Nathan BrownIndianapolis Star
After nearly a year of negotiations with engine partner Honda Racing Corp. USA on the use of a fourth engine lease part-time, Bobby Rahal has gotten his wish. Wednesday, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing announced that Juri Vips, the team's reserve driver for the past two seasons, will make his third IndyCar start later this month at Portland International Raceway in the No. 75 Honda.
The start, Vips' first of the 2024 IndyCar season, comes after Rahal made it known last October that he had hopes to run a fourth part-time car this year to give Vips a handful of shots at proving himself ahead of a potential full-season campaign in 2025. The 23-year-old Estonian driver, who last raced full-time in Formula 2 in 2022, will finally get that shot in the year's final road course event.
“We’re pleased to be able to run Juri in Portland for a number of reasons. For one, he showed at both Portland and Laguna Seca last year that he certainly has the pace to feature in any event he runs with us" Rahal said in a team release. "He has done a lot of work for us in the simulator this year, which has helped us understand the hybrid system, so it’s nice to reward him for his effort.
"I’m hopeful that this will lead to more races for him with RLL.”
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Vips' IndyCar debut came a year ago at this track as the team filled out the remainder of the schedule in the No. 30 Honda after casting aside Jack Harvey before the end of the season. In the 27-car field, Vips qualified and finished 18th. A week later, Vips starred in a full-field open test ahead of the season-finale. The next day, he finished sixth-fastest in the race weekend's initial practice before qualifying 7th for the race, less than a tenth-of-a-second out of a Fast Six appearance. Following a six-place grid penalty that left him starting 13th, he got caught up in a mid-pack Lap 1 crash and went on to finish 24th.
Since then, Vips has been present at several IndyCar rounds and has shouldered the brunt of RLL's simulator testing for its three-car team of Graham Rahal, Christian Lundgaard and Pietro Fittipaldi.
“I’m very grateful to the team for giving me this opportunity. I have been working closely with the team on the simulator program, and it has been a year since I have been in the car, but I’m confident that the experience gained last year at Portland and Laguna Seca will help me to get up to speed quickly," Vips said in a team release. "It will still be a very big challenge and one I am very much looking forward to.”
What's next: Rahal eyeing Juri Vips, Pietro Fittipaldi rather than Alexander Rossi for RLL's future
Depending on myriad factors -- including Vips' performance across the permanent road course race in three weekends -- he could still find his way into a full-time seat for next year at a team that has at least one (and possibly two) full-time seats to fill. Last month, Lundgaard announced his plans to leave RLL for Arrow McLaren at the end of 2024 after never seriously entertaining negotiations to remain in his IndyCar home of three years. The following weekend at Mid-Ohio, the elder Rahal told IndyStar it was his hope to find the proper funding to back a full-time campaign for Vips while also considering the return of Fittipaldi, who this year brought a meaningful level of funding to help power the No. 30.
Rahal said he'd be meeting with executives of Hy-Vee, the fast-growing midwestern grocery chain that has served as a full-season primary sponsor of the No. 45 Honda since the start of 2022, at the end of July to discuss the extension of the partnership into 2025 and beyond. Securing such a deal will be pivotal for RLL to secure one of the top free agents on the market -- whether it be Vips, Alexander Rossi, Rinus VeeKay, David Malukas or Callum Ilott -- all of whom don't bring any budget to the table.
Questions and concerns in pairing Vips with such a deal exist due to his use of a racial slur on an online gaming stream in the summer of 2022 that lost him his spot on Red Bull's Junior team and role as the Formula 1 team's reserve driver, at a time when Vips was seen as possibly Red Bull's hottest up-and-coming prospect. Though he has apologized for the incident multiple times and seemed to have learned his lesson after undergoing sensitivity training, the prospect that a consumer-facing brand like Hy-Vee would be willing to make Vips the face of their promotional plans through cardboard cutouts, billboards and commercials -- as they did with Harvey and Lundgaard -- is uncertain.
