When Louis Foster won the pole for the 2025 XPEL Grand Prix at Road America, the accomplishment seemed to come with some wishful thinking from IndyCar fans.
Yes, it was an important milestone for the promising rookie, and no question, it was a surprise.
For the rest of an afternoon and a race morning there was a wistful feeling, like, wouldn’t it be cool if Foster could turn his Saturday surprise into a first victory? It was more of a vibe, though, than anything grounded in reality.
He was a long shot driving for Rahal Letterman Lanigan, a mid-pack team, not one of the regular front-runners, trying to hold off the bullies like Alex Palou and Josef Newgarden and Will Power who’d claimed the 4.014-mile track as their sandbox in recent years.
Still, underdog stories are part of what makes sports intriguing.
“It was our first real trophy of the year, right?” Foster, 22, said, looking ahead to a return engagement in the 2026 XPEL Grand Prix on June 21 at the circuit outside Elkhart Lake.
“We’ve been fast in quali[fying] all year. I think at that point we’d already been in two or maybe three fast-sixes [qualifying sessions]. So it was a matter of time before we had a really, really strong result, and I think that was a special one because it really was quite unexpected, actually.”
Foster would start to the inside of Palou, then a three-time series champion, and two rows ahead of teammate Graham Rahal, who first got into an Indy car shortly after Foster got out of diapers.
What happened once the green flag flew, though, was a cold splash of reality, a reminder of just how fanciful hopes of seeing a first win for Foster were that day.
“We sucked last year in the race, honestly,” he said. “We couldn’t hold a position to save our lives.
“So I knew it was going to be a struggle. We made mistakes on the setup that day. We put too much understeer in the car, we put too much wing in the car, we were slow on the straights … we just messed up, simple as that.”
Fifty-five laps later, he was fortunate to escape with an 11th place finish that matched his season high.
“My expectations in the race, I would have loved to have been able to hold onto a top-10 in that race,” Foster said. “That probably would have been a good result for us. Even though we started [on the] pole, we just knew that we were going to suck in that race because we had.”
A year of experience in an Indy car has put the 2024 Indy NXT champion in a position to go back to racetracks better prepared and with more confidence.
On the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, Foster earned a career-best seventh-place finish after starting sixth and getting punted off track on the first lap. Then he tied that on the streets of Detroit by improving four positions from qualifying.
“I’m glad we’re learning from those mistakes, and I’m glad that now when we qualify [well], we can also back that up with race pace as well,” Foster said. “I think the amount of progress so far has been, honestly, in the space of a year, in a series as competitive as IndyCar, actually very impressive.”
That’s not to say Foster is beating on the door of his first victory a year after his first pole. But the team is a lot closer.
Rahal finished third three times in the first half of the season (Barber Motorsports Park, Indy GP, Detroit) after managing just two podiums over the previous five seasons combined.
“The top teams, it doesn’t matter where they are, they’re always [in contention], whereas we are sometimes players, sometimes not,” Foster said. “Graham’s had two podiums this year. The other events, he’s been 16th, 17th, 18th, 20th. He hasn’t just decided to be a good driver one weekend or not. He’s always trying his best and so am I. We all are.
“We just need to be more consistent and make our bad weekends less bad, because that helps with momentum and consistency as a whole. So, I think that’s our next step is to solidify what we already have but build on what we need to be better at.”
Then he’ll actually be a contender for that first victory.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Louis Foster reflects on IndyCar progress a year after Road America pole
Reporting by Dave Kallmann, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Dave Kallmann, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
