MOTOR SPORTS

Ed Carpenter returns to Victory Lane with a young IndyCar hot shot: Rinus VeeKay

Indianapolis Star

INDIANAPOLIS — Ed Carpenter has seen what an early-season win for a first-timer can do. The mistakes don’t all of the sudden disappear for the rest of that campaign, but performance and focus in the biggest moments – a la the Indianapolis 500 – can get better. And what’s more is that special pressure, unique only to drivers who haven’t reached the top step of the podium before? That’s dissipated, replaced by another emotion entirely.

The drive to do it again.

Ed Carpenter looks on from Rinus VeeKay's pit box during VeeKay's first win of his IndyCar career Saturday at IMS in the GMR Grand Prix.

Carpenter saw it in a young Josef Newgarden six years ago, when the skilled American driver was 24 years old and had been touted as IndyCar’s “next big thing” for several years, but the work was yet to pay off. Runner-up finishes at Baltimore in 2013 and then in 2014 at Iowa, both with Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing, were great, but with all Newgarden’s DNFs and finishes outside the top-15, they looked like possible exceptions to the rule.

And then came 2015: a respectable, but not altogether impressive 12th in the season-opener at St. Pete, followed by 9th in New Orleans and 7th at Long Beach. Along with three top-10s to end 2014, it was the type of rhythm that puts a team co-owner on the lookout for even more. Then, the breakthrough.

And Rinus VeeKay, the driver who may finally deliver Carpenter’s Ed Carpenter Racing team back toward the top of the championship standings, has all that on fast-forward after winning Saturday’s GMR Grand Prix at 20 years old to make the Dutchman the 6th-youngest winner in IndyCar history.

More on Rinus VeeKay:

Winning in your second year in IndyCar isn’t the most outrageous accomplishment, and it's not as if VeeKay was the youngest to do it either – Colton Herta, who just turned 21 and has won four times and grabbed his first in his second race – has both on lockdown, in terms of this newest wave of young talent.

And we’ve seen it before semi-recently, a young driver such as Carlos Munoz who won his first – and so far only – IndyCar race in 2015 with Andretti Autosport in his second season just three race weekends after Newgarden. Instead of that talent compounding, it fizzled.

Two podiums in his third season were the best Munoz could muster, and with one relatively ho-hum season with A.J. Foyt Racing in 2017 without so much as a top-5, he was all-but out of IndyCar. He’s raced only three times since, and none in almost three years.

So what gives Carpenter the confidence VeeKay will fall into the ‘Newgarden' camp and breathe life into the ECR garages, rather than a ‘Munoz’?

“He runs complete races,” Carpenter told IndyStar Saturday from the Victory Podium at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. “Maybe, even if it’s just a 4th-place day, you know he’s going to fight all the time, and that’s the way you have to be. You can’t leave anything on the table in this series now.

“Even on a bad day, I never question the type of effort we’re getting from him, because it’s the only way he knows how to do it.”

Team owner Ed Carpenter embraces driver Rinus VeeKay after the 20-year-old's first-ever IndyCar win.

Carpenter stopped short of proclaiming VeeKay to be the next Newgarden or say they’re anything close to clones on the track, because they’re not. Though both are obviously gifted, Carpenter was inclined to say his 20-year-old current driver is more naturally gifted at this stage. At 20, the now two-time series champ was winning the Freedom 100 in Indy Lights, while VeeKay was winning on the same grounds but on the big-time level.

“And some of that rawness of Rinus, I think that comes a little easier,” Carpenter said. “But at the same time, he’s still got a lot of work to get to where Josef was on the mental side. Josef was very technically sound with his setup, and that’ll be the next evolution of Rinus – just to be able to lead your engineers and make their jobs easier.

“Guys like Josef and Scott (Dixon), that’s where they set themselves above the rest. They minimize a bad day because they’re always helping their teams make the right decisions. But Rinus is 20. He’ll get better, and he’s off to a damn good start.”

More on the GMR Grand Prix:

On that mental side of things, what VeeKay will now have to balance and weather is knowing that, no matter how hard he tries to replicate Saturday, that effort Carpenter spoke of won’t always lead to a nearly 5-second win. At 20 and not 24, he has a pool of mistakes likely left to make. It’s the way you often learn the best in motorsports, unfortunately – not always at doing it right the first time, but by screwing up big and small and learning how not to do things again.

It’s not as if this version of VeeKay is markedly different than the one that showed up at IMS for the oval Open Test last month and crashed his car into the Turn 1 wall fewer than five laps into two days’ worth of work. With that, he and the No. 31 Chevy team were out of commission, while 31 other cars put in meaningful laps toward Indy 500 prep. To boot, VeeKay suffered a broken finger.

That over-eagerness, along with the lapse in focus in a pit stop during last August’s Indy 500 that relegated him to 20th after starting 4th, those mistakes haven’t all of a sudden disappeared.

“You have to learn lessons the hard way,” Carpenter said. “When Josef won last with us, he was just starting to pick it up, but when you get the first (win) out of the way, I think once you get a taste of that, it does get a little easier.”

Rinus VeeKay, of the Neatherlands, celebrates winning the Grand Prix IndyCar Series on Saturday, May 15, 2021, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

In fact, Newgarden’s lone victory in 2016 with ECR, after winning his first two with CFH Racing in 2015 at Barber and Toronto, was the last time Carpenter had been in Victory Lane – either as an owner or driver. These lean years from 2017-2020, when nine different drivers stepped into an ECR car, consisted of just six podiums while Carpenter shuffled through young drivers such as Spencer Pigot, Jordan King and Ed Jones, trying to find his next ‘2015 Newgarden’ type – or even just someone who hinted at getting there someday soon.

When Carpenter first tested an 18-year-old VeeKay back in August 2019 – and even when the driver-owner started trying to arrange it 18 months prior to that when VeeKay was only 17 – he thought this was all possible.

“I just knew this day was going to come,” he said. “Hopefully this will be the first of many for us.”

Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.