IndyCar Rookie Dennis Hauger Making Strong Impression Already
· Yahoo Sports
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On the eve of the start of the NTT IndyCar Series 2026 season, rookie Dennis Hauger knew he had a ride at Dale Coyne Racing, but he said he wasn’t sure at first which one of the team’s two cars was his.
Even until the 11th hour—mid-February with the St. Petersburg opener zooming up March 1 —he didn’t know that Romain Grosjean would return to the series and be his teammate.
“To be honest,” Hauger said Tuesday in an IndyCar press conference, “there was a bit of uncertainty about who’s on which car and stuff at times, as well. Once we got all that settled, it was nice to just get everything properly started.”
Hauger is behind the wheel of the No. 19 Ault Block Chain Honda (Grosjean has the No. 18 entry). But Hauger wasn’t behind too many competitors during the St. Petersburg weekend. He got “everything properly started,” all right.
Dennis Hauger at St. Petersburg.David Jensen - Getty ImagesHe qualified third and finished 10th in his IndyCar initiation. What captured everyone’s fancy at St. Petersburg was not only that he trailed just Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin and Andretti Global’s Marcus Ericsson on the starting grid (“four-hundredths off the pole”), but that he led a rejuvenated Dale Coyne Racing effort. Grosjean also made the Firestone Fast Six at No. 6 and completed the race in eighth place.
“It was a lot of new experiences this weekend,” the Norwegian racer said, “but to get the third place in qualifying was more than I could expect, and just to get a top six for both cars was also really, really good. It shows that we’re both up there and when things are working right, we can do something well.”
Even before the green flag dropped on IndyNXT champion Hauger’s first IndyCar race, he received kudos from McLaughlin.
“I was very impressed. This is IndyCar. It’s competitive. That’s what makes the sport so awesome… the fact that a lower-budget team, whatever you want to call it—I’m sure they don’t like me saying that—but at the end of the day, it’s well known… and they’re killing it,” the pole-winner said. “That was a great effort. I was certainly surprised to see both of them in the Fast Six, but they’ve made some acquisitions over the off-season and got a couple guys that have been pretty deeply entrenched into the sport.”
Hauger’s race day wasn’t perfect, but more than a couple of experienced drivers in the field last Sunday would have loved to score a top-10 finish. He said, “I think that the race itself for sure could have done a few things better, and if a few things went with a better direction, we could have gotten a bit more up. Those are things you have to expect on your first race weekend, so I will just take that as an experience and try to improve on it. A good start. I’m not complaining.
“I’ve been preparing for so long for this weekend and haven’t been sleeping too well in the last few weeks because I’ve been just so keen to get going,” Hauger said. “It was a nice feeling—nothing that I was expecting. It’s not always going to be like that, for sure, but it was nice to start the season off like that.”
He’ll try to duplicate or improve his performance this weekend on Phoenix Raceway’s dogleg mile oval at the Good Ranchers 250.
“All the ovals are a bit different,” the Indy NXT conquerer said about his February 17-18 practice time at Phoenix. “Going into an IndyCar on an oval was quite different—a bit of a heavier car, more power, more downforce, just a different way of pushing it. But I got up to speed pretty quickly. I felt like I got comfortable quickly, and we got to work on the car, work on the things we needed to. We got through some race runs early in the afternoon, as well. I’m happy about the days we had.
Michael L. Levitt - Getty ImagesAs Hauger spoke to details, he was starting to sound like four-time champion Alex Palou, which spells bad news for his rivals.
He said that during St. Petersburg qualifying, “as the session went on, we just got more and more comfortable. I got more and more confident in the car, and we just managed to get a bit more out of it every time we got on track, and that made the difference.
“The series is so tight—there’s hundredths of seconds between the whole field, and those small things can really make the difference.”
The other 24 drivers had better look out, because Hauger says he’s comfortable in his car, like he was in Indy NXT, when he won for of the first five races en route to the title.
“It’s just such a different game when you get in IndyCar, for me a lot more stuff to adapt to,” he said. “I know there’s going to be good weekends and bad weekends, but I think we are feeling pretty natural with it, and that’s a good feeling that I felt in Indy NXT. I’m kind of having the same mindset as last year. I don’t think too much about the rookie stuff. I just want to do the best job I can do and just maximize the performance at the time, and if that’s a P1, it’s a P1; if it’s a P10, it’s a P10.”
Qualifying for Saturday’s Good Ranchers 250 will come Friday. Saturday’s IndyCar race will precede the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series’s GOVX 200.