Indy 500 presents a big opportunity for HMD

At the onset of April, Henry Malukas and his HMD Motorsports team president Mike Maurini didn’t know they’d be running a car at the Indianapolis 500 on behalf of AJ Foyt Racing, Team Penske, Penske Entertainment, and Chevrolet.

But that’d precisely where they find themselves on approach to May as the Indy NXT champions have been activated by Penske Entertainment to complete the Indy 500 field with a car for Katherine Legge (pictured) supplied by Foyt and run under the Foyt/HMD banner with technical support from Team Penske.

It’s a powerful endorsement of HMD by Penske and all of the partners involved as Foyt doesn’t have an excess of staff to take on the running of a third car on short notice, and by Team Penske, which wasn’t interested in letting its chassis setups and dampers and car build techniques into the hands of a patchwork crew.

Enter HMD, owned by the father of Team Penske driver David Malukas, with championship-winning pedigree in NXT and whose team president also serves as Malukas’s spotter at Team Penske.

“It just started like anything does in motorsports as more of a conversation than anything else,” Maurini told RACER on Monday, the day before he and the HMD team was set to run Legge at the Indy Open Test. “It was, ‘Hey, there's an opportunity and Katherine wants to run, and there's funding, and there's a sponsor, and there's a car behind the program. There's just no people. So we came together pretty quickly. We've been talking about it for maybe three weeks.

“But actually, at our Mid-Ohio NXT test last week, I left a day early to fly to Long Beach on Wednesday, and was on the phone with Henry (Malukas) and Larry [Foyt], and that was when the decision was made to move forward. Then throughout the Long Beach weekend, it was just a lot of communication with Larry, and Larry had communication with other people that needed to sign off on everything.

“So when it was all said and done, it's going to be three HMD Motorsports engineers. And then this past week, we've had two or three people at the Foyt shop prepping wings and doing all that kind of stuff. I've had a couple people help build the car. So essentially, it's been 10 to 12 people that have been all hands on deck.”

IndyCar veteran Mike Reggio will be Legge’s race engineer and all of his HMD NXT teammates will pull double duty running their NXT cars during the upcoming Indy GP and then the select Foyt/HMD No. 11 Chevy crew members will shift into Indy 500 mode.

“Our people will switch back and forth between the Indy test and the NXT racing and then the 500 program,” Maurini added. “And it's a good thing, because I'm a strong believer that if we want to be in IndyCar, we need to show we can do it well. It was difficult to get into IndyCar when we tried, but you should still show that you want to do it, which is why I pushed pretty hard for this. There was a couple of people that pushed pretty hard to assemble everything, I don't think either program could have done it without the other program.”

Maurini will rely on Luke Varley to manage the impromptu Indy 500 program and will run the effort like any other event where HMD participates as an entrant.

“We brought in all of our hospitality walls and everything for the garage, the flooring, the scale pads, golf cart, tugger, personnel, you know, all the WiFi stuff and everything like we were doing it ourselves because we're in a completely separate garage area than AJ Foyt Racing,” Maurini said.

“So Luke, who was David [Malukas’s] driver coach for multiple years, he was not coaching with him this year, so he's going to be like the team manager just for the 11 car. So he'll go to all the team manager meetings, where Craig Brooks, the team manager from Foyt, will oversee all three of the of the entries.

“And then Jody, who's David's personal assistant, will also help. She's here now wearing an HMD Chevy shirt, and she's helping with all the logistics behind the scenes. But then when David gets here, she'll change shirts just like me and go back and forth on both.”