Jacob Abel will be the lone driver to miss the Indianapolis 500 after being bumped from the field on Sunday. His DNQ means it will be a decade since the race last featured a driver with Stadium Super Trucks experience. 13 drivers total have competed at Indy as well as in SST.

Abel, an IndyCar Series rookie and the 2024 Indy NXT runner-up, generally hovered around the late twenties. In Saturday’s qualifying, however, he was the slowest of those who set a time, which sent him to the Last Chance Qualifier alongside Dale Coyne teammate Rinus VeeKay, Marco Andretti, and Marcus Armstrong (who did not record a time due to a crash in morning practice).

Andretti and Armstrong’s backup car locked themselves into the race on speed, both three miles per hour faster than VeeKay and Abel, meaning the 33rd and final spot came down to the DCR drivers. VeeKay initially had a comfortable edge over Abel with a 227.740-mph run before inexplicably deciding to go out for another run that proved to be slower, topping at just 226.913 mph.

However, Abel could not capitalize during his final flying lap as his top speed was 226.394 mph.

With Abel missing the show, 2016 remains the last Indy 500 with SST drivers: Townsend Bell finished 21st in his tenth and ultimately last 500 while Matt Brabham placed one spot behind in his lone 500 to date. Abel ran the final two rounds of the 2021 SST season in Nashville and Long Beach, scoring a runner-up finish in Race 2 at the former, before heading to Indy Lights the following year.

Bell appeared in SST during the inaugural season at the 2013 Honda Indy Toronto, finishing fourth in Race 1 before returning to the commentary booth for NBC. Brabham, on the other hand, is one of the best SST drivers in the business as a three-time champion; while he has aspirations of returning to Indy someday, he continues to run the trucks to help pay the bills.

Incidentally, Brabham and Abel competed against each other in the 2022 Indy Lights season.

“I try to help Jacob but he was actually really good at the Super Truck at those races and I was quite impressed,” Brabham recalled in March 2022. “It’s cool to have someone who has that experience because I can bounce things off them and relate to them in a way that they’ve experienced the Super Truck and compare it to open-wheel cars on how different it is.”

Robby Gordon is perhaps the most notable of the SST–Indy 500 crossovers. The series founder competed in the race ten times between 1993 and 2004, the back half coming in “Double Duty” wherein he tried to complete the Indy 500 and NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 on the same day.

Davey Hamilton, a fellow Indy Racing League alumnus, ran six SST races from 2013 to 2016 with a best finish of third in 2013 Toronto Race 2. His son Davey Jr. has never raced the 500 but is currently in Indy NXT, and holds 12 SST starts to his name with the most recent in 2022.

Gordon’s longtime friend P.J. Jones, who’s raced alongside him in basically every discipline from stock cars to the desert, ran the Indy 500 in 2004 and 2006 while DNQing in 2007. He is a four-time SST race winner and finished fourth in the 2013 standings. Casey Mears had a similar career trajectory to Gordon and Jones, though he failed to qualify at his lone 500 entry in 2001.

Before he was one of SST’s early stars, E.J. Viso competed full-time in IndyCar from 2008 to 2013. His best Indy 500 outing was 18th in 2012 and 2013.

Arie Luyendyk Jr. made his return to SST at Long Beach in April; while he had been gone for four years, he has also raced in SST since the first season. Before that, he was in Indy Lights and attempted the 500 twice, missing one and making the other.

Jeff Ward was an IndyCar driver from 1995 to 2005, finishing second in the 1999 Indy 500. He would eventually do SST’s first four races in 2013 and the final two weekends in 2021.

Like Bell, Max Papis and Paul Tracy were Toronto-only SST drivers. Papis, who boasts a diverse résumé that includes NASCAR, F1, and CART along with three cracks at the Indy 500, raced the trucks in 2016. Tracy, a former colleague of Bell at NBC and 2003 CART champion, did the 2013, 2014, and 2016 Toronto weekends; he ran the Indy 500 seven times, controversially losing in 2002.

Stanton Barrett, who failed to qualify in his only Indy 500 run in 2009, raced the 2021 and 2022 Music City Grands Prix in SST.

Featured image credit: James Black / Penske Entertainment