Former Formula 2 champion, Theo Pourchaire, has expressed his ‘disgust’ at McLaren’s handling of his sudden departure from IndyCar this summer. Pourchaire had made a promising start in IndyCar at Long Beach earlier this year, which led to him securing a multi-year contract.
However, Pourchaire was informed last month that he would no longer be part of McLaren’s team. The team decided to sign American rising star Nolan Siegel on a multi-year deal and reportedly broke the news to Pourchaire via a brief one-minute phone call.
Pourchaire revealed to Auto Hebdo: “To be 100 per cent transparent, McLaren had signed me to a multi-year contract to drive with them in IndyCar. And then, on the Tuesday morning before Laguna Seca, I learned from my manager that they had decided not to have me drive at Laguna Seca, as well as for the rest of the season.”
“At first, I was very surprised, I didn’t understand, I thought it was fake. We had only signed a few weeks before. I was disgusted. The team ended up calling me for a minute, around 11 am that same day, the day before my planned departure for Laguna Seca, to tell me that I was excluded from the program. They didn’t give me the specific reasons.”
McLaren’s sporting director Tony Kanaan has made it clear that the decision to drop a driver was strictly business, as he explained to Motorsport.com: “He didn’t do anything wrong. It was just a situation. It was a call that we had to make. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t because of his performance. He’s done whatever he could do. He wasn’t happy, but he understood.”
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“I just told the guys out there, ‘You change race cars all the time. You come in, you make a change.’ Not that we want to do that with drivers, but we’re here. I’m in this to win races. That’s all I care [about]. And then I think eventually we look for continuity.”
Despite Pourchaire’s impressive F2 campaign in 2023, he will serve as Sauber’s reserve in 2024, as the team opts to continue with Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu, a move supported by Sauber’s representative Alessandro Alunni Bravi.
Bravi disappointingly confessed to Autosport: “We cannot be happy, mainly because Theo has lost the opportunity to have a strong racing programme. This is something that can happen in motorsport, we cannot blame McLaren.”
