Santino Ferrucci Loses His Full Time Ride After Four Years at A.J. Foyt Racing

George Howson|October 16, 2026|
  • Santino Ferrucci will not return to A.J. Foyt Racing’s full-time No. 14 Chevrolet in 2027, closing out a four-year run that started in 2023.
  • Rookie Dennis Hauger, the 2021 Formula 3 champion, takes the seat after a 2026 season at Dale Coyne Racing that produced two top-10 finishes and a career-best eighth place.
  • Ferrucci told RACER he is working on a part-time contract with Foyt rather than leaving IndyCar outright.

The Full-Time Ride Just Became a Memory

“I’m working on a contract with Foyt currently,” Santino Ferrucci told RACER last month, and that sentence says more than it looks like at first glance for a driver who spent four years rebuilding his career around this team. He signed with A.J. Foyt Racing in 2023 to get back into IndyCar full time, having last held a regular ride in 2020. Now he is negotiating his way back into the sport from a smaller seat at the same team, as a part-timer instead of the full-time driver of the No. 14 Chevrolet.

Foyt confirmed the switch itself: Dennis Hauger steps into the full-time seat for 2027. For Ferrucci, it closes a chapter that opened with real promise and ended in a slow fade nobody at the team is pretending didn’t happen.

A Rookie Year That Looked Like the Start of Something

In 2023, his first season back with Foyt, Ferrucci finished third at the Indianapolis 500, still the best result of his career in the race that defines American open-wheel racing. A year later he put together the strongest full season of his IndyCar life: ninth in the final standings, with 11 top-10 finishes across 17 races. Foyt signed him again for 2025, a vote of confidence from a team that had watched a part-time afterthought turn into a legitimate contender in the span of two seasons. Nobody inside that deal expected it to be his last.

Then the Results Stopped Climbing

2025 opened with a run that suggested Ferrucci was still on the way up: four straight top-five finishes, a career-best second place on the Detroit street course, and a podium at Road America. He did not finish better than eighth for the rest of that season. 2026 was worse: a 17th-place finish in the final standings, well outside the position he had built for himself two years earlier. Line up the numbers and the shape is unmistakable: ninth, then a hot streak that cooled fast, then seventeenth. A career can slide a long way in two short seasons, and this one did.

Foyt Talks About “Moving Forward” Without Him

Team president Larry Foyt described the change as part of a bigger plan rather than a verdict on one driver. “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about where we want this team to go,” he said. “We’re investing in our people, our technical side and our commercial program,” he added, pointing to the goal of continuing “to move forward.” He credited the team’s sponsors by name: “We’re fortunate to have partners like Hendricks Holding Company and Homes For Our Troops. They’ve given us the opportunity to keep building, and now it’s our job to make the most of it.”

Set those lines next to Ferrucci’s exit and “moving forward” takes on a second meaning. For the team, progress means swapping out the driver who helped pull it back into relevance for one who hasn’t raced a single lap in the car yet. That’s the blunt math of a racing team: loyalty to a name only lasts as long as the lap times hold up, and Ferrucci’s stopped holding up right around the time Hauger’s resume started looking interesting.

A Clean Slate Named Dennis Hauger

Hauger arrives with a thin IndyCar resume and a specific selling point. His 2026 rookie season came at Dale Coyne Racing, in a technical alliance with Andretti Global, where he finished 22nd in points but logged two top-10 finishes, including a career-best eighth at the Indianapolis road course. He had been pushing for Marcus Ericsson’s seat at Andretti this offseason, a bet that collapsed when Ericsson’s strong 2026 earned him an extension instead. Losing that seat put Hauger back on the open market right as Foyt needed a replacement, and the timing broke his way in a manner it never quite did for Ferrucci.

Hauger has already started talking about the car he is inheriting in terms bigger than lap times. “I’ve been learning more about Homes For Our Troops and what the No. 14 HFOT.org car represents,” he said. “It’s obviously much bigger than racing, and I’m looking forward to meeting General Cody, Diane and Konya.” He also pointed to the symbolism of his first race in the car: “To have my first event with the team connected to Homes For Our Troops and supporting the Medal of Honor Foundation.” Every new hire says something like that about a sponsor on day one. Here it also marks a real handoff: the No. 14 car Ferrucci spent four years driving now carries a cause attached to it that he will not be the one carrying full time.

The Rest of the Paddock Isn’t Standing Still Either

Ferrucci’s demotion lands in a 2027 driver market that is unusually busy. Scott Dixon is leaving Chip Ganassi Racing for Arrow McLaren to team back up with Pato O’Ward. Christian Lundgaard is taking over Dixon’s old No. 9 Ganassi car, a seat that carried one of the sport’s biggest names for two decades. Both Juncos Hollinger Racing seats remain unsettled, though Rinus VeeKay is expected to stay put. Foyt’s other full-time entry, the No. 4 Chevrolet that rookie Caio Collet drove in 2026, is also open, with Indy NXT driver Josh Pierson linked to it pending new series licensing rules. The seat Hauger vacated at Dale Coyne Racing has reportedly drawn interest from Indy NXT champion Nikita Johnson, and Romain Grosjean, who raced there in 2026, is said to be welcome back if he wants it. Every name on that list is chasing the same handful of full-time rides Ferrucci just lost one of, and none of them is waiting around for him to sort out his next move.

Foyt’s own history makes the moment sting a little more. A.J. Foyt built this team around his own name and four Indy 500 wins, and it has rarely been a destination for drivers at the top of the market. It has, instead, been the kind of program where a driver fights to prove a seat can be more than a last chance, which is exactly what Ferrucci did in 2023 and 2024. Losing that seat now, after he had finally made it look like a real ride instead of a reclamation project, is a different kind of blow than losing a seat he never earned in the first place.

What’s Left for Ferrucci

Ferrucci isn’t walking away from the sport. He told RACER he wants a part-time program with Foyt, the kind of role that keeps a driver’s name on the entry list for marquee races like the Indy 500 without the grind of a full 17-race schedule. Other veterans have taken that same path once their full-time window closed, trading a regular ride for relective starts and an informal mentor’s role around a younger teammate, and it beats walking off the grid entirely. It is still a step down for a driver who spent three seasons climbing toward the peak he hit in 2024 and then watched slip away across 2025 and 2026.

The 2027 season opens March 7 at the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg. Ferrucci’s name, if it appears on an entry list at all, will likely show up only a handful of times. Hauger gets the full 17-race schedule and, with it, the chance to prove the seat belongs to him now. The No. 14 car stays in the Foyt stable. The driver who spent four years building it back into a serious program does not, and the part-time deal he says he is chasing is the clearest sign yet of how much that cost him.

Sources:

Avatar photo

George Howson

Engineer, Father, Travel addict, Writer, but most of all, a motorsport nut who is never afraid to ask the questions most would back out of and I always tell it like it is.

Leave a Comment