Inside Arrow McLaren’s Hunter-Reay Indy 500 signing
- Archie O’Reilly
- 10 minutes ago
- 11 min read
A beloved veteran. An Indy-only team. A back-up car.
For 48 laps, Ryan Hunter-Reay led the way for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing. And as late as Lap 168 of the 200, Captain America was at the head of the field. It was all set for one of the Indianapolis 500’s great fairytales.
But on the brink of unbridled ecstasy came incomprehensible agony.
As he pulled into the pits for his final stop of the race, Hunter-Reay was forecast to be leading come the endgame of this year’s 500 miles. But a miscalculation meant his No.23 Chevy was run dry of fuel. He tried to launch but was greeted with nothing.
Dead stick. Despair.
One can only imagine the night that followed was a sleepless one of nightmarish visions and tortuous recollections of being 30 laps from one of Indianapolis’ most storied wins. But the morning after Sunday’s ordeal, it was back to reality, packing up his bus and gearing up to head home to Florida. Life goes on.
As with many of the drivers, Hunter-Reay stays on-site at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with his family during May. It is a bustling hub of drivers throughout the month.
And spotting Hunter-Reay on his lonesome early that Monday as he prepared to leave the Speedway for another year, two of his greatest peers and fellow winners of the great race, Dario Franchitti and Tony Kanaan, approached his solemn figure.
“Ryan was extremely disappointed after what happened to him,” a frank Kanaan recalls in a Thursday media call. “He’s packing his own bus, his 400 strollers and golf carts. I said: ‘Why are you doing this?’ Because you talk about two retired guys talking… ‘Tell me why… because do you really need to be doing that now? Do you need this?’”
But at 44 years old, turning 45 next month, Hunter-Reay plugs on. And as proven by his performance earlier this year, which he achieved in a spare car with no more than a brief shakedown after a ruinous Carb Day fire, he remains a firm contender.
There has been a certain mystique surrounding how Hunter-Reay even got into this May’s win-contending position. Even from the likes of teammate Jack Harvey. But it was no accident.
“As a spectator, it’s very, very difficult sometimes to keep track of different strategies, especially at the Indy 500 when you have early yellows - and another one compounds onto that,” Hunter-Reay explains. “At that point, you’re going to have a split in the field; you have half or a quarter of the field pit. You have to pay attention at that point.
“Even the FOX booth missed it for a good portion of it. They were actually on [Álex] Palou at the time, saying he was the effective leader, when in fact we were the effective leader. We were just on the other side of the race track.
“When you have two different strategies, then at some point you can stop and maybe fill a half-tank of fuel. Then you can leapfrog a bunch of cars and then you have to pass cars on track. You have to have the speed on track in order to maintain that.
“I wouldn’t say we just appeared there; it was more just that it wasn’t followed. If you looked at it based on when cars pit and where they came out and you looked at a chart on that, you’ll see that we didn’t just appear. We were there.”
The events of the final pit cycle were beyond brutal for a team-driver combination which works year-round to build for this one race. It was trending to be the stuff of dreams.
But ultimately, that dream was snatched by a scarcely imaginable margin.
“Gosh, it had to be not even an eighth of a mile in fuel,” Hunter-Reay divulges. “It was very, very, very close. Unfortunately, after looking at it, we didn’t even need to pit on that lap. We could have pit the one before and been in the same fuel position.
“Hindsight is 20/20 a lot of the time in racing. Racing is pretty cruel. Indy can be as well.”
It is not the first time that Hunter-Reay has experienced the savagery of the Speedway. He won the 2014 running in a dramatic drag to the line up against now-four-time winner Hélio Castroneves, but the multiple more near misses still linger.
Take 2016, when he was wiped out in pit lane by Townsend Bell.
“I absolutely should have won that race,” Hunter-Reay insists. “That’s Indy.”
The travails of 2016 meant the pain nine years later was not an unfamiliar feeling. But as Hunter-Reay’s experienced head knows, the agonising lows are an inevitability at Indianapolis. You have to come to accept that - or at least live with the prospect.
“Every driver has their different stories,” he says. “I’m sure just with Tony and myself, if we were to talk about the ones that were close or the ones that got away or the ones that we thought we would win, we could be here for about an hour.
“Everything has to be perfect. Everything. It just fuels the fire more. It can either manifest itself into negative energy or you redirect it into a positive direction, which I love doing…”
Sitting to Hunter-Reay’s left, Kanaan injerjects.
“We’re lucky enough that when we feel this way, we turn around and look, there’s a Borg-Warner on the shelf… I guess it doesn’t suck that much.”
Hunter-Reay concurs that this helps to soften the blow a little with time. But Indy is a sanctuary of ‘what ifs’ and it no doubt does little to lessen the sting in the moment.
