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J R Hildebrand Enjoys Early Christmas

JR Hildebrand [John Wiedemann Photo]

By Joe Jennings

Christmas came early for J. R. Hildebrand when Ed Carpenter Racing selected him as a full-time driver for the 2017 Verizon IndyCar Series season. Hildebrand is taking over the seat recently vacated by Josef Newgarden.

Pounding the pavement, knocking on doors and knocking on doors in quest of a full-time ode can be an exasperating experience as the Boulder resident learned first-hand. Even part-time rides are hard to secure as Hildebrand has raced only five times in last three seasons with three of them coming with the ECR team.

“It’s obviously exciting to be back full-time first and foremost,” Hildebrand said this week during a tele conference. “But to be back here with this team and to get it done this early in the off-season so that we can kind of get the program ready for next year is all just great.

Working with ECR over the last three seasons now, it doesn’t feel like a new home necessarily, it feels like somewhere that I’ve been for quite a while now. I think with that we’ll be able to just jump in and get with the program.

“This is where I’ve wanted to be since my first go-around with them. It’s definitely been my primary focus, to create a home for myself here, do the things sort of necessary to be in that position.”

Hildebrand’s value escalated after Newgarden was recovering from injuries sustained in Texas. He got to test, help the team and was ready to compete had Newgarden not healed so quickly.

“Being able to get a little bit more seat time this year during the season in that role, filling in for Josef, knowing that mattered for him, mattered for the team, that it wasn’t just some sort of off-season program, it was very specific around goals they were trying to achieve in the middle of the year, our ability to work together, the ease of being able to kind of jump into that and play that role, be around during the race weekends, being a little bit more involved throughout that process I think just fired me up about the opportunity to be doing that myself on a more full-time basis.

“I think that really gave me a lot of energy to sort of sit there and go, Yes, I want to be back here doing this, not just because I feel like I’ve got unfinished business, but because I really want to be here. I really enjoy it. I sort of am ready to take advantage of that type of opportunity.”

Throughout his search, he got lots of advice from insiders and outsiders, sometimes confusing and bewildering, but he stayed the course and it worked out well.

Driver/owner Ed Carpenter liked what he saw from Hildebrand both as a teammate and otherwise, which helped in his decision-making process. “I think it’s really important. I think the chemistry of the team, the cohesion that we already have I think is going to accelerate this and make it less of a rebuild, but more of a continuation of what we had been than if we had gone a different direction.

“We had many conversations and talked to quite a few people. But JR was always at the top of the list of someone we wanted to work with. JR and I have been talking about this before he ever ran a car for us at Indy for the first time.

“It took us a little longer than I think any of us initially thought it would to get to this point. But JR has done a good job for us, has been patient with me as an owner and us as a team getting here. But every time we’ve had him in a car, at the Speedway, different races, different tests, even outside of last year, JR has always done everything that we’ve asked and then some. It gave us a lot of confidence that it didn’t need to be a difficult process because the guy we needed was sitting right in front of us.”

During his down-time, Hildebrand drew upon his academic background to stay occupied. Upon graduating from high school, he thought he was headed to MIT but took a three-year deferral to pursue racing.

Fast forwarding to a year ago, Road and Track magazine hired him to be the man in the man versus a driverless car test program, involving Audi of Europe’s self-driving RS7. With the involvement of Stanford University, the evaluation took place at the Sonoma Raceway where the racer emerged as a winner.

“I went out there to sort of discuss what I felt like the autonomously driving vehicle was doing, what it was doing differently than what I might be doing, then in the end set a benchmark lap time to compare against the car,” he said. “Stanford works closely kind of in parallel with Audi of Europe on a like-minded program or similarly focused program that they run up at Thunder Hill once a month in northern California.

“Through that process, I got to know the guys at Stanford. I think they recognized the value that a high-performing sort of contemporary human driver has in possibly being able to articulate what the self-driving car is doing in a way that the data might not, like, jump off the page.

“Then earlier this year I was appointed as an adjunct lecturer to continue that process basically, so they would kind of have access to me, and I would have access on campus to talk maybe in more general terms with vehicle dynamics programs and things of that nature.”

Obviously, Hildebrand is a man of many talents and one day there may be a race entrant known as Professor Hildebrand.

For now, Hildebrand will be known as a lead driver for Ed Carpenter Racing.

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