Hildebrand was confirmed this morning as the oval driver for the #11 ROKiT-backed AJ Foyt Racing-Chevrolet, which is handled on street and road courses by rookie Tatiana Calderon. He will thus race alongside reigning Indy Lights champion Kyle Kirkwood, and third-year driver Dalton Kellett, rejoining the squad for whom he raced at Indy last year as a one-off.
It will be the first season that Hildebrand has competed in more than one race since 2017, when he drove his Ed Carpenter Racing-Chevy to podium finishes at both Phoenix and Iowa. So while the 2009 Indy Lights champion made his IndyCar debut the following year, he has accrued only 66 starts since then.
However, the 34-year-old California-born Colorado resident believes he can pick up where he left off at Indy last year, and his experience of racing the IR09, DW12, DW12-with-manufacturer-aerokits, universal aerokits and universal-aerokits-with-aeroscreen gives him a useful perspective to AJ Foyt Racing.
“Since 2018 with the universal kit and then with the aeroscreen in 2020, that the cars have just gotten – and not in a bad way – harder to drive. They've got less downforce. The tracks have lost grip over time and haven't had repaves, any of the ovals that we're going to in particular.
“I think that alone makes me feel like I'm definitely confident in my own ability to show up at these places and both understand pretty quickly, and now that I've raced a bunch of different versions of this car have a pretty good feel for what I think we can extract out of it and what we can actually get it to do from a setup perspective. Then if we can get it in that window, to go kind of maximize what I can get out of it as a driver.
“I feel like one of the things that I've kind of prided myself on road courses, street courses, oval racing, whatever, is just when it comes down to it, being willing to commit at that sort of maximum level. If there's a corner that we think is possible to do flat-out, like I will definitely be the guy that at least gives it a try! That's sort of served me well over my career and definitely matters at this point because there's a lot more oval corners that are more on that borderline than there used to be.”
Having spent much of the early part of his IndyCar career with Panther Racing as a solo driver, he says he has come to appreciate that experienced drivers can help rookies and sophomores, a role he hopes to play for Kirkwood.
“In hindsight you do realize the value of having some veterans around who are willing to share a little bit of their perspective on stuff. As a young drivers you've got to just be able to kind of filter that for yourself – like, ‘Alright, I'm going to go out and feel the car for myself and figure out what I think I need, and if some of that matches up right away, then right, then that's something that I can just log in the back of my mind… and now I can attach my own feeling to that, so that's something that I can kind of skip over having to figure out on my own now.’
“I think Kyle is in a place right now where he just seems to have that natural knack for knowing what he's looking for and knowing what he's got when he's got it.
“Whether it's Sebastien [Bourdais] at St. Pete working with him… Seb can be a little long-winded and full of information, which is awesome, but sometimes maybe a little bit hard to figure out, ‘How much of this do I need to know right now? How much do I just need to focus on what I'm doing?’ I'm probably a little bit the same way!
“But I think Kyle is more than capable of kind of working through that. I'm hopeful that I can be helpful to him over the course of this year and particularly these first couple of races to help him feel comfy getting up to speed.”
Hildebrand stated that he and the team are not treating next week’s race at Texas Motor Speedway “like a warm-up for the 500” but admitted it served that purpose.
“You get used to that communication with the strategist and the engineering group,” he said, “and I think in some ways having to do that in a little bit more of a quick-fire sort of environment where at Texas you don't really have a lot of time, you've got to figure a lot of things out while you're sitting on pitlane in one-hour practice sessions, that does accelerate that process a little bit before you show up at Indy.”
However, he said that he was also looking forward to the double-header at Iowa and the World Wide Technology Raceway rounds.
“Those are both places where I've had good cars and know what that feels like, so… I already have a good sense of the team's perspective on setups and all that kind of stuff. I don't expect to be like way outside the window at those places when we get there later in the year…
“I'm sort of cautiously optimistic with those events later in the year. I like short track racing, short ovals. Those are both places that are very driver- and engineering-dependent. It doesn't really matter how much development you've done or how much prep goes into the car at those kinds of tracks. The handling of the car and being aligned with that in terms of what you're doing in the seat are the things that matter the most.”