As Hunter-Reay has learned over his 17 Indy 500 starts, the best way to channel any despondency is as motivation. He is no quitter, hence why he was so quick to dismiss Franchitti and Kanaan’s day-after questions as to why, in his mid-40s, he continues to put himself through the emotional torment of Indy.
“The conversation with Dario and TK, it was just organic,” Hunter-Reay remembers. “I was completely drained mentally, physically. The first thing they said was: ‘Do you really need to be doing…’ I said: ‘This place matters so much to me. To have a shot at a win like that is everything to me.’”
It felt a relatively nondescript, ordinary - even if powerful - chat between competitors-turned-friends at the time. But for Kanaan, it was an interaction that he did not forget so quickly.
Team principal at Arrow McLaren since early this year, following on from a sporting director role in his early post-driving days, Kanaan knew there would likely be a vacancy in the team’s superstar-occupied additional Indy-only entry for 2026.
After two attempts at ‘The Double’, bidding to run the 1,100 miles of the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600 on the same day, now-two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Larson quickly signalled his intentions not to return to 2026. Before Larson, Indy 500 winners Juan Pablo Montoya and Kanaan were Arrow McLaren’s Indy-only drivers.
With that in mind, Kanaan wanted someone with the same standing for next year. And he knew who to turn to.
“That casual conversation [with Hunter-Reay] obviously stuck to me,” he admits. “And then when we needed somebody, I had no doubt who I needed to go call.
“You have to explore because I didn’t even know if he was available. He was there at Dreyer & Reinbold for [three] years. Zak [Brown, McLaren Racing CEO] is a big part of this and Zak is extremely hands-on. The beauty between Zak and I, we’re both racers; we both think the same way. When he asks my opinion, my number one name was [Hunter-Reay].
“There was more people on the list but I said: ‘If I can get him…’ And typical Zak, [he] says: ‘Well, make it happen. Do you need my help?’ I’m like: ‘No, boss, let me try to handle.’ Obviously it landed pretty well.”
Indeed, it was announced on Thursday that Hunter-Reay will pilot the No.31 Chevy for Arrow McLaren next May, making his 18th appearance at the event. It did not even take formal meetings to get over the line - simply phone calls between Kanaan and Hunter-Reay.
“I called Ryan, I said: ‘Hey, it’s you and I. We are going to negotiate, you and I, and we have three days to do it,” Kanaan recalls. “And we made it happen.
“The first time I called him, I said: ‘Would you ever imagine that I would have a possibility to actually be your boss?’ He laughed.”
Hunter-Reay and Kanaan have worked together before, spending the 2010 season at Andretti Autosport. It was a brief stint but the pair immediately connected, largely due to their very similar driving styles, and their families have grown close over the years.
“We were only teammates for a year but the chemistry that we had that year was awesome,” Kanaan explains. “We worked really, really well together.”
The dynamic is now somewhat different with Kanaan, in Hunter-Reay’s words, “somehow” the boss of his former teammate, the 2012 IndyCar champion.
“He’s been bossing me around this place for two days straight,” he jokes.
At the same time, in his more all-encompassing role rather than being tasked with just working closely with the drivers, Kanaan is welcoming Hunter-Reay’s experience to his lineup of three youthful chargers in Pato O’Ward, Nolan Siegel and Christian Lundgaard.
Hunter-Reay has already been asking Kanaan when he wants him at the team’s workshop, which will likely ramp up as the winter progresses and the new season gets underway.
“I want Ryan to be part of the team,” Kanaan says. “He doesn’t want to be a one-off. He is part of Arrow McLaren. He will be extremely involved. It’s a huge advantage that we have him around with his experience, especially for our drivers. I will use him quite a bit. And that’s what he wants - he wants to contribute. He’s going to be contributing in everything.
“I have to really police myself to do my real job instead of being with the drivers, especially in May. I have 120 people here, sponsors. Having a guy that knows exactly the way I think but also in that room because he’s driving a car, I’m going to lean on him quite a bit.
“He knows that what I don’t have time and I would like to be doing, he’s going to enjoy and have the pleasure to do it and also to drive.”
While Hunter-Reay brings that element of guidance as a senior figurehead, the main reason behind his acquisition was still the belief that he could bring this iteration of the McLaren outfit its first Indy 500 crown.
The team was not going to run a fourth car without reason and the availability of Hunter-Reay certainly gave a cause to continue with a four-car squad for a fourth season.
“What we’re trying to build here at Arrow McLaren since I’ve been here is to grow the team as far as winning the Indy 500, winning the championship,” Kanaan rallies. “The intention of running that car, since before me, is to have another chance to win the 500.
