The last full season for DRR came in 2012, with Oriol Servia behind the wheel in a campaign that featured four top five finishes after switching from the Lotus powerplant to Chevrolet. DRR has since put the majority of its focus on the Indianapolis 500, only running additional races in partial campaigns twice (2013, 2020).
The interest level by a variety of teams not currently in the sport on a regular basis has gone up in recent years, and the timing could be around the corner with upcoming changes to the technical regulations.
IndyCar’s hybrid engine – which pairs the technology with the current 2.2-liter twin-turbocharged V6 powerplant – has been a moving target and undergone multiple delays but is finally expected to be implemented during the second half of the season sometime following the Indy 500 on May 26.
The situation sets up an intriguing conversation on the possibility of new teams entering in 2025, including Abel Motorsports, an Indy NXT regular that made its IndyCar debut in a one-off at last year’s Indy 500, among them.
In a recent media availability following the team (in partnership with Cusick Motorsports) confirming this year’s Indy 500 lineup of Conor Daly and Ryan Hunter-Reay, Reinbold was asked by Motorsport.com if the introduction of the hybrid makes pursing a full-time return attractive.
“You never know,” Reinbold said.
“We're open-minded to whatever presents itself. If we have a good situation that makes a lot of sense to us, we would look at doing more races in the future. We have all the components and the people to be able to roll that out.
“It just hasn't been a great fit to get back re-involved on a full-time basis. We've been kind of close a couple different times, so we're still looking at it, still open to it, for sure.”
Although every regulation change has a tendency to have significantly affect the smaller teams, and presumably this year’s edition of the Indy 500 being the last before hybrid power, could it put a greater emphasis on an all-in approach by DRR for the upcoming month of May?
“Well, there are spec changes every year, so yes and no,” Reinbold said.
“We as not being a full-time team, they have to get the parts out to full-time teams first and foremost. We completely understand the need for that. We try to get our parts and components as quickly as we can in the queue. That puts us behind and limits some of our ability to do testing.
“We're playing catch-up whenever there are big changes like that. But we anticipate that. As soon as we get the parts, we dive in full force and arrange our testing accordingly.
“Like a lot of the testing that we have scheduled, we've pushed back from what we would normally do just because of parts availability. We work around it. It's not ideal. At the end of the race last year, if they said, ‘Here is your parts that you're going to run for next year's 500’, that would be ideal. It doesn't work that way because we have a lot of developing to do with those pieces.
“We understand. I think we've been pretty successful at getting those things ironed out in pretty good fashion.”
Reinbold added that much of that is due to the team’s involvement with Chevrolet.
“The open test that we do, we've talked to Chevy, we've worked with Chevy quite a bit in the off-season on different components and different things,” he said.
“Everyone's in the same boat. From that standpoint, it's a pretty even playing field.
“It actually can sometimes benefit us to have changes and pieces and things like that because no one has them dialed in as of yet. You can look at it both ways that way.”
