Robin Miller says…

The book on the veteran from Japan is that he’s quick, he’s inconsistent, he’s brilliant, he’s prone to crash, he’s unlucky and he’s just as puzzling at age 37 as he was at 27.

So the easy call here for 2014 is SOS (Same Old Sato) but that would be as unfair as it would be incorrect. Sure, he had five DNFs due to contact but none were his fault and what could have been a decent season wound up being about as disappointing as possible through no fault of his own.

His second season with A.J. Foyt started out like gangbusters and finished on a high note but had plenty of hiccups in between and that’s why he finished 18th in the point standings. Sato won the pole in the opener at St. Pete and led the first 33 laps before fading to seventh after a tire pressure issue and a slow, final pit stop.

He struggled at Long Beach, the scene of his first and only victory a year before, Barber, both races at Indianapolis and the opener at Detroit before snaring the pole for the second part of the Belle Isle double-header. He led 10 laps and got shuffled back on a pit stop before being hit by Briscoe and Andretti in separate incidents.

The highlight of the season looked to be the first of two at Houston, where he stormed from sixth to first and was out in front for 22 laps before tangling with the lapped car of rookie Mikhail Aleshin.

Other than Pocono (started fourth and ran well until an electrical gremlin KO’d him), and Sonoma (fourth), Sato was just part of the scenery until the Fontana finale, where he ran sixth after starting fourth.

Engineer Don Halliday and team manager Larry Foyt have made strides in calming down Taku during the race and getting him to think more big picture than fast snapshot. The final results didn’t represent how well he ran at times in 2014 and a little racing luck was in need.

Marshall Pruett says…

It has taken me a while to put it together, but Takuma Sato is to IndyCar what the Cleveland Browns are to the NFL.

Both have a sizeable collection of unwavering fans, and both factions know what it’s like to start each season with high hopes before coming to the realization that all of the pre-season optimism was either misplaced or genuinely delusional.

Like those poor Browns fans who keep telling themselves ‘This could be the year where we recapture the glory days,’ Sato’s supporters embrace each new season hoping the former Formula 1 driver will finally have a breakthrough. When it’s all over, another year of pain and suffering is all they have left to remember.

Sato eased that pain a bit in 2013 with a popular win at Long Beach, and definitely ended the 2014 season with a string of three promising results in the final five races, but after five years in the Verizon IndyCar Series, is there any reason to celebrate Takuma’s run to 18th in the standings? He had more than his fair share of bad luck which diluted posting a stronger season, yet bad luck seems to follow him at every team. With a half-decade of IndyCar performances on the books, it’s time to paraphrase former NFL head coach Denny Green and say, “Sato is who we thought he was.”

For a driver with his experience and pedigree, it would be patronizing to hail Sato finishing behind a pair of rookies (Mikhail Aleshin in P16 and Jack Hawksworth in P17) as anything other than a disaster, and if my tone sounds a bit harsh, keep in mind the only other full-time drivers he finished ahead of in the standings were Graham Rahal, another rookie in Carlos Huertas, and Sebastian Saavedra.

Sato is one of the nicest guys you’ll meet, and on his day – and history has shown those days are rarities – he’s a genuine threat to finish inside the top-6. But at 37 (he’ll turn 38 in January), what’s the upside? This isn’t a kid like Carlos Munoz or Sage Karam who deserves a bit of patience as he matures and learns his craft. He deserves to be graded on a tougher curve, and with all of his experience in mind, it’s sad to think he was beaten in the championship by 23-year-old Hawksworth who, like Sato, drove for a single-car team, had the same Honda engines, yet did it all on a shoestring budget. And missed a race.

With up-and-coming talent like JR Hildebrand, Luca Filippi, Conor Daly and others desperately trying to land a drive in IndyCar, and proven winners like Justin Wilson and Ryan Briscoe just a phone call away, Sato’s days at A.J. Foyt Racing need to come to an end. There are simply better drivers, both proven and based on potential, on the marketplace, and Sato’s numbers don’t lie.

He was 21st as an IndyCar rookie, 13th as a sophomore, 14th in Year 3, 17th in Year 4 and 18th in Year 5. That’s a trend, folks, and it points in the wrong direction. Think something is going to change in Year 6?

I’d welcome Sato’s continued presence in the series – at a different team and after paying for the seat – because he’s done nothing to show he deserves a prized ride that comes with a salary. If he goes, IndyCar also loses about 25 percent of its travelling media corps from Japan (not kidding), and that’s the last thing I want to see happen.

It’s no surprise the Foyt team went after Hawksworth to fill its second seat next year, but if Sato’s contract is picked up, I fear someone has gone insane down in Texas. With one of the few paying seats to offer in the IndyCar Series, the good folks at Foyt deserve more for their money. ​

David Malsher says…

It may have been an under-the-radar year for Takuma Sato in terms of results but in a way, this was exactly the season he needed. Sure, there were no great highs, but on the other hand, he wasn’t the de facto man to blame in one-, two- or multi-car incidents. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved in some, but that’s what comes of a season when you’re on a single-car team fighting four Ganassi, four Andretti and three Penske cars.

That meant that on weekends when Sato and A.J. Foyt Racing started out struggling, they stayed struggling…unless the driver pulled some Sato magic from his bag of tricks. So Taku would often start midfield, where so many contretemps begin, and would quite often be the innocent victim.

There were times when he was too tough for his own good – I still cringe at some of the chances he took on a wet Houston track, for instance – but if you get away with such maneuvers, it has to be a sign of good judgment, right? And I’d hate to see a quelling of the enthusiasm, self-confidence and snappy car control that earned Sato pole at Detroit 2 and St. Petersburg. But from the team’s perspective, three top-six finishes in the final five races were more important, as they showed Taku to be a man who could go fast without overreaching himself or straying too far beyond the capabilities of the car. He deserves to retain his seat at A.J. Foyt Racing.