Mick Schumacher didn’t want to just do road courses in INDYCAR in his first season.
Actually, Schumacher doesn’t have any sports-car racing plans.
His plan for 2026?
He wants to focus on his new job as an INDYCAR rookie for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing.
That doesn’t mean that the former Formula 1 driver has closed the door on a future return to the series, where he drove for Haas in 2021-22. He just wants to focus on his new job in a new car that he has only tested once, which came last month on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course.
Schumacher will make his INDYCAR debut in 2026.
Schumacher was a reserve driver for Mercedes in 2023-24 and spent the 2024-25 seasons in a sports car competing for Alpine. He was a candidate for a seat with the Cadillac F1 team before they went with a more veteran stable in Checo Perez and Valtteri Bottas. He then considered a seat as a reserve driver for the team and its endurance program counterpart.
But the 26-year-old Schumacher, the son of seven-time F1 champion Michael Schumacher, feels that spending a full season focused on racing a single-seat car (a sports-car would theoretically have room for two seats) would be best for him from the perspective of simply enjoying racing as well as potentially returning to F1.
“The world of F1 is a very specific one and a special one, but obviously it’s still a single-seater [in INDYCAR],” Schumacher said during a video call with reporters Tuesday morning.
“I think that there’s been plenty of great drivers, and numerously also [INDYCAR teams that have] settled into affiliation with some other teams in F1 for good reason, so I don’t see why the move to INDYCAR would close that door.”
That doesn’t mean Schumacher has one foot in and one foot out the door of INDYCAR. Part of the October test was to prove to Schumacher that INDYCAR was something he would want to race, and possibly race for the long-term.
Will Schumacher have success in his INDYCAR rookie season?
“I just wanted to see the car, wanted to know how it feels to drive,” Schumacher said. “But I think ultimately it was also just the passion that people had, to see that and to see how excited they were about racing.
“They showed me this is something I could see myself in and working in as an environment. Definitely, as a whole, it has been a very good experience, and I guess therefore I just wanted to seal it and make sure that I can get more of that in the next year.”
He’ll get it all and will likely do four of his seven tests on ovals to try to get up to speed on a style of racing he has never done.
“To me, it was important not to do like a half thing but actually go in and do it 100 percent. And definitely ovals are a part of that,” Schumacher said. “I’ve had good conversations with people around who had good and bad views on it, and I just had to make an average out of that and decide it for myself.”
Because racing on ovals at such high speeds is so dangerous, drivers coming from road racing often think twice before making the move to INDYCAR.
“Motorsports on the whole is dangerous,” Schumacher said. “So I don’t really see why particularly that one thing should be more dangerous than anything else. … I don’t take it on the easy shoulder.
“I think that it is crazy speeds. It is super quick. We’re obviously racing hard side-by-side. But I accept the risk for the enjoyment of the racing’s sake.”
The team obviously feels that Schumacher can make the transition as he replaces Devlin DeFrancesco.
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing is moving on from Devlin DeFrancesco next season.
“We’ve seen drivers come from Europe, and some have been successful over here, some haven’t,” Rahal said. “And some were very, very good drivers in Europe at the time. It’s really about the approach. I think he’s doing it. He’s approaching it the way it should be, which is, he knows it’s going to take hard work.
“He knows he’s going to have to work with his teammates. He knows he’s going to have to be committed to it, which is so critical, which he made clear in this talk today that this is 100 percent of his effort. And I think that’s so important.”
Schumacher said he dedicated himself 100 percent to the effort after re-evaluating what he should do after not getting the full-time Cadillac ride.
“The information that I had up to pretty much to the end, we’d been in contention for that seat, and then they went a different direction, which is fair enough,” Schumacher said. “And it just led to me having to understand, ‘OK, what do I want? Do I want to try and keep getting back on to the F1 grid or do I want to do racing that I enjoy?
“That’s obviously single-seaters. And yeah, thankfully, the opportunity came up with a team, and I’m super glad and super happy to be here where I am now.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
