Dane Cameron to test Penske IndyCar

The 33-year-old Californian, a former rising star in open-wheel racing, has become recognized as one of the world’s finest sportscar drivers in recent years, and in 2023 will be one of the aces in the Porsche Penske Motorsport line-up.

In preparation for the project, Penske will enter the FIA World Endurance Championship this year, running an Oreca in LMP2 with Cameron joined by fellow IMSA champion Felipe Nasr and now-Silver-rated former ace Emmanuel Collard.

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On Wednesday, Penske will run Cameron in an IndyCar at Sebring, using an evaluation day. For IndyCar drivers who are signed up and full-time, such as Penske’s Josef Newgarden, Will Power and Scott McLaughlin, test days are at an absolute premium in the current era.

The idea of getting a swift and technically adept Prototype driver to run through a test program on behalf of his open-wheel colleagues is a canny one. Indeed, Ricky Taylor enjoyed a similar test for Penske at Homestead Miami road course back in February 2017.

Asked for comment on this latest test, Team Penske president Tim Cindric told Motorsport.com: “Although he is currently committed to our sportscar project, we have been looking forward to an opportunity to give Dane a chance to drive one of our IndyCars.

“We were able to do something similar with Ricky Taylor a few years ago and it proved to be mutually beneficial.”

Power, Newgarden and McLaughlin will test at Sebring mid-February. 

Cameron was one of many young Americans to fall off the open-wheel ladder in the first decade of this millennium, despite finishing second in USF2000 and winning the Pro Mazda (now Indy Pro 2000) championship.

However, he morphed into a sportscar ace, winning the IMSA GTD-class championship in 2014 driving a Turner Motorsports BMW Z4, before being signed by Action Express Racing to race its Corvette Daytona Prototype in the top class for 2015 and finishing third in points with co-driver Eric Curran.

This pair clinched the championship in 2016, finished as runners-up in 2017, and then Cameron joined Penske for its three-year campaign with the Acura ARX-05 DPi car. He and co-driver Juan Pablo Montoya went winless in the opening year, but in 2019 they won the championship.

At the end of 2020, when the Acura Team Penske program ended, HPD retained the services of Cameron as he moved to the Meyer Shank Racing team last year, but Team Penske held its former champion in high regard and he was an early signing for the Porsche LMDh project.