Inside Louis Foster’s IndyCar Rookie of the Year campaign
- Archie O’Reilly
- 2 hours ago
- 17 min read
It is mid-October and everything is breaking in Louis Foster’s Indianapolis household.
There is momentary panic when he realises a broken PC may jeopardise his post-season chat with DIVEBOMB, only to discover he got the day wrong anyway.
Can you blame him? Now accustomed to having each minor aspect of his calendar planned out for him after his rookie season as an IndyCar driver, returning to self-scheduling is an unexpected challenge of the series’ excruciating off-season for Foster.
“We’ve got every minute scheduled,” he says. “We have a scheduled time we’re allowed to rest between the pre-race activities and the race itself, which is funny to me because my whole career was just chill out, do your own thing until you drive, do what you want to do.
“I want to shut the door to our driver’s room, turn the AC on and speak to no one. Honestly, if we had a sensory deprivation tank, that’d be great.”
That scarce time to breathe on race weekends is a little-known, rarely-seen baptism of fire for drivers making their bow in the sport. Each event consists of the same, constant, day-long repetition of team meetings, driver meetings, media appearances and fan appearances. Then yet more team meetings, data deep-dives and debriefs.
And that is without tackling the tallest task of getting to grips with everything on the track.
“Definitely throughout the year [it] was something I felt a bit overwhelmed by,” Foster reflects. “Specifically, it’s race day that’s very busy. But the race weekends, there’s so much stuff that’s going on. That was definitely different for me. It’s just so busy.
“It got better, for sure, throughout the year. I’m sure as time goes on, it will get easier and easier and easier and feel like second nature to me. But I definitely have headaches by the end of days; I’m mentally fatigued from all the extra activities.”
As soon as the off-season comes around, though, that in-season intensity subsides. Work does not stop but the day job becomes markedly more relaxed.
Of course, training continues: gym work to build strength for the season ahead, running, biking or whatever else may be your preference. In Foster’s case, there is a concerted effort to be present at his Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLL) team’s Zionsville, Indiana base, with meetings more sparse but plenty of data and feedback and video to dig into and review.
There is a keenness to continue building an intra-team rapport, too, especially with Foster in the infancy of a confirmed long-term stint at the team. There are team off-season outings for food and drinks, making the most of the more stress-free out-of-season environment.
Anyhow, while there are some tasks in order, there is the unfamiliar dealing of downtime. And such was the amount of time on his hands early in the off-season, Foster took it upon himself to mend his ailing PC. Successfully so, in fairness.
A matter of days earlier, though, he could not do the same with his defunct iPhone, which brought about a memorable interaction at the end of a memorable first season in IndyCar.
“I went to Apple to go and get it fixed,” Foster recalls. “I’m sitting there for like 15 minutes waiting for a tech guy to come and help me out. And some guy walks over to me; I’m like: ‘Oh, thank God. Finally.’”
Indeed, the call comes: “Louis Foster!”
It was an Apple technician. Relief, until…
“Congrats on Rookie of the Year.”
And that was that. Kept waiting, still.
“He left, didn’t come and help. I’m like: ‘Thank you, I appreciate that. But secondly, help me! Don’t leave. Help me. What are you doing?’” Foster laughs. “So that was funny because I fully expected him to be trying to help me. But it just shook me that he recognised me.
“To be fair to the guy, they had set tables and he was set a different table. But it was just funny to me because I wasn’t expecting that at all. The next words out of his mouth, I did not expect to be an IndyCar-related thing. It caught me so off-guard.”
In some ways, this recognition was emblematic of Foster’s growth journey across 2025. He joined RLL as a ruthlessly dominant Indy NXT champion, but from emphatic top-of-the-crop you become wholly a novice and essentially small fry upon graduation to the big league.
Much of the champion-worthy attention dissipates. IndyCar is another level; to much of the non-NXT-watching fanbase, you start as little more than unknown again.
Foster intentionally entered his rookie season with very few expectations, though with the overarching goals of securing the Rookie of the Year (ROTY) crowns for both the Indianapolis 500 and the entire season. Above all and usurping any highs that were to come, though, there was the bigger picture of building towards a long-term future.
But for the driver who took the 2024 Indy NXT championship by 122 points, it was never going to be a season entirely out of the headlines.
