"We didn’t expect it": Chip Ganassi official admits IndyCar's engineering scarcity amid senior engineer departures

Chip Ganassi Racing faces a task ahead of the 2025 IndyCar season as the IndyCar team searches for engineers to fill the spots left behind by the departures. Ahead of the upcoming IndyCar season that begins on February 2, 2025, Chip Ganassi confirmed the departure of two senior engineers from the team. CGR managing director has now come out to detail the struggle of filling in the positions.

Mike Hull, the MD of Chip Ganassi, explained the need for the engineers despite the downsizing of the team. With the IndyCar charter system implemented, the teams cannot field more than three cars on the grid. CGR, which fielded five cars, partnered with Meyer Shank Racing as Marcus Ericsson moved to MSR.

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Yet, the team needs to compensate for the departures. Mike Hull said (via Racer):

“We lost two senior engineers at the end of the season, which we didn’t expect. And yes, we reduced our entries to three because of the charter system. But we’ve replaced it with Indy NXT and we’ve taken on the Meyer Shank program, which is supplying engineering support for those two entries.

“So we’ve actually increased ourselves a fair amount. So by losing two engineers, we’ve been scouring the marketplace globally to try to find senior engineers, a senior engineer, or maybe more than one, in this case, to protect ourselves going forward.”

Linus Lundqvist, CGR’s 2024 driver is currently without a seat with the remaining three, Alex Palou, Scott Dixon and Kyffin Simpson driving for the full-time entries fielded by the team. One of the positions that the team is reportedly looking to fill is for a race engineer to pair with Simpson.

Chip Ganassi Racing will field a couple of cars in the Indy NXT series to compensate for the two cars dropped in the IndyCar series.

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Chip Ganassi Team Manager on the Indy NXT venture

With Chip Ganassi introducing the Indy NXT program, the team had to move some of the members/engineers to the junior open-wheel racing series. The team didn't want to lose out on the engineers as a result of the downsizing and hence introduced the NXT program.

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Taylor Kiel, CGR's Team Manager spoke about the team’s ambitions in the Indy NXT series. He said (via Racer):

“With what we’re seeing in the IndyCar Series and what we’re seeing in Indy NXT, we’ve got a lot of confidence in joining the [NXT] series. The NXT car counts are up. The quality of teams is up. There’s a lot of bonuses to being a part of that series as an IndyCar team, beyond just finding a place for our people. It’s a natural fit for us and it’s been discussed in the past here for quite a while.”

Chip Ganassi, in collaboration with the NXT project, announced a new driver development program in early November 2024.