Louis Foster guest column: My rookie Indianapolis 500
- DIVEBOMB Motorsport
- Jun 11
- 14 min read
In a DIVEBOMB driver-led guest column, IndyCar rookie and 2024 Indy NXT champion Louis Foster gives a raw account of his debut Indianapolis 500 experience…
The last couple of months have been non-stop. A blur. None of it has quite sunk in yet.
I had experienced the Indianapolis 500 before as a fan. But my first time as a driver was awesome. It has been a lot and it was up and down but I really enjoyed it all.
We had a great test back in April. I was P3 in qualifying running and it was a great first experience of the Speedway. My first impression was that it’s bloody quick. Honestly, it exceeded my expectations - and I very rarely get my expectations exceeded.
Even after the first run of my Rookie Orientation Programme - a great thing that IndyCar does to get us up to speed - never in my life have my forearms hurt so much from how hard I was gripping the steering wheel with how petrified I was. It’s not a physical oval but my arms were so sore from gripping the wheel in nervousness the first time out.
I had only done an hour or two of track running before the qualifying boost was given to us for a session on the second test of the test. It went from learning the track, into a night’s sleep, waking up at 9am and going straight into qualifying running. You could say me and the other rookies were thrown a little in the deep end.
It was scary and I did not need coffee that morning because the speeds woke me up quite well. You approach the corner and it feels like the craziest thing in the world, the speed at which the apex curb appears and disappears. But it was great fun and good insight having those qualifying runs before May.
My Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team were very confident going into the test. They had made a lot of progress and put a lot of hard work in over the off-season. It was hard for me to know how much to read into the test but Graham Rahal was very, very happy.
He was convinced that the performance said something. And Graham does speak his mind.
But we got to May for the pre-qualifying practice week and it was a difficult one. We had a strong car and were fast in the open test and we turned up in May and all that was gone.
Me and Graham particularly struggled and had the same feeling in the car. We tried some things on my No.45 car that eventually worked and got me to a place where I felt I could qualify and race. Unfortunately Graham did not really find that.
Practice at Indy is difficult. Something will work one day and the next day it will not. You are always playing catch-up. It’s about being mentally strong as it’s very easy to spiral when it’s not going right. It’s a drawn-out process and you need to be in the right mindset the entire time.
The biggest help was having a close relationship with my engineer. You cannot grab a setup from another driver, put it on and expect it to work because it will not. It’s your own crew that you have got to work closest with.
I did learn a lot from my experienced teammates though. Graham was helpful, especially to find our footing in the first few days. Takuma Sato… I learned he is a menace; I saw his steering trace and I’m like: “Dude, I don’t know how you do it.”
Takukma is insane. He is a super nice guy, super talented driver and super helpful and great to work with. But I did not learn much from his balance because I could not match that.
It’s a busy two weeks but you get into the rhythm of it and it flows pretty naturally. The drivers all live at the track for the month and it was nice to be able to go back to the RV and decompress and switch off somewhat from ‘work’.
I did not find the practice schedule super difficult. I’m not an early riser so it’s lovely not starting until midday. And on each day, there are six hours of practice but you don’t just pound laps for the sake of it; each lap has a reason, unlike other tracks we go to where you can just figure it out as a driver.
The small details are so important. Get it wrong once and you have tubbed your car.
I drew 26th in the qualifying running order, so quite a late draw. It was a wait but I’m not the kind of person to be sitting there freaking myself out. I’m not a super emotional guy so I don’t get big highs and lows of nerves.
Qualifying is for sure a different feeling. The car feels lighter on downforce and it’s a big jump to enter the corner about 10-to-12 miles an hour faster. It is scary.
I called my dad after my first qualifying run and said two things…
Firstly: “I don’t know how this is legal.”
Secondly: “The amount of respect that I have for some of the older drivers that have wives and kids is through the roof.”
Through the roof.
And I don’t need to expand on why that is. But it’s insane.
