Photo Credit: IndyCar
JR Hildebrand upgrades from part time to full time for Ed Carpenter racing
Last week Ed Carpenter Racing made the announcement that JR Hildebrand will be replacing Josef Newgarden in the No.21 ride for the full 2017 season. Hildebrand received the news a few days after he married his longtime girlfriend.
“It’s great, man,” Hildebrand stated. “It’s obviously exciting to be back full-time first and foremost. But to be back here with this team and to get it done this early in the off-season so that we can kind of get the program ready for next year is all just great. I mean, obviously working with ECR over the last three seasons now, it doesn’t feel like a new home necessarily, it feels like somewhere that I’ve been for quite a while now. I think with that, we’ll be able to just jump in and get with the program.”
He isn’t new to ECR as he has been racing with the team in both the Grand Prix of Indianapolis as well as the Indianapolis 500 for the past three years. Hildebrand tested Road America and Iowa Speedway when Newgarden was injured after crash at Texas Motor Speedway in early June.
“I wouldn’t say necessarily it told me anything new about being here,” Hildebrand quoted. “It was more just; I mean — I’ll back up by saying this is where I’ve wanted to be since my first go-around with them. It’s definitely been my primary focus, to create a home for myself here, do the things sort of necessary to be in that position.
“But being able to get a little bit more seat time this year during the season in that role, you know, filling in for Josef, knowing that mattered for him, mattered for the team, that it wasn’t just some sort of off-season program, it was very specific around goals they were trying to achieve in the middle of the year, our ability to work together, the ease of being able to kind of jump into that and play that role, be around during the race weekends, being a little bit more involved throughout that process I think just fired me up about the opportunity to be doing that myself on a more full-time basis.
“I think that really gave me a lot of energy to sort of sit there and go, Yes, I want to be back here doing this, not just because I feel like I’ve got unfinished business, but because I really want to be here. I really enjoy it. I sort of am ready to take advantage of that type of opportunity. That was a great experience to have over the course of the season, getting a little more seat time than expected. It’s great to be able to just build from that as we get prepared for next year.”
Before Hildebrand came back into the racing world with ECR he hasn’t been seen on a racetrack or inside a racecar for almost two years. He said it was hard at first to be away from the track because you work so hard to get there.
“You talk to some people, and they think you should just be at the track every weekend, banging on everybody’s door, bugging people to the point of it being uncomfortable,” Hildebrand added. “You talk to other guys that think you should be doing the opposite, then everything in between. Start going to all the sports car races. Maybe you should hunt something down in NASCAR land, whatever. For me, that was sort of a difficult thing to figure out what to do. But I guess in the end, I very quickly sort of deduced that there was a couple of really specific situations that I wanted to try to put myself in. One of them was here at ECR, to be able to grow our relationship and hopefully eventually, however long it took, get to a point where whether it was teaming up with Ed in the 20 car or otherwise, to see where that could progress and grow.
“I mean, we all know how volatile racing is, both from a sponsorship perspective and from an opportunity perspective for drivers. I guess I early on took the stance that just playing the field wasn’t something that I was even interested potentially in some of the feasible outcomes of that process, and that it might not be something that puts me in a position where I end up with any really, really high-quality opportunity at any point. Ed was one of the first guys that called. We went and had a beer not long after everything went down at Panther. Had a very early version of this type of conversation, that we would work together to try to make something happen, whatever that would be.
“That really became my focus from a driving perspective, was just to make good on that and try to cultivate that relationship. Outside of that, there’s not really a good template for what to do. You can pursue other drives, other places. You could go driver coach, whatever else. I sort of took the stance that I wanted to find something that I could sort of leverage my experience in racing towards something that I found maybe a different type of purpose in doing.
“I’ve focused a lot of my time not spent at the track or sort of pursuing an IndyCar gig, working in education. I’ve been working at Stanford this last year, kind of involved in the emerging automotive space which has been super interesting, stimulating, exciting. Over the past couple years it’s been difficult because there’s not necessarily a path to follow. There’s no obvious way that this all works out well. But I’ve managed to find other things that sort of supplement my interest in doing this, and that’s kept my sanity intact. I think a lot of those things end up just providing great perspective for me to have this opportunity now and really make the most of it.”
Hildebrand has set some realistic expectations for the 2017 season. Giving the success of the team their expectations will be higher that his personal ones.
“I think my expectation certainly is the places where I’ve been involved and we’ve worked together already, the Speedway being sort of the centerpiece of that program, but that certainly translates to a lot of the other oval circuits that we’re in contention to win right away at those types of places,” Hildebrand stated. “My personal expectation on the road and street courses is we can continue to build from what Josef was able to do here. He proved to be a threat at those places more often than not. That’s a challenge that I’m really looking forward to sort of tackling over the off-season and into the year to make sure that we’re equally competitive at those events, as well. I think the expectation is that, kind of as Ed mentioned earlier in the call, that we continue to build from where the team is right now. I think we can hit the ground running. I think a big part of the focus for me is being totally prepared to be able to do that right from St. Pete, have there not be a period of sort of layoff and using the first few races to get back in the swing of things. I’ll be highly focused on being totally prepared to really hit the ground running when the season kicks off.”
