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IndyCar
INDYCAR: Carpenter Hires Veteran Engineer Cannon, Adds More Staff
After hiring Derrick Walker to run the team, Ed Carpenter Racing makes another bold statement by signing Michael Cannon to lead ECR's engineering efforts.
ECR's signing of Michael Cannon ranks as one of the biggest surprises during a busy off-season in the IndyCar paddock. (LAT)
If there’s one owner/driver in the IZOD IndyCar Series paddock who isn’t paying attention to the old adage of “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” it’s Ed Carpenter.
With the recent forming of Ed Carpenter Racing, the 30-year-old Hoosier has a prime opportunity to take control of his future, to leave some of his shortcomings behind and to be taken seriously as a start-to-finish championship contender.
The road to earning the title he desires won’t come easily, nor will it happen in ECR’s debut season, but as his recent actions reveal, assembling his new team has been about hiring the best, rather than the most familiar or readily available.
Starting with the hiring of Walker Racing owner and former Team Penske team manager Derrick Walker, Carpenter, and his ECR co-owner/stepfather Tony George signaled their intentions. The old Carpenter—“Oval Only Ed” as this writer once dubbed him—was clearly something the Kentucky race winner wanted to leave behind.
The next phase of forming Carpenter’s “second impression,” as SPEED.com learned Monday was the hiring of veteran CART, Champ Car and IndyCar Series engineer Michael Cannon.
Arguably the top IndyCar engineer on the market during the off-season, Cannon’s road racing pedigree is well-known, but his setup skills on ovals—highlighted in 2011 where he and Tony Kanaan finished fourth at Indy, fifth at Texas 2 and second at Iowa--should complement ECR’s ambitious program from the outset.
“I spent a lot of time talking with Michael to paint the potential of what we have here, and to my delight, he’s come to work for us,” said Walker. “I think it sends a message that Ed and his partners are very serious about this program. It isn’t ‘Vision Racing 2.’ It’s a new entity, and it does have long-term desires to be a competitive force in the series and is making a bold step. The people who are coming to work for us are just part of the confirmation that what we’re doing deserves to be taken seriously.”
After joining KV Racing on a week’s notice to engineer Kanaan, the mild-mannered Canadian and boisterous Brazilian never jelled, but still managed to place the 2004 series champion fifth in points through Loudon, Cannon’s last race with the team.
He’d finish the year consulting for Panther Racing, and with a variety of intriguing offers in place throughout the paddock for 2012—from race winners to teams needing a major engineering upgrade—Cannon went with an option that few would have predicted.
“The program Ed and Derrick are putting together has real ambition and a strong growth plan that includes expanding to two cars and adding in all the components—the people and the assets—to become a major player in the series,” Cannon said from his home in Indianapolis.
“Look, believe it or not, I’ve always told people that I was a genuine Ed Carpenter fan from the moment I joined the IndyCar Series,” Cannon continued. “He races really well on the ovals, he finishes races, he doesn’t crash, and he’s a genuinely lovely person to work with. If you’re looking for a solid foundation to build from, those are the kind of intangibles you want.”
Cannon says he was also drawn to the core strengths of his driver and the man in charge of running the operation.
“First, I believe Ed has the ability to keep winning,” he said. “This is ‘Indy’ racing after all, and he goes amazingly well at those tracks. It’s also a chance to go racing with people whose life is all about racing. That’s what Ed’s life is, and that’s what Derrick’s life is. It’s all Ed’s ever known. It’s all Derrick’s done for 50 years or whatever. It’s all I’ve ever known. You have three like-minded people in the same building.”
With years of experience working for the powerhouse Players/Forsythe team, Cannon knows what it’s like to build a large-scale engineering department, and despite ECR’s plans for only one full-time entry in 2012, he says they won’t be taking any shortcuts in his domain.
“Derrick and Ed approached me and said they wanted the team to be very engineering-centric,” he said. “I met with them and said there were four engineering departments we needed to establish, and Derrick interjected right away and said, ‘I think there are five I actually want to create,’ so right there, I knew they meant business. It’s a long-term program and they have serious plans to build a proper team.
“It’s building towards becoming a two-car team, but let’s not forget that we have Ed as the foundation. He’s a race winner—a real winner who went and out-drove Dario Franchitti and others at Kentucky—so there’s no mistaking what we have to start with here.”
Carpenter’s oval prowess aside, the biggest “second impression” he hopes to make will come on road and street courses. With CART and Champ Car killers like Franchitti, Will Power, Justin Wilson and others to measure up to, ECR’s oval-trained owner/driver has a daunting task ahead of him.
So how does Walker and Co. plan to make the team a threat at every type of track in the near future?
“It’s a valid question, and with everyone who’s come onboard, we’ve addressed that right up front,” said Walker. “You’ve got to focus not on short-term, but long-term. Our goals are obviously to win a championship for Ed and his partners and sponsors, but there’s an understanding that getting up to speed on the road courses will be part of that. Before we even get to that point, we have to build the infrastructure of the team, to learn an entire new car, etc.
“I think for anyone who looks at us and says we’ll run into a dilemma when Ed goes to a street course, you’ve got to understand that Ed is just as keen as anyone to learn all that he can to make that a strength of his. Simply put, the quickest way to address that is to get a second car so that we can expedite that learning process. And that would give us the possibility of having strengths in both [forms of racing]. As soon as we can do that, and it makes sense for everyone, we’ll look to make that happen.”
