Juncos Hollinger Racing announces Callum Ilott will be driver No. 77 full-time in 2022

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Entering his IndyCar team’s three-race kickstart before plans of running full-time in 2022, Ricardo Juncos thought he had lined up two ex-Formula 1 drivers, as well as the most recent Formula 2 runner-up to man the No. 77 Chevy. Likely from that pool, the co-owner of Juncos Hollinger Racing would select the driver who would try to rebuild what Juncos had tracking to become a full-time program two years ago.

And when those two ex-F1 drivers backed out of one-race gigs at the last minute, the young gun was happy to fill their roles. Now, still just two-thirds of the way through his part-time IndyCar gig this fall, Callum Ilott has decided IndyCar is a place where the deserving prospective F1 driver would like to stay a while – or at least a year, for that matter.

On Friday, JHR announced that Ilott would drive the No. 77 full-time in 2022 and take on the massive challenge of serving as the focal point of a team that ran 12 of the 17 IndyCar races in 2018, fought onto the 2019 Indy 500 grid, but then disappeared from the top levels of the sport during the pandemic and only recently reemerged. With so much of the human capital Juncos had acquired through the middle of 2019 now either gone completely or working for his Indy Lights and Indy Pro 2000 teams, Juncos knows this is going to be far more than just a one-year rebuild.

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The challenge then, with such a young driver who this year served as Ferrari F1’s test driver and Alfa Romeo’s reserve driver and finished 2nd in F2 in 2020 will be keeping hold of him during what will very likely be a rough first full season back on the IndyCar grid.

Team co-owner Brad Hollinger told IndyStar Friday that the team’s deal with Ilott is just for one season, “but it’s something we can build upon.”

“It’s not something beyond (one year), but it’s really good,” he said. “We’re really happy about it.”

Back in Portland ahead of his first IndyCar race, Ilott still sounded very uncertain about what he wanted his next year in racing to look like. By that point, nearly all the 2022 F1 rides had been locked up and formally announced, and for the second consecutive offseason, he’d come away without an offer to pursue the dream he wanted most. Last year, the drivers who finished 1st (Mick Schumacher), 3rd (Yuki Tsunoda) and 5th (Nikita Mazepin) got F1 nods over him. Heading into next year, only one open seat still remains, and Ilott said weeks ago be believed his name was no longer in the running.

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At 22, Ilott doesn’t necessarily feel as if joining IndyCar full-time takes his name out of the running for a future F1 gig. In fact, he said, it would likely help to be racing a single-seater car somewhere than nowhere at all. And at the moment, like current F2 driver Christian Lundgaard, who came over to drive one race for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing earlier this year, landing an F1 seat is the ultimate goal.

But until that day comes, now that he knows where he’ll be for the next year, Ilott says he’s dedicated to giving JHR his full attention. In all likelihood, officials of the Ferrari Driver Academy, of which he is part of, will be managing his future prospects in F1, so Ilott doesn’t have to be constantly looking over his shoulder.

“I’m going to give this my sole focus and almost get myself out of the European side of things,” he said. “Not because it’s never going to happen, but because it’s good to try something new and get a change of scenery and get the best out of it.

“If I’m really wanted here, I prefer that to fighting for my life to get something where I’m not really wanted.”

The “wanted” part is certainly not in question. Both Juncos and Hollinger have high praise for the young British driver who has finished 25th and 22nd in his two IndyCar starts. Perhaps his biggest achievement to date in IndyCar was landing 19th in qualifying at Portland out of 27 cars, having had just one test day before that Saturday’s combined practice and qualifying effort, without much time in between to digest everything.

And Juncos said he knows that doesn’t even tell the full story of what Ilott has in the tank. He knows JHR’s lack of depth, experience and continuity across the board outside the ownership side is presently and will continue to hold Ilott’s talent back until Juncos can get his philosophical model for the team in-place going forward. The hope, he and Hollinger have said, is to start to see signs of significant improvement team-wide by the end of next year, in part so that they might hope to retain Ilott if a year from now he continues to turn into the driver they’ve forecasted.

“I think we need to start over, maybe with people that don’t even have (IndyCar) experience and have them learn,” Juncos told IndyStar at Laguna Seca. “Eventually as we go, I’ll be less hands-on, but until the system is the way I want it, I need to spend more time and try and visualize what I want for next year to make the system the way I want it. 2023 realistically should be much more proper.”

As green as so much of the team will be rolling into the season-opener Feb. 27 next winter on the streets of St. Pete, Ilott said even before this deal was announced that he wouldn’t mind bringing his inexperience in IndyCar to a program where team-wide that’s a fairly common theme. As long as he can sense progress, it might in fact help persuade him to stay longer-term.

“When you’re in this position, it gives you the opportunity and hopefully the freedom to control some things, especially if you’re trusted to make those decisions,” Ilott told IndyStar at Portland. “From my side, it would be nice to build an environment around me and have some control over everything. That can be good or bad, but from my side, you try and make the best package you can for yourself, and I think that’s when you get the best results.”

Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.