The best average finish across the last four races in the IndyCar Series doesn’t belong to Alex Palou, Kyle Kirkwood, or even Pato O’Ward.

It belongs to AJ Foyt Racing’s Santino Ferrucci.

Across its two cars. it took six races for the Foyt team to bag even a top-10–but once it did, Ferrucci’s managed fifth, second, fifth, and third at the Indianapolis 500, Detroit, Gateway and, Road America respectively.

One of the key things that has changed in this period is Ferrucci has a new race engineer: Adam Kolesar.

“A little bit weird to have an engineering switch in the middle of the season, but we went fifth, second, fifth, third, so I’d say it’s going pretty good!” said Ferrucci after the Road America race.

Kolesar started in IndyCar in 2011 at Newman Haas, then did 11 years at Rahal Letterman Lanigan as a mechanic, data acquisition engineer, and then performance engineer, a role he took at Foyt in October 2023 with the noted long-term goal of becoming a fully-fledged IndyCar engineer.

Now that he is, The Race puts it to him that the run the team has been on is pretty incredible, and he immediately focuses on the things he wants to improve once the pleasantries are out of the way!

“It’s been really good,” he says. “Obviously, we need to work on qualifying a little bit, but it hasn’t been for a lack of pace either, which is a little bit difficult to deal with.

“By the time the race comes, you have a very fast race car. We’ve worked with Santino to build a base of set-ups that we’re very, very confident in. It hurts a little bit, from an engineering perspective, to not be able to throw it up at the top of the charts, and have to make Santino kind of drive through the field with that car instead.”

Read the full article, originally published by Jack Benyon for The Race.