As Walker explains, Carpenter has often found himself in teams that catered to his strengths, while with ECR, IndyCar’s newest owner has tasked his team manager and engineer with creating an intensive program to make him as complete a driver as possible.
With the recent forming of Ed Carpenter Racing, the 30-year-old Hoosier has a prime opportunity to take control of his future, to leave some of his shortcomings behind and to be taken seriously as a start-to-finish championship contender.
The road to earning the title he desires won’t come easily, nor will it happen in ECR’s debut season, but as his recent actions reveal, assembling his new team has been about hiring the best, rather than the most familiar or readily available.
Starting with the hiring of Walker Racing owner and former Team Penske team manager Derrick Walker, Carpenter, and his ECR co-owner/stepfather Tony George signaled their intentions. The old Carpenter—“Oval Only Ed” as this writer once dubbed him—was clearly something the Kentucky race winner wanted to leave behind.
The next phase of forming Carpenter’s “second impression,” as SPEED.com learned Monday was the hiring of veteran CART, Champ Car and IndyCar Series engineer Michael Cannon.
Arguably the top IndyCar engineer on the market during the off-season, Cannon’s road racing pedigree is well-known, but his setup skills on ovals—highlighted in 2011 where he and Tony Kanaan finished fourth at Indy, fifth at Texas 2 and second at Iowa--should complement ECR’s ambitious program from the outset.
“I spent a lot of time talking with Michael to paint the potential of what we have here, and to my delight, he’s come to work for us,” said Walker. “I think it sends a message that Ed and his partners are very serious about this program. It isn’t ‘Vision Racing 2.’ It’s a new entity, and it does have long-term desires to be a competitive force in the series and is making a bold step. The people who are coming to work for us are just part of the confirmation that what we’re doing deserves to be taken seriously.”
After joining KV Racing on a week’s notice to engineer Kanaan, the mild-mannered Canadian and boisterous Brazilian never jelled, but still managed to place the 2004 series champion fifth in points through Loudon, Cannon’s last race with the team.
He’d finish the year consulting for Panther Racing, and with a variety of intriguing offers in place throughout the paddock for 2012—from race winners to teams needing a major engineering upgrade—Cannon went with an option that few would have predicted.
“The program Ed and Derrick are putting together has real ambition and a strong growth plan that includes expanding to two cars and adding in all the components—the people and the assets—to become a major player in the series,” Cannon said from his home in Indianapolis.
“Look, believe it or not, I’ve always told people that I was a genuine Ed Carpenter fan from the moment I joined the IndyCar Series,” Cannon continued. “He races really well on the ovals, he finishes races, he doesn’t crash, and he’s a genuinely lovely person to work with. If you’re looking for a solid foundation to build from, those are the kind of intangibles you want.”
Cannon says he was also drawn to the core strengths of his driver and the man in charge of running the operation.
“First, I believe Ed has the ability to keep winning,” he said. “This is ‘Indy’ racing after all, and he goes amazingly well at those tracks. It’s also a chance to go racing with people whose life is all about racing. That’s what Ed’s life is, and that’s what Derrick’s life is. It’s all Ed’s ever known. It’s all Derrick’s done for 50 years or whatever. It’s all I’ve ever known. You have three like-minded people in the same building.”
With years of experience working for the powerhouse Players/Forsythe team, Cannon knows what it’s like to build a large-scale engineering department, and despite ECR’s plans for only one full-time entry in 2012, he says they won’t be taking any shortcuts in his domain.
“Derrick and Ed approached me and said they wanted the team to be very engineering-centric,” he said. “I met with them and said there were four engineering departments we needed to establish, and Derrick interjected right away and said, ‘I think there are five I actually want to create,’ so right there, I knew they meant business. It’s a long-term program and they have serious plans to build a proper team.
“It’s building towards becoming a two-car team, but let’s not forget that we have Ed as the foundation. He’s a race winner—a real winner who went and out-drove Dario Franchitti and others at Kentucky—so there’s no mistaking what we have to start with here.”
Carpenter’s oval prowess aside, the biggest “second impression” he hopes to make will come on road and street courses. With CART and Champ Car killers like Franchitti, Will Power, Justin Wilson and others to measure up to, ECR’s oval-trained owner/driver has a daunting task ahead of him.
So how does Walker and Co. plan to make the team a threat at every type of track in the near future?
“It’s a valid question, and with everyone who’s come onboard, we’ve addressed that right up front,” said Walker. “You’ve got to focus not on short-term, but long-term. Our goals are obviously to win a championship for Ed and his partners and sponsors, but there’s an understanding that getting up to speed on the road courses will be part of that. Before we even get to that point, we have to build the infrastructure of the team, to learn an entire new car, etc.
“I think for anyone who looks at us and says we’ll run into a dilemma when Ed goes to a street course, you’ve got to understand that Ed is just as keen as anyone to learn all that he can to make that a strength of his. Simply put, the quickest way to address that is to get a second car so that we can expedite that learning process. And that would give us the possibility of having strengths in both [forms of racing]. As soon as we can do that, and it makes sense for everyone, we’ll look to make that happen.”
As Walker explains, Carpenter has often found himself in teams that catered to his strengths, while with ECR, IndyCar’s newest owner has tasked his team manager and engineer with creating an intensive program to make him as complete a driver as possible.
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