Why is the driver who is 16th in the championship arguably the series' hottest property right now? And who is this "Einstein", "Adrian Newey" character he's working with to achieve this success?
Rinus VeeKay was a race winner in 2021, his sophomore IndyCar season, but a tough run of form in the middle-to-end of the season coinciding with him breaking his collarbone in a June cycling accident meant he was passed up in the free agency market. McLaren especially was interested but ended up sticking with a two-car team of Pato O'Ward and Felix Rosenqvist, the latter having been under threat.
At the end of 2024, despite being told weeks before that his future was safe, VeeKay was discarded by Ed Carpenter Racing, replaced by big-money signing Alexander Rossi, leaving VeeKay without a seat in a competitive market. "Without doubt a really hard off-season", he notes.
A last-minute move to Dale Coyne a week before the 2025 season gave him a home. But you can be forgiven for thinking a team that had eight drivers in 2024 and a best result of 13th wasn't going to be the place for VeeKay to shine.
How wrong that take was.
He immediately bettered Coyne's top result from 2024 by bagging ninth in St Petersburg, and only a dropped wheel nut cost him a podium at Barber a few races later. Another top 10 and being the biggest mover of the race on the Indianapolis road course (ninth from 24th on the grid) put him into the top 10 in the championship.
Given Coyne's poor season the year before, the sheer number of staff that left the team, the week VeeKay and his engineers had to prepare for the season and VeeKay's switch from a team and engine manufacturer that had been his whole experience in IndyCar, it's been amazing.
Every single team in the paddock has noticed VeeKay's performances, which also included qualifying seventh in the last race in Detroit before a failure in the race, which coupled with running sixth at the Indy 500 before a pit spin took him out, is why he's now 16th in the points and not in that top 10.
Veekay's noticed that people are noticing his performances, noting being "hyped like I was in 2021".
"I would say there's definitely a lot of chatter around me now in the season," VeeKay tells The Race in an exclusive interview.
"This team really allows me to show my capabilities. Without a question, Dale Coyne Racing is the smallest team in the paddock with the least resources, but whatever other teams are spending we are beating them.
"I think this just shows that the right approach goes above anything else.
"I'm doing well, that's the most important thing, but also for Dale everybody's happy that results are coming.
"I think our strongest tracks are coming up. We definitely have a good shot at Gateway. I think most of the short ovals are going to be really strong. So I think we're only going to do better this season. Just need a little bit of luck on our side.
"But yeah, there's been some chatter around me and then definitely some fans asking for big teams to pick me up."
IndyCar's off-season is moving a lot slower than in previous years currently. Will Power at Penske is one of the biggest dominos to fall - depending on what he does, that could set off a chain reaction. He could stay, or if he goes, his likely replacement would be current Foyt driver David Malukas, but double champion Power would be a tough driver to go up against for vacant seats no matter how strong VeeKay's season is.
There's no expectation Andretti, Ganassi or McLaren will line up differently in 2025. So the options are quite slim for VeeKay. But as anyone familiar with the IndyCar off-season knows, things change quickly.
With the charter system in place, it does make it less likely big teams just field an extra car to house a talent available on the market, although it's not impossible either.
VeeKay notes we're not even halfway through the season so other teams are not even on his mind in race weekends, and he's focused on his "duty" to Coyne and maximising its results in a team which has given him a home.
"The whole morale of the team, everybody was cheering and jumping when we got the biggest mover award in the Indy GP and same with the top four at Barber, almost the podium there," he says.
"So that was just really good. The morale is just the biggest thing because the way those guys work for me and the amount of emotion there is when we do well or we don't, it gives me a lot of motivation to work harder."
Installed alongside him now is IndyCar technical guru Michael Cannon, who has worked for most teams since the 1990s, most recently won the IndyCar championship with Ganassi in 2020 and turned around AJ Foyt's fortunes from 2023-2024 before joining Prema for a few weeks this year, ultimately deciding it wasn't for him.
Now the "Einstein" of IndyCar as VeeKay calls him, adding Cannon "came up with a few laws himself", gives Coyne a massive boost. Not only does he bring experience across all races, but he's seen as somewhat of an Indy 500 guru, and Coyne has had one car fail to qualify for it for the last two seasons. So getting to work on that will also be crucial.
"It's like he invented this car," adds VeeKay with a chuckle.
"So he's like, 'no, we shouldn't do this because if we go too far this way, that doesn't work, we should do this'. And he's right, exactly that.
"When I'm on the track, that translates and it makes sense.
"I would say 90% of our changes are positives, barely a negative in there. He reminds me of Adrian Newey, that everybody wants to work with him because whatever he does is right. That's kind of similar with Michael Cannon."
VeeKay has only worked with Cannon for one race but it produced his second-best start this season. He reckons Cannon makes sure "we just hit the jackpot [on set-up] sooner or more often", rather than earlier in the season when "usually in practice one, we didn't hit the right balance and we had to make a big swing and we got it right afterwards, but you lose some time with that".
VeeKay says this is the "hardest I've ever worked in my IndyCar career", and he is really settling into the leadership role required of him and wanted from him at Coyne.
"This team really allows me to guide them and the stronger of a voice I have, the better we do," he adds.
It's no surprise that given it has won all seven races this year, VeeKay praised the drivability of Honda as well, which he is experiencing for the first time having only driven Chevrolet IndyCars before this year.
It's partly that which makes VeeKay so hard to judge for people. Using Malukas as an example of another young driver interesting the top teams, the latter has worked with four different teams already, two Honda and two Chevrolet. Imagine how many different people he's been able to impress in that time.
VeeKay remained with the same engineer for most of his five seasons at Carpenter. Sure, Chevrolet teams share date, but it's not always easy to tell what programme a driver in another team is actually running, making the data lack context.
As a combination, this has to be the most impressive '16th in the championship after seven races' scenario we've seen in a while. It's a proper David versus Goliath story, which has the potential to get a lot better with the races coming up.
Malukas scored two podiums at Gateway for Coyne across 2022/23, and the last time Cannon was at the team, Sebastien Bourdais qualified second there and Santino Ferrucci finished fourth. Not a bad track record for a first oval race with his 'new' team.