It was after June’s trip to Road America, America’s National Park of Speed, that Foster felt a ramping up in the spotlight cast upon him. More fans recognising him. More hero cards signed each weekend. Even one supporter with a t-shirt bearing his face and, possibly jokingly, pleading with him to shave off his new-look moustache.
To that point, the start to the season had been eventful but rocky on the results front. Finding himself caught up in an opening-lap crash in St. Petersburg marked the truest of false starts to Foster’s IndyCar career, enhanced by an issue-ridden second round at the Thermal Club.
For the first half of the campaign, the biggest stories continued to generally be those of woe and contention. For one, May’s Indianapolis 500 invited substantial scrutiny as Foster was unwillingly caught duelling teammate Devlin DeFrancesco right in front of the lead battle.
Ultimately, Foster had every right to continue to run his own race and maintain his position on the lead lap. There was no requirement to give way to the leaders, as much as it may have dampened the viewing spectacle - something Foster is perfectly aware of.
At the end of it, an 12th-place finish - after a bout of post-race penalties - marked an extremely strong debut at the Speedway. Foster looks back on his May campaign fondly and with pride, even if two drive-through penalties for speeding in the pit lane may have denied something of a dream maiden Indy 500 result.
“That’s definitely an experience that I won’t forget,” he assesses. “The overarching view of my race was [that I] held up the leaders for 30 laps, which is fair enough. Obviously we weren’t a lap down at that point so we didn’t have the command blue [flag].
“But I was in that position after two drive-through penalties. Without those two drive-throughs, we would have been easily inside the top 10 - easily - but probably pushing towards a top seven, six. But with two drive-throughs, to be finishing 12th and I’m still on the lead lap, we had a really good race and there were a lot of positives to take.”
But if May marked a fortnight of living out a lifelong dream, the following two rounds were something of a nightmare unfolding in real time for Foster.
A suspension failure in Detroit saw him slam into the back of Felix Rosenqvist at the end of a 0.7-mile straight in the closing stages, followed by a wall tap at World Wide Technology Raceway (WWTR) sending him spinning in front of helpless race leader Josef Newgarden, who ended up upside down after the pair collided.
So after eight rounds, Foster was 24th in the championship and 18 points adrift of PREMA Racing’s Robert Shwartzman - leader of the ROTY standings. But there was one particular saving grace from a testing start to Foster’s IndyCar career: single-lap speed.
On road courses in particular, Foster was catching the eye on a Saturday. As much as Thermal transpired to be bleak at its climax at the beginning of the year, he had qualified 10th for only his second-ever race. Again at Barber Motorsports Park the next time out, he transferred to the Fast 12 with his teammates down the order.
Then in early May came RLL’s strongest track: the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course. And again, Foster shone in qualifying; with teammates Graham Rahal and DeFrancesco second and fifth, he secured a third-place start for only his fifth race.
“That’s obviously a really good thing because that’s the hardest thing to get, qualifying and outright pace,” Foster admits. “The race stuff can come in the future but that’s the main thing: having that ability to drive the cars that fast on a track.”
It was a month-and-a-half after that until the paddock was Wisconsin-bound for the next road course race. But it was that weekend at Road America that served up the pinnacle of Foster’s first season as an IndyCar driver on a quite sensational Saturday.
To begin with, his qualifying session was fraught. An error on his final lap in the opening round meant he only scraped through into the Fast 12, where under the impression he did not have Fast Six speed, he was tempted to save a set of fresh alternate tyres for the race. But overridden by the team, Foster indeed made it to the pole shootout.
Devoid of new alternate tyres, what followed felt incredibly far-fetched.
But on IndyCar’s longest track, at 4.014 miles, Foster usurped eventual champion Álex Palou by over one-tenth of a second - and the remainder of the field by over three-tenths - to take the unlikeliest of first career pole positions.
At 21 years old, a rookie was to lead the field to green in only his ninth race.
“I surprised myself with how well we qualified throughout the year,” Foster utters. “That was pretty outstanding. I definitely did a better job than I expected there and I thought that the pace was there out the gate.
“To give credit where credit is due, the RLL car on the road courses was good. Yes, while I obviously did my job, the car did its job as well. I’ve been driving cars or karts and trying to get the most out of it in one lap for the best part of 15 years, so that comes naturally to me.”
By the end of the season, at 8.3, Foster had the fourth-best road course qualifying average in the field - beaten only by Palou (2.1) and Arrow McLaren duo Christian Lundgaard (5.4) and Pato O’Ward (6.7). Until the final road course round of 2025 at Portland International Raceway, he held an impressive 100-percent record of transferring to the Fast 12.
