Karting and sportscar ace Hanley to Indycar
Multiple karting champion and sportscar regular Ben Hanley will contest a partial season in Indycar this year, including the Indianapolis 500, after the Dragonspeed team with which he contests the FIA World Endurance Championship announced its expansion to the US open-wheel series in December.
The 33-year-old Mancunian hasn’t raced a single-seater since 2010 in the football-based Superleague Formula championship, but has kept his hand in conducting tyre development work with Formula 2 and GP3 in recent seasons.
Both driver and the Dragonspeed team, run by former British Formula 3 racer Elton Julian, will be new to Indycar and oval racing, but Hanley told Motorsport News that his familiarity with the team and extensive test mileage in single-seaters will help shorten the learning curve.
“I’ve done a lot of mileage in the background and the experience that you gain when you’re doing tyre testing and car development is massive,” he said.
“We all know each other and we all know each other’s roles, so when we get to that first test, we’ll just focus on the car and getting to familiarise ourselves with the car as opposed to forging new relations on the engineering side, so it’s a big positive to have that continuation.”
The first test gets underway at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas next month.