The new Juncos Hollinger Racing IndyCar team principal brings decades of open wheel racing experience to this exclusively created role.

Dave O’Neill has been working in the world of open wheel racing since his teen years, and more recently building up Formula 1 teams Manor and Haas F1. In early 2024, he joined Juncos Hollinger Racing (JHR) as team principal, which fields two cars in the NTT INDYCAR Series and one in the INDY NXT by Firestone series. O’Neill brings four decades of race car building and management experience to JHR, which began as a Formula Renault operation in Argentina and moved to the US to join IndyCar.
After college, O’Neill’s career took him to Formula 3 teams and F3 manufacturer Ralt, followed by nine years at Jordan Grand Prix, which is now Aston Martin F1. In 2009, he set up Manor Racing’s F1 effort over a span of just six months.
Five years later, Haas F1 hired O’Neill to do the same as sporting director and team manager for its Kannapolis, North Carolina-based team. Haas F1 placed 8th in the Manufacturer’s Championship two years in a row, an admirable achievement for a new team. Tired of the globetrotting F1 requires and wanting to be closer to home in Austin, Texas, O’Neill left Haas at the end of 2018 and became a partner in Esses Racing in Austin, which services GT3 race teams.
A call from Romain Grosjean, who had driven for Haas F1 and was now driving for JHR, brought O’Neill to visit JHR to consider a new role there. O’Neill then became team principal in early 2024.

PRI: You’ve been involved in racing for 40 years. How did that start?
O’Neill: When I was 14, I used to ride my bicycle past a race team in a village called Faygate in West Sussex, England. One day I stopped in and asked, “Do you mind if I have a look at the race cars?” The cars turned out to be Ray Racing Formula Fords. They let me clean the bodywork, and I started doing that in the evenings and on weekends. They invited me to Brands Hatch for Formula Ford Racing and Snetterton, Oulton Park, and a few other tracks.
PRI: At JHR, do you have any top priority plans in place?
O’Neill: The main project is to stabilize what we have. We compete against the likes of Penske, Andretti, McLaren, and Ganassi. Those teams do the same thing time and time again, which breeds consistency. So, my main target is to get the budget into the correct place, put a structure in place, and get the SOPs running properly to achieve that consistency.
PRI: What are some key differences in doing that for IndyCar versus Formula 1?
O’Neill: The technology is more advanced in Formula 1, and there are lots more moving parts. Typically, if you’re on a smaller F1 team, you’d have 300 to 400 people. On a larger team, you’d have 1,000 to 1,200. At JHR, there are 47 people on the books. There are not as many components on an Indy car that need servicing, and the parts are made a little bit stronger, so you don’t need as many people or as many parts. The IndyCar parts are not life’d-out as quickly. For example, a Formula 1 wheel has a life of four or five races, while an IndyCar wheel will do a couple of seasons. The crack checking and other procedures to get it to that point are far less compared to Formula 1.

PRI: The team’s media materials talk about doing things differently. Can you explain what that means?
O’Neill: It means we basically do things with what we’ve got. For example, the same people that work on the car at the factory also work on it in testing and put it back together for the race. The bigger teams have more of an advantage, because they have more people and resources to draw on.
PRI: Is there something you’ve learned in your varied career that you still rely on every day?
O’Neill: Every day is a school day in my book. But I guess the quick answer would be to go with your gut sooner. My gut instinct has typically been the right way for me. I’ve found that when there’s too much worrying about things and too much deliberating, you dig more into something that doesn’t really matter.
PRI: You’ve crossed paths with a lot of top people in racing. Are there a few people that you would point to as having a strong influence on you?
O’Neill: For non-technical people, there’s a couple. I never had a father, he died when I was one. So, I have listened to people that I thought talked sense. One was Stuart Bennett. He has sadly passed. The other is Roy Baker. They offered me good advice and were solid people from the motor racing industry. When it comes to a technical guy, it’s probably Gary Anderson, who designed the Jordan F1 car. He was very solid and true to his words. He explained everything and made sense. He was also fun. Learning should be fun.