Photo credit: Matt Fraver | Penske Entertainment

ABEL Motorsports will enter the 2025 season with a revamped driver lineup, but don’t say that they’re unfamiliar with each other.

Callum Hedge and Myles Rowe, two teammates last season with HMD Motorsports, both are moving over to ABEL in 2025. They’re joining returning driver Jordan Missig, a former teammate of Rowe’s as well when the two won a teams championship together with Pabst Racing in USF Pro 2000 in 2023. An additional fourth driver is unannounced.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the 2025 Indy NXT season at the series’ content days this past week, all three drivers spoke on what it meant to be a part of their new team.

A four-car team may seem large in some motorsports categories, but for the drivers coming into ABEL, it is a smaller setup than they’re used to.

Rowe and Hedge are two drivers who have been used to being on teams with a much larger car count than ABEL’s four cars. They both were one of ten on HMD Motorsports last year. Hedge was part of an eight-car Crosslink Kiwi Motorsport team as well in 2023 when he won the Formula Regional Americas title.

While appreciative of the teams he was part of in the past, Hedge pointed out that the close-knit nature that comes with racing with a smaller group such as ABEL will push him toward better results.

“It feels like a bit of a family,” Hedge said. “I feel like that, as a whole, is allowing me to get the most out of my stuff.”

Hedge finished fourth in the championship in 2024, showing his prowess on a wide range of tracks. His five top-five finishes came on two road courses, two ovals and a street circuit.

It’s that wide-ranging consistency which the New Zealand native looks to build on in 2025. 

“I’m able to look at my performance last year and fill in the gaps,” Hedge said. “And then look at what ABEL does, what they do differently and how to work that into there.”

Hedge has already proven himself as a versatile driver, and his record in qualifying further cements that reputation. He led both Formula Regional Oceania and Formula Regional Americas in pole positions in 2023.

On top of that, he’s also a champion with his aforementioned Formula Regional Americas title. All three of the drivers on ABEL have won championships in the past two years in open-wheel racing and beyond.

Missig is the most recent of those champions. On top of a Indy NXT partial campaign in 2024 which ended in a ninth-place finish at Iowa, Missig had a stellar year in Radical Cup North America, winning a title in the prototype spec series in the Pro 1500 class driving for Graham Rahal.

Now he’ll have the chance to carry that success over to Indy NXT on the back of his best finish yet. He expressed excitement and optimism about doing that, especially alongside a former teammate such as Rowe at ABEL.

“Me and (Myles) gel very well together,” Missig said. “Our driving styles are very similar to each other and whenever we see each other on track, we give each other as much space and room as we can.”

That partnership between Missig and Rowe will be one of the key dynamics to watch throughout a season where Rowe is looking to bounce back. After having a strong start to 2024 with five straight top-10 finishes, the 2023 USF Pro 2000 champion had a slump of sorts as he fell to 11th in the standings after a string of mechanical issues and incidents.

Rowe was up front about those struggles, and in his calm, soft-spoken, oftentimes poetic tone, he detailed the steps he was taking in the offseason to work toward learning from them with his new team.

“We’re taking it race by race,” Rowe said. “It’s still a new team, the goal is trying to communicate clearly in preseason what our strengths, and most importantly, our weaknesses were.”

ABEL as a team showed strengths in 2024 mostly with Jacob Abel, who earned a well-deserved promotion to IndyCar after scoring three wins and ten podiums. Now, with a stable of young champions all in their first full season with the team, they’re aiming to repeat that success in 2025.

The 2025 Indy NXT season kicks off on March 2nd, with ABEL Motorsports and the full grid taking on the Streets of St. Petersburg at 10 a.m. ET.