Juncos Racing team owner Ricardo Juncos admits that he is open to fielding multiple drivers in 2018, but says every effort will be made to expand Kyle Kaiser’s program before he considers alternate plans.

The team announced last month that newly-crowned Indy Lights champion Kaiser will graduate to IndyCar in tandem with Juncos next year, initially for four races including the Indy GP and Indianapolis 500. Juncos says that his priority is to add as many extra races for the 21-year-old Californian as he can.

“For me, it’s about working with Kyle and the team,” the Argentinian told RACER. “That’s what we want to do, and he and the team deserve that. So that means we will work to find more sponsors to run him for more races than the four. If we find another sponsor, maybe that’s one [more] race. We find another, maybe that’s one or two or three more. Still, our goal is to do the full season with Kyle, and you never know in this country what can happen because it could be more races that we do [together].”

The only scenario where Juncos could envision sharing Kaiser’s car with other drivers is if the team is unable to run more than the four races made possible by the $1 million check the 21-year-old earned from Mazda for winning the Lights title.

“We know we’ll do the Indy 500 and Indy GP, and the other two, we don’t know which ones, yet,” Juncos continued. “We need to do as many races as possible to grow the team, and the more we run, the more we can get what I want on the performance side. Any sponsorship we find to do more races will go with Kyle, but if we cannot find more, and another driver comes with money who wants to drive, then this is something we will consider.”

Juncos ordered new UAK18 kits to update the DW12s he purchased from KV Racing, and plans on outfitting the fleet as soon as the bodywork arrives from Dallara.

“We did this three months ago when we decided not to race at Sonoma, and I have everything ready to send out – the tubs and the floors – for updating so we can start testing as soon as possible in January,” he said. “We were the first team to notify IndyCar we were ready, and now we wait to hear when it’s our turn to get everything and update at least one car for testing right away.”