Hildebrand at another crossroads

The business of motor racing can be cold, as the 29-year-old will attest. In a sport where numbers matter, holding 15th place in the IndyCar standings entering the last race of the year – one spot behind Rookie of the Year Ed Jones – has certainly kept the Northern Californian on the hot seat in recent weeks.

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Following Josef Newgarden's run to fourth in last year's championship driving the same car, the bar was set impossibly high for the No. 21 entry, especially with a new driver and new race engineer entering the equation for 2017. Even so, both sides would agree that wherever the post-Newgarden bar was set, it wasn't reached on a consistent basis.

"I think what Josef achieved with the team showed its potential, but there was a lot of change coming into this season," Hildebrand told RACER. "He left. His engineer left, and there was a lot of structural change. We did not expect to follow that up one season later, knew we'd have a significant learning curve, compared to if he and Jeremy [Milless] had stayed. I didn't think a top five [in the championship] was expected, but we also didn't expect to be fighting as hard as we were just to be showing progress."

Hildebrand's podiums at Phoenix and Iowa continue to stand as the best the team has achieved this season for any of the ECR drivers, but it wasn't enough to continue the relationship.

"I don't think any of us expected to be as good as Josef was throughout this year, but we were proud to have outqualified and outfinished him at the handful of ovals we did through the halfway point of the season," he said of championship leader Newgarden, who joined Team Penske in the offseason.

"But that wasn't the level of expectation that was set. That said, from a results perspective, we had a string of races where we weren't producing quickly enough, figuring things out quickly enough, to get results. The amount of time we spent trying new things and trying to find the right direction, as a driver and as an engineering group, to be more than on the bubble between 10th and 15th, didn't happen the way we wanted.

"I've also never had a season where as many things, in races, fell the wrong way. We needed to be better, as a unit, to produce better results. It just hasn't been a year, overall, where that came together."

With Pigot making waves in the sister No. 20 Chevy and showing immense upside at 23 years of age, Hildebrand could see the writing on the wall.

"This happening was not something that was super complicated to deduce," he said. "This week has not caught me off-guard. I've been around long enough to know how these things tend to play out."

So, where does he go after the final lap of the GoPro Grand Prix of Sonoma is complete? And is he capable of authoring a third act in IndyCar with another team?

It's fair to say that on a weekend where he's the only local driver at the event – born and raised 15 minutes from the site of IndyCar's season finale – answering questions about his future is the last thing Hildebrand wanted to do.

"In terms of going into next year, I'm usually pretty good at having options on where I'm going and what I'm doing," he said. "It's hard to say how things will shake out, but I haven't been waking up making 10 phone calls to teams each morning because I have a race this weekend that's important.

"It probably sounds cavalier, but I'm just not concerned about what happens after Sonoma because I still have a job to do for my teams and my sponsors. There's a lot of things out there that I want to pursue. After this weekend, I'll turn the page and start making those calls."