IndyCar: Chip Ganassi Racing signs Kiel, promotes O’Gara

Chip Ganassi Racing has made two key managerial moves that will impact its NTT IndyCar Series program and its dual factory efforts on behalf of Cadillac in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and the FIA World Endurance Championship reports Racer.

The changes start with the assignment of Mike O’Gara, CGR’s Director of Operations, to oversee the Cadillac GTP/LMDh programs in IMSA and the WEC. O’Gara’s appointment comes after spending 2022 as a leader within CGR’s IndyCar operation where he managed and performed race strategy for the Indy 500-winning No. 8 Honda entry driven by Marcus Ericsson. With O’Gara’s extensive background in sports cars, including a senior role in running the former Ford GT IMSA/WEC project, the promotion to head CGR’s global Cadillac prototype campaign is a natural fit for his skills and experience.

O’Gara’s renewed focus on IMSA and the WEC has in turn created a managerial need on the IndyCar side, and in response, CGR has hired former Arrow McLaren SP president Taylor Kiel as its new team manager. Like O’Gara, Kiel will report to CGR managing director Mike Hull and serve the crew chiefs and individual car managers across its four IndyCar entries.

“Some people are really into titles, but we never have been,” Hull told RACER. “We’ve been more into results because results define titles for us. Starting with Mike O’Gara, moving to what he’s doing next for us in this position is a pretty enormous task because we’re going to be a global racing company. We’re going back in the direction of where we were when Mike managed a similar program with GT. He’s now the global manager for Chip Ganassi Racing’s sports car effort, which spearheads what we do in partnership with Cadillac.

“We’ll be in IMSA and WEC, and Mike’s driven to not do things as two separate organizations, but one organization that races in two very different places. That program has legs to it for the future and Mike’s ready to do that job. With that said, there were a lot of things that Mike was doing here that creates a void that we have to fill, and Taylor became available. We’ve always hired talent to try to help us and so we hired him.”

“Taylor will fit in as a team manager, and certainly he’ll help Mike O’Gara with some of the sports car things just to get his feet wet and to understand what we’re doing going forward,” Hull said. “He’s already well into it. Primarily, at the moment, he’s focused on learning everything that we do and how Chip Ganassi Racing goes IndyCar racing, at the race track itself, the preparation to get there, what goes on with the parts and pieces that are required, what goes on with the people that support the programs, all vocational areas, and he’ll be a strategist for one of our four cars going forward.”