Photo: Travis Hinkle
HMD Motorsports will run nine drivers in Indy Nxt’s post-season Chris Griffis Memorial Test on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course this Friday.
Christian Bogle, Reece Gold and Nolan Siegel raced for the team this year and have already signed to continue with them next season, while new USF Pro 2000 champion Myles Rowe will be joining HMD for his step up to Indy Nxt in 2024.
The other five drivers HMD will be running in the test are Caio Collet, Michael d’Orlando, Kaylen Frederick, Niels Koolen and Josh Pierson.
Of that quintet, only Pierson has experience of the team and the Indy Nxt car having completed a part-time campaign with HMD this year. He came 15th in the standings with a best finish of sixth, and is currently fourth in the World Endurance Championship’s LMP2 class.
Former Alpine junior Collet, who is actually still connected to the French marque, was French Formula 4 champion in 2018, Formula Renault Eurocup runner-up in 2020 and has been racing in FIA Formula 3 ever since. He came ninth in his rookie campaign in 2021, took two wins and a pole en route to eighth in the standings last year and won once as he came ninth in the standings this season. He had planned to move up to Formula 2 for 2023, but lacked the budget to make it possible.
D’Orlando was USF2000 runner-up in 2021 then champion last year, meaning he spent 2023 in USFP2000. He took four wins and six poles, but a bad start to the season with only one top-10 finish in the first six races meant he could not mount a title challenge as a rookie and ended up fourth in the standings.
Frederick started his car racing career in his home country of America, coming fourth in USF2000 in 2017 and sixth in 2018, before relocating to Europe. He raced in F3 that year, coming 14th in a part-time Euroformula campaign, then actually stepped down a rung on the single-seater ladder for 2019 by racing in BRDC British F3 (now known as GB3).
In his rookie campaign he won two races, then dominated the series in his sophomore campaign with nine wins and eight poles. The three years since have been spent in FIA F3, and in that time he has had a best finish of fifth and scored 40 points from 49 races.
Koolen will be making a big step by testing in Indy Nxt, and is missing the Formula Regional European Championship finale to be in Indianapolis.
The Dutch driver picked up three weekends of single-seater racing experience last year across two different F4 series. He picked up a best finish of 17th from that, then at the start of 2023 stepped up to FRegional Middle East. Koolen did a full campaign, but failed to score and came 31st in the standings. It is a similar story in FREC, with no points finishes from 18 races. He sits 37th in the standings ahead of this weekend’s final round.