But while qualifying was often exceedingly good, race days continued to prove tougher.
“Pit stops, fuel saving, tyre management, race management, race distance that we do, those things don’t come naturally to me because I haven’t done them before,” Foster explains. “I know how to drive a car fast for a lap; I now need to learn how to do it over 90.”
Across the 17 races, Foster’s qualifying average of 13.5 regressed to a 17.8 average race finish. On road courses, his average race result of 16.6 - 18th in the field - was double his fourth-best-in-field qualifying average.
Races proved a conundrum for RLL in its entirety. Rahal’s three top 10s and Takuma Sato’s ninth place in the Indy 500 were their only top-10 results across the season, with Foster never finishing better than 11th.
“We struggled a bit more in the races than I thought or hoped we would have,” Foster remarks. “We tended to go backwards more than we went forward. Myself and the team are very much critical of our own failures and our own setbacks. You compare [qualifying] to the race result, you’re like: ‘Ah crap.’
“The disparity between those two is ginormous. There’s so much work to be done in the races and in pit stops, fuel saving, strategy, tyre wear - so many little things there. That’s where IndyCar gets you.”
Take Road America. Starting at the head of the field, Foster was passed for the lead by Scott McLaughlin - the other soft, alternate tyre starter inside the top four, alongside Foster - after an early caution restart but otherwise held his own in the early laps until Christian Lundgaard overtook him at the start of Lap 9. While likely not a victory, a strong result was on the cards.
The following lap, Foster offered a staunch defence against Palou, holding onto third place as a second caution was brandished for a heavy crash for Sting Ray Robb. But opting to pit during this stoppage, a slower stop dropped Foster to the lower end of the top 10 on his strategy alone. For even a top-five challenge, it was essentially ruinous.
There has been a constant moving process on pit stops to get the most out of the team on the No.45 car. On that front, there was a mid-season change of fueller in 2025, which initially brought forward challenges but started to pay dividends latterly.
At Road America, RLL’s higher-downforce setup, meaning Foster was down on top speed, made recovering a tall order; overtaking from deep in the field was tough and defending a challenge too. While Foster rebounded to finish 11th, the manner in which the race came undone was emblematic of where things too regularly went awry on race day.
“A lot of it is just down to decision-making,” Foster analyses. “Road America, we put it on pole then went to the race with a car that was way too understeery with way too much downforce and that killed us.
“We looked back at it and we were like: ‘Why did we do that? That was just stupid.’ We were trying too hard to protect the rear tyres that we just gave the car a crap load of understeer and we were just slow because of it.”
Foster views the following race at Mid-Ohio as his best of the year - and maybe with his best car too. But after another Fast Six appearance - a sixth-place start which he felt should have been a pole - only a 14th-place finish could be yielded after an errant strategy.
There was a feeling of too often missing opportunities on that strategy front, whether failing to take a chance under caution or ending up a lone wolf on a particular strategy. This is among the many things being reviewed and addressed across the off-season.
Some of the struggles were also put down to sacrifices made for qualifying performance. Foster’s results across a single lap sometimes owed to using an extra set of fresh alternate tyres compared to the rest of the field; despite a higher grid slot, the inability to consistently produce first time around in qualifying compromised the race approach.
Foster hopes this can be ironed out with a season under his belt in IndyCar.
“The exact same lap time, with a year’s experience, I can do it just with one set [of tyres] rather than two. I don’t need two goes at it anymore. So that’s going to be an immediate instant improvement to our race performance is having those extra [alternate] sets of tyres.
“There really isn’t any stone being left unturned as to making sure that our race pace is better next year.”
Despite glimmers of improvement, ovals were also a continued struggle for RLL - a recurrent problem in recent seasons. Encouraging for Foster, he led the team in average result on ovals in his rookie season, though sitting at 17.1 across the six oval races.
Having vacated the seat Foster now occupies ahead of the 2025 season, Christian Lundgaard claimed he has had to relearn the oval craft at Arrow McLaren after three difficult years learning the discipline at RLL. At least for Foster, unlike Lundgaard’s switch straight from Formula 2, his time on the Road to Indy ladder did give him prior education.
