After dramatically crashing out of the first day of IndyCar’s open test session Rinus VeeKay will not be able to take part in the second and final day of testing while his team continues to repair damage to his car following a hard crash on Thursday.
In an effort to fix the car quickly, the Ed Carpenter Racing crew took VeeKay’s car back to the shop yesterday afternoon, which is just down the road from Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
However, the damage was too much to be safely repaired in one evening and only the remaining two ECR entries will participate in today’s running.
VeeKay lost control in the middle of turn 1, and the #21 Sonax Chevy went into a spin and sent the young driver hard into the outside barriers, likely damaging the chassis.
He was only able to manage four laps yesterday and had not even fully gotten up to speed when the crash happened just 11 minutes into the day’s session.
Last year’s Rookie of the Year didn’t miss out on too much running yesterday on account of the rain that moved in for most of the day, but he will lose out on over seven hours of valuable track time today.
There was the option of converting VeeKay’s road course car to the speedway trim and bringing it to the track for day two of the test session, but team owner Ed Carpenter decided that it wasn’t worth risking the team’s only other car so soon before the start of the season.
The lack of participation in the remainder of this test session means that the next time the young Dutch driver will have a chance to get behind the wheel will be at the first race of the 2021 season.
That race takes place from Barber Motorsports Park next weekend, with the green flag waving at 14:30 EDT on Sunday, April 18.
