Agustin Canapino's tenure in IndyCar, which featured flashes of on-track promise and off-track controversy, has come to a close after Juncos Hollinger Racing announced the pair's "mutual" and "amicable" parting with five races left in the 2024 IndyCar season Wednesday.

"We commend Agustin for taking the leap into open wheel racing with us over the last year and a half, not only learning a completely new style of racing from his impressive and storied career, but also moving to the US and learning the language to join our series," the team said in a brief statement. "Both Agustin and the team have worked tirelessly to learn, grow, and succeed throughout their time at JHR, and we are extremely proud of what we have achieved together."

The move comes with the No. 78 Chevy sitting five points out of the final Leaders Circle spot that would pay JHR team co-owners Ricardo Juncos and Brad Hollinger just over $1 million in prize money over multiple installments in 2025. For a team whose pair of rebranded black and green cars have been largely bare of sponsorship in 2024, the loss of such a significant amount of funding as costs continue to rise in the sport would likely be difficult.

After an up-and-down debut season in 2023 that he entrered with virtually no open-wheel racing experience, Canapino delivered a couple solid results that suggested he and the JHR team were beginning to round into form after changes in the offseason. Along with qualifying for the feature round at the $1 Million Challenge at The Thermal Club and finishing 10th, Canapino finished a respectable 16th at St. Pete to go with 15th at Long Beach and 12th at Detroit.

Canapino's status with the team took a turn in Detroit, during which he suffered contact from Arrow McLaren rookie Theo Pourchaire in the hairpin that hosted much of the day's incidents. Pourchaire was penalized for the relatively minor incident, but it took Canapino out of the running for a potential first points-paying top-10 of his career. In the days that followed, fans of Canapino's lashed out at Pourchaire, flooding his social media posts with vitriolic comments and threatening direct messages that both teams condemned. Canapino, whose fans had reacted similarly twice the year prior during run-ins with then-teammate Callum Ilott, did very little to quell the controversy, 'liking' some tweets that made light of the situation.

The Argentine driver eventually posted a statement of his own -- against the wishes of his team -- that both rebuffed the idea of abuse and hate online, but rejected the idea that Pourchaire had received such messages for the simple reason that he had not seen them. Canapino also added that he had often recieved hate during his career and grew to ignore it and suggested others do the same.

Not long after, Arrow McLaren ended its commercially-driven strategic alliance with JHR. Then, 90 minutes before opening practice at Road America that same week, JHR officials pulled Canapino from the No. 78 for the weekend on the grounds that he was not mentally fit to compete that weekend after having been caught up in the aftermath of the week's events. After Nolan Siegel took over for the round, JHR announced the following week that Canapino would return to the team for the upcoming Laguna Seca round "for the remainder of the season" -- a plan that would clearly change over the next four weeks.

‘We had to do something’: Agustin Canapino takes leave of absence from Juncos Hollinger

Results of 18th (Laguna Seca) and 22nd (Mid-Ohio) led to a trio of consecutive DNFs during the Iowa doubleheader and Toronto round. The first two included a Lap 1 crash he was simply collected in and a mechanical failure, but he went into the summer break completing just four laps on the streets of Toronto after tapping wheels with Scott Dixon, who was nearly a car length ahead, during an early restart and sailing into the Turn 4 wall.

In Canapino's place last week during a private team test at World Wide Technology Raceway, IndyCar journeyman Conor Daly manned the No. 78 Chevy and appears a likley candidate to fill-in for some or all of the remaining rounds to try and lift the entry back into a paying Leaders Circle spot for 2025. Also among the candidates, Devlin DeFrancesco, who's watched this IndyCar season from the sidelines after a two-year start to his career at Andretti Global, has long been understood to be in discussions with the team for a ride in 2025.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Juncos Hollinger Racing parts with Agustin Canapino for rest of 2024 IndyCar season