Alessandro de Tullio, who moves from AJ Foyt Racing to Chip Ganassi Racing for 2027. Photo: INDYCAR.com
Chip Ganassi Racing owns the NTT INDYCAR SERIES record with 18 championships, six of the past seven courtesy of Scott Dixon and Alex Palou. In INDY NXT, the same team has won exactly nothing. Its own announcement says it plainly: more than 275 victories across all forms of motorsports, none in the ladder series.
That is the context for this week’s signing of Alessandro de Tullio, the 20-year-old Argentine who will drive the No. 10 AstroPay entry in 2027. Good hire. It comes with one catch: eight poles, two wins.
Eight poles, two wins: that gap is the job
De Tullio took eight poles in 17 races as a rookie at AJ Foyt Racing, one shy of the INDY NXT single-season record and tied for second most in series history. He also won at Barber Motorsports Park and Portland, finished sixth in the championship and led 99 laps, most among rookies. Eight poles from 17 starts is 47 percent. Two wins from 17 is 12 percent. Qualifying speed is the scarce thing, and he already has it. Turning it into Sunday results is the part still unfinished.
Portland shows the version Ganassi wants to see more often. He started from pole, led all 35 laps and beat Lochie Hughes by 2.1885 seconds, managing his tires late. I can’t tell from a results sheet how much of the pole-to-win gap belongs to the driver and how much to cars, strategy and circumstance, and anyone who claims to know is guessing. But a team that has never won in this series, adding a driver whose raw speed has already been proven, is buying the difficult half of the equation.
A program that is still learning, with a famous test mule
The evidence that Ganassi’s NXT effort is still finding its feet is in its own account of the October test: damp, cold conditions, several setup directions and strategies tried, and Palou reporting that the NXT car’s steel brakes, lower downforce and cramped cockpit forced him to adjust his driving. De Tullio drove the No. 10 at that Griffis test and was sixth fastest in a 22-driver field that Palou topped with a 1:14.5050. Sixth in those conditions, with a setup agenda, is not a pace statement. It is an audition with a data trail, and de Tullio’s answer when asked what he could learn from the reigning champion was “just about everything.”
Ganassi’s INDYCAR side is the most decorated operation in the paddock (here is how it built the dynasty). The point of this deal is to import some of that thinking into a ladder program that has not yet produced a win.
The reserve role is a classroom, not a seat
Do not read the reserve-driver title as a back door into an INDYCAR cockpit. De Tullio will serve on road and street course weekends only, through simulator work and at-track support. Call it a year in the building that wins the titles, which suits both sides: Ganassi gets a driver fresh out of an NXT car to help correlate its simulator, and de Tullio spends a year inside the building that wins the titles. It also fits the ladder logic we have laid out before, where seat time matters but so does learning how a top team works.
Team manager Taylor Kiel said the goal is to give de Tullio and his teammates the resources to “compete for wins and the INDY NXT championship.” The word that matters in that sentence is the first one after “compete.”
What to watch in 2027
Carson Etter returns, and the team has yet to name the drivers for its remaining entries, so the rest of the lineup will show whether Ganassi is building one star car or a full-strength program. The grid around it is shifting too: Andretti Global’s NXT plans and Foyt’s decision to promote a different NXT driver, Josh Pierson, to INDYCAR both change who de Tullio will be racing and who he left behind.
The test is simple. If he keeps qualifying at the front, Ganassi’s engineers and strategists should convert more of those poles than Foyt did. If they do not, the problem is not speed, and a team with this résumé will have to explain why it still has not won. The No. 10 carries extra weight in Argentina, where Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona wore it. A winless season would be a heavy thing to put on that number.
Eight poles, two wins. If Ganassi still can’t win in NXT with this driver, where does the blame go?
Lead image: Alessandro de Tullio. Photo: INDYCAR.com
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