Ryan Hunter-Reay didn’t ask for this. He didn’t seek this. He felt like his full-time driving days were now behind him. He was coaching his kids sporting teams and living the good life around his family more. While he was around the NTT INDYCAR SERIES the last few years as a consultant for Juncos Hollinger Racing, a standby driver for Chip Ganassi Racing or even a driver himself in last month’s 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500 for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, he never envisioned being back behind the wheel on a full-time basis in INDYCAR.

Now here we are.

Hunter-Reay is back and will drive the No. 20 Dallara-Chevrolet for Ed Carpenter Racing for the rest of the 2023 season. He was brought in as a favor for his good friend Ed Carpenter last week and to do a simple task – evaluate the team and to help make them better. It’s as easy as that.

However, that’s also a feat that he acknowledges is way easier said than done.

“Ed (Carpenter) is a good friend of mine. He called me. I was surprised when it happened,” said Hunter-Reay. “He called me and said, I need your help. Would you be willing to do this? This is the situation that we’re in.

“I had driven for Vision, right, in ’09. Ed was my teammate. I had tested with the team in 2013. I tested with the team in 2021.

“So this is over a decade-long relationship and friendship that kind of got us to where we are at this point.”

If the team were already firing on all cylinders, then he’d not have unexpectedly been asked to be in this position that he’s currently now in. The team feared that if they were going to be better in 2024 than 2023, then something drastic had to be done. Conor Daly sat 20th in points at the time of his mutual dismal. His teammate, Rinus VeeKay, sat 15th.

“We need to improve our competitiveness and I wanted to add a fresh perspective from a driver like Ryan (Hunter-Reay) who has a massive amount of experience and success as well as a reputation as a team leader,” stated team owner, Carpenter.

Hunter-Reay mentioned that this is a unique scenario that he’s facing but something that he’s done before. He’s been on both sides of the equation and has respect for both sides in the process. He feels like Daly is talented enough to be back in the series soon and that while he wants to talk with him, he feels like when he was in that situation, it was best to let things cool down first before doing so.

Hunter-Reay notes that while VeeKay and Daly are both great drivers, sometimes a team, especially in a series as competitive as INDYCAR, you just need to mix things up a little bit, look at things in new ways, and it’s just the way the business rolls.

“I’m not really sure where it’s going yet, and I’m not really looking that far ahead right now,” he continued. “I am totally focused on getting to Road America, doing the best job I can for that group of people at Ed Carpenter Racing who I have a great relationship with, and that’s really where it is.

“Right now honestly it’s race by race. We’ll see where it goes.”

He mentions that he feels the pressure of the opportunity, but when he takes a step back and looks at this pragmatically, there’s no silver bullet here to turn this magically around. It’s a situation of looking at how they can approach things differently. How do they approach a qualifying session differently, a race weekend differently?

“How can we tweak some things? Maybe some of the things I used to do in the past weren’t right,” Hunter-Reay continued. “Maybe some of the things they’re doing now aren’t right. Maybe we could come together and maybe take a path that way.”

In doing so, it’s going to be difficult to find solid ground with all the variables that have been thrown their way. They’re not going to immediately be race winners or even top 10 contenders. This is going to take some time for which is why he was given the rest of the season, not just race by race.

“Obviously this is a tough situation,” said Hunter-Reay. “A lot has happened in a short amount of time. There’s just a whole lot to take in. It’s so multifaceted. There’s so many variables here at play.

“Bottom line is tough situation, especially mid-season. We’re just plugging away hour by hour here, day by day, and looking forward to the weekend ahead.”

Daly said before being let go that the biggest issue with the team at that point of the season was mechanical grip and that’s the department to where they were lacking the most.

“I mean, honestly, you don’t forget how to drive,” Daly said then. “I think Rinus (VeeKay) didn’t forget how to drive. He’s still race winner and pole sitter. He’s very, very talented at what he does and he’s struggled you know, just as much as we have. He’s done a little bit better in a couple places, but we’ve also had things you know, go very wrong and a couple different races this year.

“So I don’t think it’s, you know, if I was very, very much on an island and Rinus was in the top 10 in the championship, I’d be very upset with myself. It’s been a very difficult situation.”

So where do you start if you’re Hunter-Reay? How do you balance coming in and fixing a problem in a series that’s defined as arguably the most challenging and closest series from top-to-bottom to compete in when you have no experience with them and doing so seven races in?

