Photo Credit: Ashley McCubbin
Gary Peterson, owner of AFS Racing and driver Sebastian Saavedra have pulled the plug on their Indianapolis 500 effort.
The two had been busy working on putting something together since the Long Beach weekend in mid-April, which included Conquest Racing as the team to field the car on Peterson’s behalf. Conquest Racing owner, Eric Bachelart even went as far as to pick up Peterson’s Dallara DW12 chassis as well as the equipment from Chip Ganassi Racing, who ran the car for AFS and Saavedra in 2015, and moving it to the Indianapolis-based shop.
The list of all that would required to update the chassis to Chevrolet’s 2016 aero kit specification, and the limited time left to assemble the rest of the car before opening day practice session on May 16th caused them to abandon the project on Friday.
“It was just time. Everything started too late,” Saavedra told RACER Magazine. “We had an idea of the time to do it, which was very tight, and once we got started working on it, there was a lot more to do than expected, we didn’t have enough personnel, and many, many factors added up to us telling Gary we shouldn’t do it.”
However, Saavedra feels that he could have gotten the car out in time to practice, but no one felt it could be done without compromising the quality of the car.
“Everyone has given so much support, Chevy believed in us, IndyCar believed in us, our sponsors believed in us, but we couldn’t do a proper program with the time we had,” he continued. “We could have tried to scrape in and make it, but everybody deserves something better so I think it was smart to stop if we couldn’t do it the right way.”
The sponsors associated with the Colombian driver’s ill-fated Indy 500 program, which would have been his seventh entry for the famed race, could help Saavedra and Peterson to return later in the season, or to help the team branch out into other forms of racing.
“The sponsors are with us and interested in building something strong,” he said. “At this moment, it’s hard to see if it will be in the IndyCar Series this year, or if it will be in something that’s a new opportunity for us. Of course we want to continue in IndyCar, and Gary wants to step things up, so we need to find the right situation that’s the best for everybody.”