Anyway, we rock up for qualifying and you are rolling the cars one by one down pit lane, watching everyone else do their laps. You keep an eye on wind direction, looking at the flag and seeing if that’s changing every 10 minutes.
Colton Herta crashed quite early on. You watch that. I saw what happened. You see what he did and maybe something he did wrong to learn from. He was too loose and it was one of those things - not his fault. Usually, you just watch to make sure the driver is okay and purely out of interest more than anything.
Does that affect you? No, not really. You don’t see a crash and go: “Oh my god, that could happen to me.”
That’s not the process your brain goes through. People crash there all the time. It happens. It’s part of it. Just because someone else crashed doesn’t mean that I’m going to.
It’s like: “Oh, Colton crashed. Hope he’s okay. Right, my turn.”
It’s immediately back to your job. And you are not an IndyCar driver if you have not got some kind of screw loose in your head. You know you are risking your lives to compete but you cannot think about the speed or sit there and think: “What if I crash?”
As soon as you are thinking that, you are not going to be quick. If you crash, you crash. It’s part of the job. This is what I love to do so you don’t think about that side of it.
Back to my qualifying day, Colton crashes but you put that to the back of your head. You continue to roll slowly towards the front of the queue. Suddenly there are only four or five cars in front of you and you get in the car, ready to go.
You are always sitting behind another car and, all of a sudden, that car in front of you goes out for its run and you have a clean view of Turn 1. In your own head as you watch, you know each lap that they go by, you are another 30 seconds closer to going.
You are nervous when you get the call to go. You don’t know what the car is going to give you. You don’t know what to expect. And there is not a lot of time to get a feel for the car.
The out-lap is done in the slow map on the car. It doesn’t really accelerate past 210 mph, which is fast but you are driving around slowly compared to what we are supposed to do in qualifying. You flick the boost on on the exit of Turn 2 so you don’t really approach a corner at ‘proper speeds’ until Turn 3 or Turn 4 on your preparation lap.
You essentially get two corners on the warm-up lap to get a feel for the car and then you are onto the main straight to take the green flag for your four-lap run.
At that point, you are taking Turn 1 flat. If you are not flat on Lap 1, there is no chance you are going to be flat for the rest of the run.
I didn’t go into qualifying thinking about the threat of being in Last Chance Qualifying and fighting to make the field if I was to crash. I don’t think anyone goes into it thinking that. That’s not the way a driver should be thinking.
If a driver is thinking like that, then you are already kind of screwed.
I don’t think it ever gets comfortable. It’s always so on edge and so on the limit. You never get used to it. You haven’t done a single lap all day and just have to strap in, complete four laps and not lift because you don’t want to be fighting for the last row. You just have to throw any kind of mental barrier out, forget about everything else and focus on those 16 corners.
As each lap gets counted by you, all you are thinking about is the car balance and if you need to do anything with your tools. You really have to listen to what the car is telling you.
The last lap is the scary one as the tyres are wearing. This year especially, the car is at its limit with the weight of the hybrid system, then you are told to push the hybrid button. It isn’t a tonne of boost with the gradual, trickled deployment of hybrid power but it’s an amount.
So that’s scary as well. It’s like: “Ah, I know I need to deploy but I really don’t want to because that extra power might be the difference between the car making it around the corner and not.”
When you finally cross the line, you’ve done the four laps, it feels great. It’s very nerve-wracking for sure. But once it’s done, it’s a big relief.
I knew that we put a decent time on the board but we were struggling with raw car speed so it wasn’t amazing. We were trimmed more than the three other team cars but were not achieving the same top speeds and the car was still super planted.
That’s just the Speedway. Sometimes you get good cars; sometimes you don’t. It’s life.
I was lucky that my balance was very good in qualifying. I was completely pinned for four laps without any moments at all aside from one small understeer in Turn 1 that got quite close to the wall. But it wasn’t too bad.
