How Foster proved a point and fulfilled a lifelong dream in 2024

Winning the Indy NXT championship and getting an IndyCar seat for 2025 meant this has been a great year for me. To win the title in such a dominant fashion was the icing on the cake. It showed how much effort the team at Andretti and I put in over the last two years. Our rivals at HMD had been quite dominant in recent Indy NXT history, so I’m happy to have turned it around.

The performance has given me the opening to go and drive in IndyCar next year with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. I had discussions with Bobby Rahal throughout the year, but it came together once the season was finished. I’m over the moon to be with the team, as they’re a great organisation. I’ve spent quite a lot of time getting to know everyone because there are a lot of new faces, and it’s a team that I hope to be able to push forward with. It’s about turning it around and I hope to have a long future where we can be successful.

It was awesome when I announced the drive because it’s been a lifelong dream to call myself an IndyCar driver and to give myself the label of being a professional racing driver. I thank Bobby, Mike Lanigan, David Letterman and the entire team for their belief in me. The honeymoon period has worn off now, and all I’m focused on, and all I want, is to do well. It’s one thing to be in IndyCar, but it’s another thing to stay in IndyCar and be successful. My mindset from day one was, ‘How do we get ready for the upcoming season, so that we hit the ground and surprise people?’ That’s my target. I want to be a pleasant surprise on the grid and have a big impact.

We have some winter testing planned, and the early sessions are going to be about teaching me things like in-laps, out-laps, pitstops, fuel saving, the hybrid system and all the nitty-gritty growing pains stuff that I need to learn. The team and I can then have a good conversation about targets for next year and understand which direction we want to go with the car.

I did some pitstop practice, to get my eye in and be around the team more because it’s about cohesion. There are so many talented individuals in every IndyCar team nowadays because they’re really world-class people. I think the difference is not in the people you’ve got, but how you make everyone work together. That’s what we’re focusing on.

This year the trip to Barber Motorsports Park was a highlight for me. I came from the back, due to issues that meant I couldn’t qualify, and finished fifth. That one was quite a good weekend for me personally – I learned a lot and it allowed me to realise that, even when we have bad weekends in this championship, we had the pace to be up the front. That instilled a lot of confidence in me to go ahead and beat them all for the rest of the year.

When you’re fighting for championships, you don’t start near the back. So, when you do, it’s almost a bit of fun, really, because you get to properly go racing again. Often in championships you spend your life near the front, and you never really get to race anyone. The weekend where we dominated at Laguna Seca was good as well, and then the weekend at Milwaukee where we won the championship. There are a lot of highlights throughout the year, which was really nice.

The end goal was the championship and once we’d accomplished that, going into the final race in Nashville, there was nothing to lose at all. Although I may have been the Indy NXT champion, that didn’t guarantee a seat in IndyCar, so I wanted to really put a stamp on the season and go out with a win, just to clarify my position in the minds of any bosses out there that I am the driver to lead their team.

Victories on the ovals made the difference between winning by a close margin and winning by the margin we did, and it proves that I can race and win on every track: road courses, street courses and ovals

Oval racing still feels very fresh to me, but after this year I feel more comfortable in the car and understand what I need to do as a driver. It meant a lot to do well this year, having only won one oval race in my career out of four coming in, but now I’ve had eight oval races, and I’ve won five of them. I think there was a lot of pressure on my competition where people tipped them to be better on ovals than I would be, and I really wanted to make sure that was stamped out immediately.

Those victories on the ovals made the difference between winning by a close margin and winning by the margin we did, and it proves that I can race and win on every track: road courses, street courses and ovals. I’ve got the three disciplines down, so there would be no question marks for any IndyCar team bosses whether I could perform.

Having the support from Andy Meyrick and the guys back home at Silverstone and the British Racing Drivers’ Club is great. I would love to be able to come back more, especially for the Grand Prix, but next year is going to be difficult. I’d like to support the BRDC a bit more, like I used to, but it’s nice to race in a foreign country, flying the flag for the Club and the SuperStars. Next year it might only be myself and Callum Ilott as Brits in IndyCar, but it’s great to be a part of the UK’s top Elite Athlete programmes.

What can Foster produce in his rookie IndyCar campaign?

Photo by: Penske Entertainment