Julian: Racing boom makes it tough to find crew for Indy one-offs

The 2022 NTT IndyCar Series has 26 full-time entries, and several other championships are either enjoying expanding entrylists or, like the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and World Endurance Championship, are on the verge of doing so in 2023 as the GTP (LMDh) prototypes are introduced.

Consequently, finding good staff available for DragonSpeed/Cusick Motorsports’ Stefan Wilson-driven one-off entry in the Indianapolis 500 has proven difficult, as most of the best engineers and mechanics are already committed to full-season campaigns. Julian’s team will make its third attempt at the Memorial Day Weekend classic, becoming the 33^rd and probably final entry.

Said Julian, “[IndyCar] is almost a victim of its own success, in a way, but it only hurts at the Speedway. If you go through the list of teams in your head that were an option to also join the grid… DragonSpeed is one of the only ones on that list, everybody else is already in the field.

“There's not many other teams that can come and do one-offs like they used to in the past. It's going to be a tough one to navigate moving forward, I'm sure, for the Speedway, because as they galvanize these really quality, quality entries, full-budget, top drivers really focused at the 26 to 28 number, it's going to be difficult. There's going to have to be definite movement to make the possibility happen, to have available engines, to have available chassis and also to have some level of commitment from the biggest teams that they have to do it, or I don't see how else you can.”

Wilson added: “As someone else pointed out to me two or three months ago, it's just the general interest in not just IndyCar but motor racing across the country right now. You're seeing record-sized fields in Ferrari Challenge and Porsche Carrera Cup, even Super Trofeo, even in the Road to Indy. We have got grid sizes that are huge.

“Each one of those cars in all of these different series is utilizing personnel, and it's just making it harder to find the right personnel to do these one-off entries because they're already committed for the year or they have a conflict on their schedule… I think it's a good news story all around really that this all came together to make it a full field.”

Julian said there were other, more deep-rooted issues that have caused a reduction in the numbers of quality team members available to IndyCar teams.

“Racing sportscars and racing around the world, I will say that the average age of the crew member in IndyCar is way older than anywhere else I see,” he said. “The first time we went to IndyCar with my European crew, they were like, ‘Wow, we're really young here.’ So I think there's been a lack of new blood.

“Some of the older talented guys that are in retirement mode now have left. You've got to beg the Andy Browns [Tony Kanaan’s race engineer for Indy] and these guys to come back out and do a race with you. So there's been very little backfill from that, and you have a lot of kids now that go to school that have engineering degrees that want to get paid like $150k coming out of school. Nobody wants to just go work. So I think that's part of it.

“I can tell you 100 percent I fight with Penske in Europe for personnel. They poached my systems engineer last year [for Penske’s LMP2 campaign in preparation for its LMH Porsche campaign in 2023]. I was like, ‘Why don't you just take the whole team?! But it's like that, and it's happening everywhere. There is a serious lack of people out there.

“At the same time there's people falling out of Formula 1 because they can't hack the schedule, so there's places to go find people if you really need to.”