I knew that we would be okay from our first run - and I was happy with it - but we still decided to run again. I knew that there was more pace in the car and knew there was more pace in me. The first run wouldn’t have knocked me down and was good enough but we wanted to be safe and thought we could get higher up the grid.
I was a bit less nervous and more chilled for that second run and it was a lot more raw and honestly a lot more enjoyable. We improved our time to the seventh row and I was fine with starting 20th. It was what it was with car speed and we are working on that for next year.
I feel like I could have done a better job but we were in the show.
There were only two more two-hour practice sessions but race week was busy. Milking Indy the cow - a tradition for rookies - was particularly enjoyable. It was relatively easy and I took to it quite well. I may have a career in milking cows if all else fails.
I took everything as it came through race week. And before you knew it, it was race day.
I slept fine - got a good seven or eight hours. The cannon woke me up at 6am. That was not so fun… tradition’s tradition but maybe the fireworks could be replaced by a light show instead so it’s quiet! But it was nice. I went back to bed after that and got up at like 7:30.
I wasn’t super nervous, to be honest. But the pre-race was pretty hectic.
I had my friends come over from Los Angeles and they were shooting film for me. When we left the RV on race morning, I told them: “Roll the film now, because when we leave, it’s going to be a stampede. Roll the cameras on me and leave them.”
They didn’t quite know what I meant.
“Just roll the cameras and you’ll see what I mean,” I said.
You feel like a rockstar. And there are fans from all around the world: Germany, Sweden, China, Japan… everywhere. It’s absolutely insane. It’s great to meet all those fans because without them there would not be an Indy 500. It wouldn’t be what it is.
That is what makes it so special. It’s a cool track. It’s a cool race. It’s dangerous and it’s fast and exhilarating for a driver. But none of that matters without the fans.
Before driver introductions, all of the drivers and their families end up getting literally cattled into this one little room of maybe five metres by 10 metres underneath the Pagoda. It was a bit uncomfortable how close it was with everyone. But driver intros were super cool.
You walk up onto the stage row by row, so I was between Kyle Larson and Callum Ilott. You only see about 5,000 of the 350,000-plus fans at the Speedway in front of you during driver intros, but the biggest realisation was when you are sitting on the grid, looking up and down.
There are seas of people.
There are so many people even on the grid that they have to put tape around the cars and barricade them off to make sure nobody stands on a front wing or sits on a tyre. At every other track, there is nothing like that. It’s crazy on the grid before the race.
The ceremonies then are super special. You are listening to the anthem and see the flyover and hear the cheers of the crowd. That’s pretty cool.
It definitely sinks in while you’re doing it. But at the same time, all I’m thinking about is Lap 1, Turn 1 and what’s going to happen, what the plan is and thinking through the race, thinking through the strategy. The event is designed to overstimulate a driver and to not allow it to do that to you is important for performance. That was the main thing for me.
Despite the rain delay that followed the ceremonies, we could not get out of the car once we were in the cockpit. It was an opportunity to decompress before the race but I also didn’t want to sit there and psych myself out thinking too much about the race at that point.
I ended up asking the team for my phone and was just sitting there playing Flow, a puzzle game, for like half-an-hour before my first Indy 500. I also thought it was a good idea to text my mum and update her on the situation as she was there at the race so I texted her to let her know there was a wait due to rain on the track.
That text didn’t get delivered because there were so many people on their phones at the track. I didn’t think much more of it. But on Lap 19 after the race finally gets going, a yellow comes out for rain. My mum looks down… BING! A text from Louis…
Lo and behold, the text goes through as the yellow has just come out for rain, saying: “Rain delay.”
“Is he texting me from the car?”
My mum genuinely thought for the rest of the race that I had my phone in the car with me. She told me that after the race and I burst out laughing.
Anyway, after about 45 minutes of delay, I handed the phone back (it was not in the car) and it was time to go. The pace laps were really cool. You get to wave at the fans and running three-by-three and having the Blackhawk helicopters was awesome.
