MotorSportsTalk continues its run through the 2016 Verizon IndyCar Series field, driver-by-driver. Ending 21st was Spencer Pigot, who ran most of the races in a year after winning the Indy Lights Presented by Cooper Tires championship.
Spencer Pigot, No. 16 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda, No. 20 Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet
- 2015: Indy Lights (champion)
- 2016: 21st place (10 starts), Best Finish 7th, Best Start 17th, 0 Top-5, 2 Top-10, 0 Laps Led, 20.6 Avg. Start, 15.7 Avg. Finish
Spencer Pigot entered IndyCar as the poster child for the Mazda Road to Indy presented by Cooper Tires, having won four scholarships throughout his career and making it to the championship on the basis of talent alone. And while Pigot was unlucky to have not had a full season – he only started 10 of 16 races – he still did enough in his first go-around to merit a proper first full season in 2017, because he handled some of the challenges that befell him this year like a veteran several years older.
Pigot, only 22, impressed the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team early on with his feedback and was positioning himself to get better after a solid debut in St. Petersburg and an even better race at the Angie’s List Grand Prix of Indianapolis. However, a practice crash in Indianapolis proved a bit of a setback for him.
The fact he didn’t know what his future held after the Indianapolis 500 didn’t bode well either, although that question was answered the following week at Detroit when Rising Star Racing – his longtime supporters – assembled an effort to place him in Ed Carpenter’s No. 20 Chevrolet for the remaining road and street races.
Was it an ideal situation, jumping into a new team, new aero kit and engine, with a new crew and new engineer (plus he’d already had different strategists at RLL), with exactly no testing time? Of course it wasn’t, and expectations realistically needed to be tempered.
Pigot didn’t really have a standout weekend with ECR but he was never out-of-place, either. Where he starred was at the weekends where he’d had an in-season test prior; it was no coincidence that Road America and Mid-Ohio provided his best results of the season, and Watkins Glen his best overall weekend from a pace standpoint in practice and the race; admittedly though, not in qualifying.
The area where he struggled most was in qualifying, as he couldn’t seem to crack Firestone’s red alternate tires. He never started better than 17th and inevitably that made his race days tougher, often needing a strategy play to move forward.
But outside of his practice crash at Indy, Pigot proved a safe pair of hands. His only retirement was courtesy of a gearbox issue in the Sonoma season finale and he made no mistakes otherwise. He also starred in sporadic appearances in Mazda’s Prototype at sports car endurance races. He’s in that glut of young talent who deserves another IndyCar shot, but only time will tell if finances can keep him going after talent got him here in the first place.