There is a feeling in the team that a step forward was made on ovals in 2025. But this remains too inconsistently shown by results and flat-out work continues in a bid to eliminate inherent issues in the RLL cars, which both Foster and Rahal have the same read on.
“There’s a lack of feel in the car - in the rear - on the ovals,” Foster describes. “As drivers, we don’t know where the rear is at any time. It’s a big issue for ovals, where you need confidence to drive the cars in hard and to be able to carry minimum speed or roll-in speed.
“When you can’t feel the rear of the car, you just lose all that confidence so it’s a very hard place to build from. But the team has some ideas and some thoughts as to what could be the issue. I would love to say we’re making progress. I hope we are. The guys have been working genuinely tirelessly on trying to find a fix for it.”
Heading into the final two rounds of the season - both on ovals - Foster had turned round the rookie standings to lead Shwartzman by six points. But it was only six points. Unexpectedly, rookie team PREMA had hit the ground running in the oval discipline, so it was pressure-on for Foster and RLL to deliver at both the Milwaukee Mile and Nashville Super Speedway.
It had been a generally tough year for former Formula 3 champion Shwartzman, who traded a Hypercar ride with Ferrari in the World Endurance Championship for IndyCar. But he impressed on ovals, his sole top-10 results coming at WWTR and Iowa Speedway and an all-time great Indianapolis 500 story seeing the rookie team-driver combination claim pole.
There was a sense that Foster should have had ROTY comfortably in his grasp based on pure pace across the year. And yet, it hung in the balance with two races remaining.
The first of those, Milwaukee: Foster 17th; Shwartzman 18th. One position between the duo but Foster’s lead extended by two points to eight.
But with so little to split the pair, it remained all to play for in the Nashville finale, especially after Saturday, when Shwartzman qualified five positions higher than Foster’s lowly 24th place. Come the race, Foster promptly navigated his way into the top 20 but, ahead of him, Shwartzman was probing, inside the top 15 and threatening the top 10.
Lap 80: Foster up to 18th; Shwartzman sitting 13th. Foster’s live lead cut to two points.
And Foster was in trouble. While Shwartzman had several seconds in hand to the race leader, Foster had been passed by O’Ward at the head of the field. No longer on the lead lap. And David Malukas, charging in second, was in extremely close pursuit.
As Foster, how do you play it? An almighty conundrum.
“I was a lap down to only one car at that point, which was the leader,” he recalls. “[Malukas] overtaking me, more cars overtaking me, [that] just decreases my chances exponentially of getting my lap back [under] a yellow flag.”
It was a familiar tale. Much like at Indianapolis only three months, Foster was reluctantly caught in the lead battle. As a backmarker, in the eyes of the leaders, purely a pest.
But as much as he was running in the lower end of the top 20, Foster was fighting for a win of his own. Knowing that being trapped off the lead lap could be detrimental to his ROTY hopes and not obliged to move aside, 18th place was going to have to fight second.
No holds barred. Foster’s defence against much-quicker Malukas was robust.
As Foster fought for the one-time opportunity to win the rookie crown, Penske-bound Malukas was desperate to chase down his maiden career victory in what would prove to be his final race for AJ Foyt Racing. A wall tap early in his pursuit of Foster was telling of that.
By Lap 83, frustration was brewing. Malukas had been persistent but without reward. He dipped low into the tri-oval section but to no avail, so his mind turned to an outside move in Turn 1.
But the worst-case scenario beckoned. For both.
Reacting to Malukas, Foster darted up high - not forcing Malukas into the wall but unyielding and aggressive. Malukas reciprocated with his own commitment, pinned on the high side and forcing a side-by-side tussle. Unyielding. Aggressive.
Maybe expecting Foster to back out, maybe misjudging, Malukas cut down what transpired to be a fraction early. Disaster. Contact ensued and the Foyt machine was propelled rearwards into the wall, Foster sliding and saving but far from out of the woods.
Malukas eventually emerged from his car but was airlifted to a local hospital, though mercifully only as a precaution as he was promptly cleared.
“Definitely a race I wanted to forget,” Foster admits. “I talked to David on the phone. From his perspective, he was a bit confused as to why I was defending from him. I explained to him the situation as to why I was with Rookie of the Year.”
Foster was not ruled at fault for the contact but found himself penalised for blocking in his aggressive cut up the track moments before the incident. A drive-through penalty was catastrophic for his race - the ROTY fight snatched out of his hands.
