Indianapolis Motor Speedway Aerial August 2018. Image credit: Kimaz2412/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Add up the IndyCar starts in AJ Foyt Racing’s 2027 garage and you get 18. Every one of them belongs to Dennis Hauger. The other driver, Josh Pierson, announced Tuesday for the No. 4 Chevrolet on a multiyear deal, has none.
Larry Foyt’s line in the announcement was that the team is excited to be part of Pierson’s “continued development.” Note the noun. Not contending, not winning. Development. It is an honest word, and it tells you what this is: a bet on a 20-year-old’s ceiling, made by a team that also just signed a Rookie of the Year who spent 2026 22nd in the points with 228 of them and no top-fives.
The standings say Foyt looked past its own driver
Pierson finished 2026 eleventh in INDY NXT with 364 points for Andretti Global. His first career win arrived in his 53rd start at Laguna Seca on Sept. 5: pole, all 35 laps led, 2.6294 seconds clear of Nikita Johnson, who went on to take the title. A week earlier he had thrown away the lead at Milwaukee after taking his first pole there.
Now look one column over. Sixth in that same championship was Alessandro de Tullio, 442 points, in an A.J. Foyt Enterprises car. That is 78 points clear of the driver Foyt just hired, and Pierson’s own Andretti teammates, Max Taylor and Lochie Hughes, finished fourth and fifth. Backfire has already looked at why Andretti’s Indy NXT program matters more for its IndyCar access than for its lap times; the Pierson signing is a reminder of how much of the ladder runs through that building.
None of this says de Tullio was owed the seat. NXT points are a blunt instrument, and INDYCAR.com’s late-September Inside Line had Pierson as the favorite for the Foyt ride pending an evaluation test. The point is narrower: Foyt did not hire off the table. It hired off something else.
What the team may actually be buying
My read is that it is buying a different kind of résumé. Pierson went from karts and junior formula cars to sports cars before returning to open wheel, with wins and podiums in the FIA World Endurance Championship, Asian Le Mans Series and IMSA. At 16 he became the youngest driver the 24 Hours of Le Mans had seen, in an LMP2 car for United Autosports. Sports-car drivers spend years doing a job single-seater juniors often skip: handing clean, usable feedback to engineers while managing traffic and a shared car.
That is a plausible reason to back him over a table position. It is also an expensive theory to test, because INDY NXT is a spec series. The car does little to hide the driver, so 11th is a fair description of 2026, not just a bad year for the equipment. If Foyt is right, the gap between his results and his speed has to close in the first season. If not, the team will have learned something costly in public. If you want the ladder explained, here is how Indy NXT prepares drivers for IndyCar and where it stops doing so.
The real exposure is in the engineering office
Two cars, 18 combined starts. When a driver reports that the car is pushing, an engineer has to decide whether the car is wrong or the driver is still learning the tires. With this lineup, the reference data to settle that argument does not exist in the building yet. When Foyt signed Hauger, the team said it would invest in its people, its technical side and its commercial program. Now it has to deliver the middle one on a deadline.
Money sits behind that. The release says only that a new sponsor for the No. 4 will be announced later. Testing days are the cheapest way to turn inexperience into data, and they are not free.
What to watch
Pierson’s debut comes at St. Petersburg on March 7, 2027, the first of three straight race weekends in a car that will run the entire 2027 season. The Chevrolet engine under it is also part of a bigger story: Chevy is already committing customers to a 2028 engine nobody has raced yet. And 2027 is the 50th anniversary of A.J. Foyt’s fourth Indianapolis 500 win in 1977, so expect the Indy month to come with a rookie and a lot of history in the same garage.
The scoreboard I would use is not wins. It is whether the No. 4 and No. 14 look like cars sharing information by the time they reach Indianapolis in May.
Lead image: Indianapolis Motor Speedway aerial, August 2018. Image credit: Kimaz2412/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
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