Legge, Abel Fill 500 Field

Thanks to two announcements on two consecutive Mondays, we now have a full field of 33 for the 110th Indianapolis 500, and the implications from this lineup will keep ringing well beyond.

Last week, we learned that Kentucky native Jacob Abel will take a crack at it with his family’s team, piloting the Abel Motorsports #51 Chevrolet. This one will primarily be about reclaiming his dignity, as last year, Abel failed to qualify with Dale Coyne Racing, and after an overall dismal season with that team, he’s been running LMP2 in IMSA and the Asian Le Mans Series ever since.

Then, this week, A.J. Foyt Racing unveiled its third car, the #11 Chevrolet, with HMD Motorsports as co-owners and racing Renaissance woman Katherine Legge making a very welcome return to the Brickyard. This one’s a bit of a shock given her traditional allegiance with Honda, which seemed to limit her options to either landing the fourth Andretti Global car or missing the race altogether. However, Andretti had that spot earmarked specifically for Colton Herta, and when Formula 2 added Montreal to make up for April’s cancellations, the team decided to simply shelve the car. Fortunately for Legge, she’d started building a relationship with Chevrolet last year, when she drove their cars in various tiers of NASCAR, and that presumably helped her swing over to their side of the aisle here in IndyCar.

For Foyt as an organization, this is a great sign. They haven’t run a third car since 2022, when Tatiana Calderón and JR Hildibrand split the #11 for the first half of the season before financial troubles forced the team to pull the car. Having e.l.f. as Legge’s sponsor certainly helps, given the merch numbers they’ll likely do, but the experience as a whole will be good practice for 2028, when Foyt will almost certainly operate Chevrolet’s works entry charter full-time.

However, for Prema Racing, this has all been a final death knell. This was their last shot to at least attempt another season, and with open entries officially iced out of all non-500 races going forward, Callum Ilott is fully marooned to IMSA and last year’s polesitter Robert Shwartzman is officially out of work. Anyone who wants to compete full-time from here on out is going to have to buy a charter from one of the existing teams, and while it should theoretically be a much more stable state of affairs, Silly Season will never be the same now that the teams aren’t in flux the way the drivers are. It’s also an open question as to how many one-off teams we’ll even see at future Indy 500s, and whether it’ll mean more years like this one, where no one’s in danger of a DNQ and qualifying on the eleventh row is a mere formality.