“To me, it was like: ’I need a winner. I need a guy that is going to be able to win the Indy 500.’ There is not many guys that are available right now. I told people that if they mentioned me one more time, I was going to fire whoever is saying that because I’m not coming back.”
Hunter-Reay quickly bought into the ambition of the team too, with an Arrow McLaren driver on the ‘podium’ in each of the last four years at the Speedway. His transition has already been aided by the fact he has worked with a vast amount of the team across his two-plus-decade career.
“Everything is hitting its stride here and that’s huge credit to everybody that’s really shaping this into a major powerhouse,” he says. “I’m thrilled to be a part of it and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to hopefully better the team in any way that I can contribute.
“My goal is to operate at my maximum potential. Being in an environment like this is what comes naturally to me. We’re here because we want to win. That’s it. There’s no other conversation. We’re here because that is the goal.
“We’re not here to qualify. We’re not here to participate. Eyes on the prize.”
Kanaan, who expects to be front-and-centre of an upcoming documentary following Larson, hopes for a more stress-free Month of May than the past two seasons, when he has been hands-on aiding Larson’s learning and in the frame as a possible weather-induced deputy.
“Oh, I didn’t tell you… I’m working on a Double deal,” Hunter-Reay chimes in (joking, of course). “I forgot to tell you.”
Kanaan is now able to see the funny side of the quip but does admit that the 2025 campaign, which featured him returning to the car for a refresher session and being close to being called in to drive amid rain on race day, was one of the more fraught experiences.
“Huge relief,” he concedes of the burden being lifted. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful because I drove the car again last year for a few laps - I would do that any day of my life. But it’s helping us to focus now: me, the team, him.
“It was a difficult spot. I thought that I’ve been through every single scare moment, tense, nervousness before a 500 in my 26 years. The way I felt last year, I don’t want to ever feel it again when Rocket [Kevin Blanch, IndyCar technical director] called me.
“I was on the grid, dressed [in team principal attire]. He says: ‘Do you have your stuff ready?’ That there, I was never more frightened in my entire life. I wasn’t ready mentally and everything else. I’m glad that chapter is over.”
It is raised to Kanaan that Trackhouse Racing is interested in entering its NASCAR sensation Connor Zilisch into the Indy 500 at some point after his rookie Cup Series season next year. But Kanaan is not entertaining the idea of a partnership similar to that with Hendrick Motorsports and Larson from across the past two seasons. For now, at least.
“We’re committed to [Hunter-Reay] right now,” he insists. “I’m definitely not running five cars. I think that kid is extremely talented but I’ve been through with what Kyle did.
“I think nowadays, [The Double] is becoming more and more difficult than actually in the past when Tony Stewart did or Kurt [Busch]. I’m a big fan of I never say no to anything. My commitment is to Ryan for the next few years. I’m not going to say no but right now it’s definitely not where my head is at.”
Tentatively, Kanaan suggests Hunter-Reay’s addition to the lineup is more than just a one-year deal, should there be a willingness to continue from both parties.
“It’s a multi-year deal,” he says. “It’s tough - contracts are so confidential - but he’s here. Let me put it this way: if he wins, he’s going to have to come back. If he doesn’t win, he’ll have to decide. I want him here as long as he wants to be here.
“I think he is extremely an asset for this team for what he does. He has time to help me on the other side. It’s his house, and as long as he wants to stay around, we’ll have him.”
As with any driver racing through their 40s, Hunter-Reay has to face yearly questions about when he may retire from Indy 500 competition. But it is still a subject that injects just a hint of irritation, which says all you need to know about his stance.
“I don’t even think about that,” Hunter-Reay affirms. “You get that question probably every year for the past seven or eight. You re-evaluate after every 500.
“It’s situationally dependent. I have to understand exactly what preparation has gone into it, the amount of development work that’s gone into it, what my position looks like within that team, within that car that is within that team. And I make a decision based on my past knowledge. Usually it’s the right one.
“You also have to obviously have the fire. You have to have every bit of it. You can’t go to Indy and be at 99 percent; you have to be past 100, fully committed. Otherwise, you’re doing yourself and everybody else that you are around a disservice.”
As it stands, Hunter-Reay’s experience remains very much a virtue - and an appeal to suitors - rather than age becoming anything close to a hindrance. When that flips, maybe there will be a change in mindset. But there are no signs of that being the case.
“If you don’t have experience of the environment, the pressure, how it gets to your head… it is not a joke mentally,” Kanaan says. “The experience helps you block all that, which makes it you have an advantage over much younger talent or even better-than-you driver.”
If he was not still so invested, maybe Hunter-Reay would have called it a day after the heartbreak of not-yet-six months ago. But the fire still burns brighter than ever. And with an Arrow McLaren team to be reckoned with, he should not be discounted in 2026.
