver includes options beyond the lone confirmed season, and ECR's track record with VeeKay would show it's likely to pick those up and hold onto the decorated champ, giving him a longer runway to develop and ease into the highly competitive series -- rather than demanding immediate results, as some teams have with young talent.

"I don't think it would be fair to say we're going to see Christian's full potential after one year," Carpenter said. "I expect him to be strong, but we want to be able to capitalize on his talent in the long run."

From this summer: Inside ECR's addition of Ryan Hunter-Reay

What does this mean for ECR development driver Josh Pierson?

A year ago, Carpenter joined what's slowly becoming a trend in IndyCar in signing a young driver to a development contract, with a roadmap to join its IndyCar lineup. For ECR, their chosen young talent was American Josh Pierson, who at the time was 16 years old; in 2022 became the youngest driver to compete in the Rolex 24 (at 15) and Le Mans (when he was 16).

In the team's announcement last November, ECR stated it was both sides' plan to plant Pierson in a full-time Indy NXT ride for 2024 with the goal of elevating him to IndyCar for the 2025 season. Those stated plans, though, would suggest ECR would have to jump back to three cars for 2025 at a time when it's still working on refining a two-car program, or risk losing its two young promising talents (VeeKay and Rasmussen).

When asked in September how ECR would approach making the hire that ended up being Rasmussen alongside its future with Pierson, Carpenter told IndyStar the team would be making the best decisions for it in the short-term and confront a potential logjam when the time comes.

"Our plans (with Pierson) are largely going to depend on if he's ready or not (after the 2024 Indy NXT season)," Carpenter said. "I'm definitely not letting a potential prospect influence what we do between now and then, because every season is too important to have a short-term deal with someone."

Will BitNile continue as a major sponsor with ECR?

Paddock sources had indicated near the end of the 2023 season that ECR was either close -- or had already finalized -- an extension of its sponsorship agreement with BitNile and its founder Todd Ault III, who aligned with ECR starting with the 2022 season as part of Daly's full-time program. Since, the company and its subsidiaries have almost exclusively been featured on the team's primary liveries. Wednesday's release, notably, lacked any mention of the company's sponsorship role.

Carpenter, while pointing out he was wearing a BitNile-branded ECR polo on Wednesday's Zoom call, affirmed the company will indeed return in a similar highly-visible role with ECR in 2024.

"(BitNile) will be part of our program," Carpenter said. "There may be different brands or look a little different than it did last year, but that'll have its own announcement in due time."

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar: Christian Rasmussen, Ed Carpenter to split ECR's No. 20 in 2024