After a brief hiatus following the traditionally hectic month of May at Indianapolis, all three levels of the Road to Indy Presented by Cooper Tires open-wheel development ladder will return to action this weekend at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wis.
Indy Lights Presented by Cooper Tires, the Indy Pro 2000 Championship Presented by Cooper Tires and the Cooper Tires USF2000 Championship will all feature a pair of races held in support of the NTT IndyCar Series at the super-fast and challenging 4.014-mile road course.
Cape vs. Pabst Rivalry Continues in USF2000
Drivers representing six different teams have stood on the podium in the first five races of the Cooper Tires USF2000 season, but perennial front-runners Cape Motorsports and Pabst Racing remain at the top of the pile.
Florida-based Cape Motorsports, owned by expatriate English brothers Dominic and Nicholas Cape, have amassed an astonishing record in recent years, winning each of the last eight drivers’ championships. But they have been pushed virtually every inch of the way by Augie Pabst’s eponymous Oconomowoc, Wis.-based organization, especially at Road America.
Rinus VeeKay claimed a memorable double victory for the home team in 2017, but Pabst will be hoping for more than last year, when Rasmus Lindh took a pair of poles before both race wins were scooped by the Capes’ Kyle Kirkwood.
This weekend the two teams will have a total of seven cars on the grid. Braden Eves, from New Albany, Ohio, is currently a clear leader in the championship points table for Cape Motorsports, having swept the first four races of the season, but Pabst’s Hunter McElrea, from Gold Coast, Australia, has run him close with four consecutive top-three finishes to begin his career in North America. Darren Keane (Cape), from Boca Raton, Fla., and Colin Kaminsky (Pabst), from Homer Glen, Ill., are separated by just a solitary point in third and fourth.
The Capes will field a third Tatuus USF-17 for 14-year-old Reece Gold, last year’s Lucas Oil Race Series champion who qualified an impressive third on the oval at Lucas Oil Raceway, while Pabst’s lineup will also comprise Brazilian Bruna Tomaselli, the only female in the field, and former F1600 race winner Yuven Sundaramoorthy, who lives in upstate New York but was born in Oconomowoc, Wis.
Three other teams have local connections. Legacy Autosport’s Alex Baron, who holds dual French and British citizenship – and was the only driver to beat Kirkwood last year – is now based in nearby Port Washington, Wis., while both Newman Wachs Racing and BN Racing are from the Chicago area.
The team founded by the late actor Paul Newman and fellow former racer Eddie Wachs will field two cars for Australian Cameron Shields, who scored an impressive first victory both for himself and the team last month at Lucas Oil Raceway, and 14-year-old Californian Nolan Siegel. BN will enter Venezuelan Anthony Famularo and newly recruited Englishman Matt Round-Garrido. The pair will be looking to at least replicate the pole position and pair of podium finishes claimed by BN over the past two seasons.
A strong field also will include Danish former karting star Christian Rasmussen (Jay Howard Driver Development); Eduardo Barrichello (Miller-Vinatieri Motorsports), whose father Rubens scored 11 Grand Prix victories during a stellar 19-year career in F1; and the DEForce pair of Manuel Sulaiman, from Puebla, Mexico, who has two podium finishes to his credit, and 14-year-old Jak Crawford, from Houston, Texas, who burst onto the scene recently by claiming two fourth-place results in his first three races.
The USF2000 schedule virtually mirrors that of Indy Pro 2000 with practice and qualifying on Friday and Saturday and a pair of races at 12:00 p.m. CDT on Saturday and 8:00 a.m. on Sunday.
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