INDYCAR: Saavedra ruled out of Indy 500

AFS Racing team owner Gary Peterson and driver Sebastian Saavedra have pulled the plug on their Indy 500 effort.

The pair had been busy assembling a program since the Long Beach race in mid-April, which included Conquest Racing as the team to field the car on Peterson's behalf. Conquest owner Eric Bachelart went as far as picking up Peterson's Dallara DW12 chassis and equipment from Chip Ganassi Racing, which ran the car for AFS and Saavedra in 2015, and moving it into his Indianapolis-based shop. After assembling a list of all that would be required to update the chassis to Chevy's 2016 aero kit specifications, and the limited time left to assemble the rest of the car ahead of Indy's opening practice session on May 16, the project was abandoned on Friday.

"It was just time. Everything started too late," Saavedra told RACER. "We had an idea of the time to do it, which was very tight, and once we got started working on it, there was a lot more to do than expected, we didn't have enough personnel, and many, many factors added up to us telling Gary we shouldn't do it."

Saavedra says they could have gotten a car out in time to practice, but nobody felt it could be done without compromising quality.

"Everyone has given so much support – Chevy believed in us, IndyCar believed in us, our sponsors believed in us, but we couldn't do a proper program with the time we had," he continued. "We could have tried to scrape in and make it, but everybody deserves something better so I think it was smart to stop if we couldn't do it the right way."

The sponsors associated with the Colombian driver's ill-fated Indy 500 program, which would have been his seventh entry for the famed race, could help Saavedra and Peterson to return later in the season, or to help the team branch out into other forms of racing.

"The sponsors are with us and interested in building something strong," he said. "At this moment, it's hard to see if it will be in the IndyCar Series this year, or if it will be in something that's a new opportunity for us. Of course we want to continue in IndyCar, and Gary wants to step things up, so we need to find the right situation that's the best for everybody."