With Team Penske announcing that Juan Pablo Montoya will not be given the opportunity to race with them in the 2018 Indianapolis 500, Sam Schmidt admits bringing the Colombian into his team for the race is enticing.
Schmidt Peterson Motorsports announced earlier this week that James Hinchcliffe will be joined by Robert Wickens for the 2018 Verizon IndyCar Series season, while it has long been announced that Tristan Gommendy will compete in a third Schmidt car at Indianapolis in conjunction with Calmels Sport.
Whilst the funding is not there yet for a fourth entry, now that the teams’ full-time plans have been confirmed, they can now look at looking for sponsors in order to possibly bring Montoya, a two-time Indianapolis 500 winner, into the squad for the Month of May at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“Roger deciding to not run Juan at Indy and allowing him to look for alternatives there has opened a door, and so it’s something Juan and I have discussed,” said team co-owner Schmidt to Motorsport.com. “It would be very interesting and it works well with him being an Acura driver and us being a Honda team.
“But it’s a scenario where we would have to find the funding, and to this point our total focus this off-season was getting the second car nailed down, getting a strong driver for it, and extending our deal with James.
“Now we can turn our attention a little more to the Indy situation, but we haven’t yet generated the funding internally to run that entry. We always have run an extra car there and that’s our intent again, but we haven’t been able to focus on it so far.”