He clearly knows what he likes in a car, but how much do you implement what he likes in a car versus on what the team already had on it? Wouldn’t it be better to take what the 20 car had and insert Hunter-Reay and get his feel for what is wrong with it?

Maybe it’s not the team, maybe it truly was the driver. Or, maybe it wasn’t the driver, it’s the team. Shouldn’t you know that first?

Hunter-Reay was brought in for his leadership abilities and is going to lean on that to help get this process started.

“Well, a team, right, everybody says racing doesn’t get the rap for being a team sport as much as it should because it is — it’s a lot of different personalities in one area that need to come together and put forth a competitively strong effort when you’re going up against all these other teams,” he told me.

“Each situation is so unique. I can’t say what I can bring into a situation. It depends on what and how they go about — which I’m still going to learn, how they go about it on race weekend. How the team goes about what their test plan is, what the menu is for each different change, each different request from the driver, and what that data analysis looks like between sessions and kind of how we approach a qualifying session and all this.

“I am coming in and I am working with — really even though I know a lot of people there, it’s a new grouping. It’s a new situation. I also have to blend into that. I have to gel with that.

“Then from there, I’ll find my place and what I can bring to the table or what I think may be a potential improvement that we can try and work on.

“Yeah, a lot of TBDs right now, just a whole lot of them. I wish I could expand more on it, but one thing on my side, I think I have a lot of experience with some really great race teams, whether they be in INDYCAR. My career has been a journey. I’ve driven for the greats, I’ve driven for Rahal, Foyt. I’ve driven for Andretti. I’ve driven for Ganassi.

“I have a lot of experience and a lot of different race teams and how they go about their business.”

The thing is, Hunter-Reay hasn’t raced a Chevrolet powered car on a track that turns left-and-right since 2013 in Houston (Oct. 6, 2013). That was a street circuit. The last natural road course event was in Sonoma (Aug. 25, 2013).

That’s a long way ago. These cars have changed a lot since then. While he raced a Chevy for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing in this past year’s Indy 500, that’s on an oval. How much has he learned setup wise over the years can he bring over to ECR, but how much of that data works being that most of it was from a Honda setup?

“Yeah, so since the last time I tested in a Chevy, turning right at Barber October of 2021. You know, that was when — my engineer for many years, Ray Gosselin, engineer for 12 years at Andretti, he was going to Chevy,” he said to me on the subject.

“I was able to work on some drivability things with them, and since then it’s been completely reworked on the drivability side. Basically you’re most sensitive to it as a driver like, right, tip in right when you get into throttle, getting through the middle of the corner, because you are trying to maximize the corner. Obviously all these things happen very fast.

“But that transition period from 0 percent throttle to, let’s say 20 to 25 percent throttle, that is a very key area in where and how you put the power down and manage that power. Each driver wants something different.

“Things have changed, so that will be another thing I’m going to have to adapt to. At Indy you’re really not looking for those drivability characteristics that you would be on a road course. You’re in a completely different road range.

“So that’s something that will be another one of those items on the list that I’ll be trying to work through in a very short amount of time.”

One thing Hunter-Reay can lean on is the fact that in the first two years of the current car, the DW12, he ran with Andretti Autosport and Chevy. He even won a title with the bowtie camp. Then, between 2013 and 2014, Andretti swapped from Chevy to Honda. So he’s had a change between camps before, albeit nine years ago, but he’s done it.

Also, Hunter-Reay did test an ECR car at the Barber Motorsports Park in October 2021, where he made an immediate impact. They took those notes and when they came back the following spring, Rinus VeeKay won the pole.

Another aspect working for them is the fact that how the schedule lines up for them. Up now is Road America, a place Hunter-Reay has had past success at. After that is Mid-Ohio, another strong track for the American. To make matters even better, they’re both the same discipline of tracks. It’s not like they’re going from a natural road course to a short oval, to a street course and so forth. It’s two of the same tracks with the same philosophy at both and a week off between them.

In the meantime, he’s taking this session by session, day by day and knows that results don’t necessarily equate success with this opportunity. It’s all about improvement from day to day and session to session is what matters the most.

He notes he can get to 98% comfort quickly. It’s extracting that extra 2% is what’s going to take some time.