Hélio Castroneves Seeking New Team for 2021 IndyCar or IMSA Season
If Hélio Castroneves is to continue racing beyond 2020, it will not be with Team Penske.
The three-time Indianapolis 500 winner will pilot his iconic No. 3 for the 20th year in a row this month in The Greatest Spectacle in Racing and hopes to leave with both a fourth Borg Warner Trophy and the framework of a full-time NTT INDYCAR Series ride next season.
Castroneves is looking for a new ride because Team Penske will shelve its IMSA DPi program after the season due to Acura announcing last month that it will end its Prototype program after the 2020 season. The 45-year-old has raced with Roger Penske since the 2000 CART season.
After Indianapolis victories in 2001, 2002 and 2009, not to mention his three runner-up finishes, Castroneves hopes his resume with Penske will give him one more run in North American open-wheel racing.
"Hopefully with the experience I have — not only in IndyCar, but in sports cars — I’ll be able to find myself in a good position and will be able to help a team, whether it’s an experienced team or a young team," Castroneves told Jeff Olson of the IMSA Wire Service. "I’m open to a conversation. I’m ready to keep it going."
Castroneves backed up the words with impressive results over the weekend, taking his Penske No. 7 Acura to Victory Lane in the rain at Road America in the trickiest track conditions imaginable. It was his first DPi victory in over two years and came alongside co-driver Ricky Taylor.
"There hasn’t been one like this," Castroneves said. "It was managing traffic, managing attacks from other competitors, and then dealing with such difficult conditions. All of this was in one race. In IndyCar, you have one or the other. You don’t have all three at once. For me, it ranks right up there, no question."
Taylor said Castroneves delivered "a special performance" on Sunday in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.
"He dug down pretty deep for that one," Taylor said. "He wanted it really badly. You could really see it just by how he was driving. I was thinking he was going to have to pull out some magic, and that was really some magic."
Castroneves also made a statement that he can still deliver to IMSA and INDYCAR programs despite questions about his age.
"This is exactly why I love racing so much," Castroneves said. "You reinvent yourself. You learn. You prove to yourself that you’re still capable of doing things. I still have a lot of fire in me. There’s a lot of fuel to burn. It was great to be able to show what this group of people can do. There was a lot of risk, but with risk comes great reward."
Castroneves hopes the risk will be worth the reward of signing him for 2021 and beyond. A strong run this month at Indianapolis would go a long way towards making the proposition less riskier too.
