What will you remember the 2015 IndyCar season for? Juan Pablo Montoya’s teflon coating wearing off right at the time he needed it most? The introduction of the aero kits, several years after they were first mooted? Rocky Moran Jr’s inspiring hour of track time at Long Beach?

Whatever the case, it was a season that once again delivered racing so good that we almost took it for granted, coupled with the usual helping of drama on the side. Some was real: the loss of Justin Wilson will be felt deeply for a long time to come. Other scandals were like the sorts of things you see on regional TV news – they mattered deeply to a few hundred people, but barely reverberated outside the paddock.

More than anything, we got variety. Nine different race winners, and only eventual champion Scott Dixon finding his way to Victory Lane more than twice. If ever there was a season that deserved to end on a tie-break it was this one. Following IndyCar sometimes feels like riding a slightly wonky rollercoaster, but the rewards are a level of genuine, uncontrived competition that most other series cannot hope to match.

To try to make sense of it all, RACER’s Marshall Pruett, Robin Miller and Mark Glendenning asked each other some searching questions about all of 2015’s regulars, which for the purpose of this review, includes anyone who started a minimum of half the races. Look for new installments every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

SAGE KARAM

Chip Ganassi Racing
2015 starts: 12
2015 best finish: 3rd (Iowa)
2015 championship position: 20th; 197pts

Did Karam do enough with his part-time Ganassi deal to deserve another opportunity?

ROBIN MILLER: Sage took a lot of verbal abuse this season, which I found somewhat comical because people either have a short memory or know nothing about history. He was a 21-year-old rookie folks, prone to be aggressive and make mistakes like just about everyone before him. Johnny Rutherford was called “Wreckaford” before smoothing out, Bobby Unser ate a lot of concrete in the beginning and Lloyd Ruby and A.J. threatened Mario a few times in 1965. The danger today is that owners don’t have much patience but Karam’s runs at Fontana (fifth) and Iowa (third), plus his qualifying effort in the rain at Detroit (should have won the pole before the session was inexplicably cancelled) out-weighed his crashes. Hell yes he deserves another shot. The real tragedy would be if he just falls by the wayside because he’s the kind of personality IndyCar needs to go down the road with.

He was fast, and he was erratic. Which should we be focusing on?

MARK GLENDENNING: The former. You can teach a young driver to tone things down, but you can’t teach fast.

He drove like an idiot at Detroit, but most of the criticism from other drivers stemmed from what they considered to be a potentially dangerous lack of respect for others on ovals. Karam admitted at Sonoma that the fact that Justin Wilson was killed by debris from his car at Pocono was weighing heavily on him, even though he has – rightly – been completely absolved of any blame. Whether the way he processes Wilson’s accident translates into a different approach on the track is something we’ll only learn when he gets back into a car. But his raw speed and refusal to be intimidated was a thing to behold, and with a bit of refinement, I’d love to see where it can take him.

Karam was rarely impressive on road and street courses, yet became a force on ovals. Is that a concern for a rookie, and his potential employers in a road/street-centric series like IndyCar?

MARSHALL PRUETT: In Karam’s current position, it is. Fearlessness helped the 20-year-old to fly high on many ovals, but he struggled to find the right balance of aggressiveness and constraint when turning left and right was involved. Ganassi is searching for a budget to keep him, but if Sage ends up on the unemployment line, he’ll have two strong oval outings to showcase (fifth at Fontana and a third at Iowa) and a lot of missed opportunities on road and street courses to downplay.

Although an average finishing position of 17.5 at six road/street course events isn’t a complete shock for a rookie, the 2013 Indy Lights champion was expected to make less contact and finish higher than 12th on one occasion (at Detroit 2).

There’s no doubt Karam has immense talent, and if he’s able to return for another season with Ganassi, I’d expect the team to zero in on Sage’s road racing output. If he’s forced to look elsewhere, the Pennsylvanian could be limited to oval outings.

CFH Racing
2015 starts: 10
2015 best finish: 2nd (Toronto)
2015 championship position: 21st; 182pts

How good a fit is Filippi for the CFH set-up?

MARSHALL PRUETT: The charismatic Italian found a happy home at CFH, and for the first time since his debut with Bryan Herta in 2013, Filippi entered each road and street course with a sense of security. They really liked him, he really liked them, and when he was able to maintain focus throughout an entire event, it showed in the results.

If there was a knock on Luca this year, it was on his ability to start and finish a weekend on a high note; opening the season with a ninth at St. Pete and 10th at NOLA felt like the GP2 veteran was warming up for an ass-kicking season in Ed Carpenter’s No. 20 Chevy. A ninth at Detroit 1 and a welcome second-place sprint at Toronto proved CFH found a worthy replacement for the outgoing Mike Conway. But Filippi’s memorable days were offset by an equal number of anonymous runs to forgettable finishing positions.

And to be fair, when Conway wasn’t winning his two races in the same car in 2014, he was usually somewhere well outside the top 10. Filippi, minus the wins, produced similar boom-or-bust results.

And that’s where the question of Filippi’s fit comes in. Significant highs and lows with Conway and Filippi tells me the team has more work to do on their road racing R&D, and if the Italian is honest with himself, he knows there’s a lot to be found on his side of the equation. He made the Firestone Fast 12 in half of his races with CFH, yet lost ground – or failed to improve his starting position – in seven of his 10 races.

Provided CFH continues for another season of Carpenter sharing the No. 20 with a road racing specialist, keeping Filippi and continuing to build around him wouldn’t be a bad idea as long as their sponsors are patient. If, by chance, CFH needs a proven commodity that will bring increased consistency, Oriol Servia’s sitting by the phone.

Did he really capitalize on his opportunity this year?

ROBIN MILLER: A lot of us figured that with full-time, road-racing duty at CFH, Filippi might just score his initial IndyCar victory in 2015. He’d always impressed in his pinch-hit roles the year before but crashed trying too hard so this was the perfect opportunity for the personable Italian. And he did score his first podium with a strong second at Toronto after starting sixth but he would likely gauge this past season as somewhat disappointing with only a pair of ninth places to go with his runner-up finish in his 10 starts.

But he also qualified ninth four times and definitely was the bright side on that wing of CFH, as Ed Carpenter struggled mightily. He didn’t capitalize as strongly as he probably wanted but he certainly earned the right to give it another go in 2016.

Would JR Hildebrand be a better fit for the No. 20 car?

MARK GLENDENNING: It’s impossible to say. Hildebrand deserves a place in IndyCar and he’s long been keen to shake off the ‘oval specialist’ label. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better way to do that than to sign up for a road/street-only program. A look at his career suggests that he could probably do the job: he has finished in the top-five five times, and two of those were at Long Beach. (The other two were his second at Indy in 2011, a fourth at Iowa the same year, and a fifth at Texas in 2012). Those aside, he has six top 10s on road/street courses, and just one on an oval. (Motegi, 2011). He already knows everyone in the team, so there’d be no problems on that front.

Would he do a better job than Filippi? I’m not sure there’s a clear-cut answer to that. The Italian’s desperation to impress occasionally gets the better of him, but then it’s not like the No.20 car was a shining beacon on ovals this year, either. I wonder whether whatever was going on with that entry this year requires a more fundamental fix than simply swapping one road course driver for another.