“I did think it was a bit harsh, especially since watching the race back and watching many other cars do the exact same thing that I did,” Foster reacts. “But it is what it is. Obviously I apologised to David. [I] didn’t want anything bad to happen to him and it wasn’t my intention for any contact to come between us.
“That ruined our race. And so at that point, I was just driving around and getting out of people’s way. It was more just waiting to see what we could get to and how many other cars would crash and what position I would end up in.”
The outlook was bleak. The race ebbed away and Foster was stuck, helpless. With 10 laps remaining, curtains appeared drawn on his chances. Shwartzman sat eighth with Foster 20th, two laps adrift of the field; a gain of 24 points, versus Foster’s 10, had Shwartzman sitting with a six-point advantage. Even dropping to 12th place would get the job done.
But then came the inexplicable.
Under pressure from Santino Ferrucci, Shwartzman made the gravest, most amateurish, most unnecessary of errors at the most key of moments. Fighting a place he ultimately lost anyway, the PREMA man - within 10 laps of clinching ROTY - was assessed to have blocked Ferrucci in his defence of eighth place. Completely needlessly.
With five laps remaining, he was dealt the same fate as Foster: a blocking-induced drive-through penalty. Off the lead lap. Down to 14th. Still six places ahead but, oh-so-crucially, only six points ahead of Foster.
Six. A magic number. Foster led by two points again. And it finished that way.
“I knew [Shwartzman] was moving forward in the pack; I knew that he was ahead on points at some point,” Foster says. “There was nothing I can do so I was just like: ‘Well, it is what it is.’ I guess I’m thankful that the stewards gave him a penalty as well.
“Definitely not the way I wanted to win the Rookie of the Year. It soured the taste, especially with the ungodly amount of hate I got from the David Malukas thing, which is fair enough. I understand that. But the end goal was to get Rookie of the Year, was to try and show what we could in our rookie year, which I think we did.
“It was definitely something that was deserved after all of our issues throughout the year.”
This was Foster’s main goal achieved. And he was the highest-placed rookie in the Indy 500 too - only denied rookie honours there because of the subjectivity of the award and undeniable force of Shwartzman’s stunning pole.
There may have been hints of complacency from Foster across the season in his ROTY pursuit. But as much as he stumbled over the line, he claimed the coveted accolade nonetheless and exits 2025 encouraged by his start to life in IndyCar.
“Throughout the year, I wasn’t really focusing on [ROTY],” Foster concedes. “I was more focused on the overall championship and standings there - purely because we tended to be a lot quicker than Robert and we usually ended up qualifying better, racing better.
“I wasn’t particularly worried about that. Stupidly, I kind of assumed it was almost a done deal halfway through the year so I wasn’t really looking at it. Robert had a great year as well, especially on the ovals. That’s where they clawed back, where we struggled. So it was a great fight between us two. Definitely something that I’m happy that we managed to clinch.
“Would have definitely ruined my day, probably my week, if I didn’t win that. So I was glad that it did happen and that we did manage to scrape it.”
There is pleasure looking back on a rookie season with certain highlights to go with the inevitable lowlights of a debut campaign. There is room for growth but equally a solid foundation set in place, which will be built upon across several more seasons after the post-season signing of a new multi-year deal, on top of the year remaining on his initial deal.
Naturally, there is now a quest to make another stride forward in 2026 for an RLL team buoyed by the addition of Mick Schumacher, recruitment of multiple high-profile personnel and a first off-season under the expert guise of Jay Frye.
“The goals get a little bit more vague,” Foster asserts of year two. “But for me, a podium for sure is going to be on the cards. If we can get another pole next year, that’d be great. Championship standings wise, if we can finish in the top 15 would be good; top 12 would be great and then anything better than that would be a bonus.
“Obviously we want to sit here and say that we want to win races, which we do, but we’ve got to look at where we were this year. We need to look at being able to consistently fight for podiums and not just have these one-off races where we are randomly good.
“We want to be at a place where we can turn up to every road and street course and have an actual, valid shot at having the top five, top three finish, without lucking out on a strategy or without everyone in front of us crashing. If you can get a podium, another pole and top 15, top 12-ish in the championship, that’ll be a successful year for us.”
Moving to IndyCar was a dream come true for Foster: a professional racing driver at last. And after his first year at the top, all signs point to him being there very much for the long haul as he continues his pursuit of the ultimate dream of now winning at this highest level.