Scott McLaughlin crashed so they were very stressful pace laps because I felt that suboptimal grip as well. I was never close to crashing but we were working it hard. The engine was really cold from sitting and waiting for so long and it was very difficult to manage that as well as tyre temperatures, brake temperatures and all of those things.
Our race was up and down. Obviously that speed of the car from qualifying continues on - just sometimes not getting big drafts and being able to overtake where other cars would be able to. It was frustrating but we still made some really, really good moves.
The balance of the car was phenomenal and race pace was generally good. We did a good job managing the race - fuel and tyres.
I felt pretty relaxed. Nothing really surprised me too much. It’s longer and there are more fans watching, but when you are in the car, you are racing in an IndyCar race against mostly the same guys that you race all year.
I knew that keeping the car out of the wall would be a good idea. My best decision in the race was when Larson crashed on a restart. I was right at the back with Colton and had been planning to send a bunch of moves around the outside. But as I’m getting ready to overtake Colton, I see five-wide into Turn one.
Okay… nope.
Me and Colton fully lift out of it and, two corners later, there are three cars in the wall.
“Thank you for not sending it in as well,” Colton told me after the race. “I was praying that you weren’t going to fire it in.”
That is what you need to do at Indy. You need to survive and making sure that you get home safe and the car gets home safe is paramount to getting a good result.
Had I not had two drive-through penalties, we probably would have finished around seventh after the post-race penalties - so around 10th on track. I was around Christian Rasmussen and had very similar pace to him during the race and he finished sixth.
We had issues with the brakes on our cars after changing the system for the race. I had no prior reference coming into the pits, making it very difficult to know where to brake and resulting in the two pit speed violations. For the first violation, I broke really early but entered the pit lane at like 100 mph when I should have been doing 60 mph.
That was unfortunate but we will fix that for next year.
The elephant in the room… I hated the situation that myself and Devlin DeFrancesco were in at the end of the race. I knew that the lead fight was going on behind me and I knew that was manipulating the race, more or less.
But I can’t do anything differently. We were not a lap down, so if the yellow came out, we were immediately back in the fight.
I got a lot of DMs off people chatting s**t. I get it from their perspective and I don’t blame them for being pissed off because it did hinder the end result of the race and made it less enjoyable. But it’s times like that where they have no understanding of how the rules work.
If Álex Palou was fast enough, he could have overtaken us. But he couldn’t because we were quick. That’s not a dig at Palou - it’s very hard to overtake the second car when you are third in line because I have such a big draft. He was never going to pass me unless I was ridiculously slow.
That’s just how it is. I wish we weren’t in that situation.
It’s times like that where I wish IndyCar could take a NASCAR stance and throw a random yellow because there is ‘debris’. They never will because that’s not how IndyCar operates and that’s fair enough.
But me and Dev aren’t going to get out of the way because we’re racing. We’ve got our own race to do. I don’t care who wins the Indy 500. I care about my race. If I win it, I care. But the people behind me, they’re people behind me. It doesn’t impact me.
People can be upset if they want to and they’re probably rightly so upset because it did rob them of a good finish. But it’s no one’s fault. It is what it is. It’s racing.
I wish the results were a bit better looking back, but if you told me I would qualify 20th and finish 12th before the race, I would have been very happy. We targeted the Indy 500 Rookie of the Year and were top rookie in the race but I was never going to win it after Robert Shwartzman got pole. All credit to him - he deserves it and PREMA did a really good job.
I am generally positive about how it went and I feel in a good place for next year. But the most important thing is that I had my family and friends there and got to experience this with them.
My dad especially has been with me every step of the way in my career. My helmet had a bunch of names of people who’ve helped me in my career too. That is something I’ll definitely look back on very fondly.
I don’t know how long I’m going to be in IndyCar for. I don’t know whether it’s going to be a long career or a short career. That’s up to the next few years to decide.
But being able to share my rookie Indy 500 with people close to me was most important.
