The news that Chip Ganassi Racing will run five cars in the Indianapolis 500 this year sounds like a lot. This is a team that only ran two cars in IndyCar as recently as 2019 – and suggested at the time that slimming down its line-up had been helpful.
Yet now Ganassi will field Scott Dixon, Marcus Ericsson, Jimmie Johnson, Tony Kanaan and Alex Palou in the 2022 season’s biggest event.
That’s the most at the 500 since 2015 when it ran Max Chilton, Dixon, Kanaan, Charlie Kimball and Sebastian Saavedra. Kimball was third and Dixon fourth but the other cars all finished outside of the top 22.
And let’s not forget the standard at Indy and in IndyCar continues to grow each year. Ganassi keeps on racking up titles, but it hasn’t won an Indy 500 since Dario Franchitti’s last victory way back in 2012.
This expansion has come partly through necessity. You don’t turn down a driver like NASCAR legend Johnson, but he initially didn’t want to run ovals in IndyCar so Kanaan was brought back into the fold to race his car at those events. Now Johnson wants to try the 500 too, and that’s not an event where you’d want to drop past winner Kanaan. So five cars it is.
But you might be forgiven for questioning whether Ganassi is running too many cars and biting off more than it can chew. After all, it seems that resources aren’t the biggest influence on whether you can make a big team successful at Indy and there are plenty of past examples of expanded 500 line-ups spreading a team too thin or ending up with some cars as just uncompetitive filler.
Andretti Autosport is not just one of the biggest names but one of the biggest teams at the 500 whether you’re thinking in terms of money backing or human and parts resource. But in the last couple of seasons, some have questioned whether running anything above five cars is too much to create a successful collective.
At the opposite end of the spectrum as well, consider AJ Foyt Racing. This is one of the teams with the smallest amount of resources and financial backing on the grid historically. Last year it qualified three of its four cars in the 500, with the leading two cars making it comfortably thanks to the experience and leadership of the veteran drivers involved as much as anything.
So, is expanding like this wise for Ganassi?
“Well, hopefully it works well,” laughed the team’s talismanic leader and last year’s 500 polesitter Dixon when asked what to expect by The Race.
“Yeah, it’s five cars, a lot of cars. When you understand the process and how many times you’ve been there before, it can be tricky, and you’ve definitely seen other teams kind of step on their toes in these scenarios.
“I think with the way it’s done and who’s involved hopefully it should go pretty smoothly.
“The 500 is such a mixed bag anyway. We’ve been fortunate, I think, as a team and as a group to have great natural speed. Hopefully that transfers to this season, as well, but it doesn’t guarantee you anything.
“If you look at the race last year, with that first caution it wiped out a good handful of the top contenders, and even if you go a lap down, it took us almost the whole race to try and get that back.
“Sometimes it’s just not your day at the 500, and times it can just fall in your lap.
“We’ll work hard, as usual, but I think the group that we’ve got and the process that the team has already got in place is going to be strong as ever.”
The fact that Dixon acknowledges the potential weakness of the situation is reassuring, and makes the positive undercurrent more believable. The pitfalls of such a big line-up are clearly an issue he and Ganassi have considered, so it won’t creep up on them in May.
Some of IndyCar’s best teams often head into a season with question marks hanging over them, but they excel and thrive under that.
Take last season as the perfect example. Ganassi entered IndyCar having added the #48 full-time entry, making it two years in a row it had added an additional car.
It also expanded into Extreme E, and added a prototype in IMSA with Kevin Magnussen joining the squad alongside Renger van der Zande.
That’s three new programmes spreading the organisation thinner in a year the highly rated Felix Rosenqvist left the squad for Arrow McLaren SP.
This all came off the back of a 2020 title-winning season with Dixon where one of the biggest factors credited in that success was the closure of the Ford GT sportscar programme run by Ganassi in 2019, which allowed it to point some of its human resource back to perfecting the IndyCar team.
Ultimately, none of that mattered as Ganassi came out swinging in 2021. Palou was an immediate hit winning his first race with the team. Dixon may have struggled by his standards but his season was better than the points standings made it look. And Ericsson won two races in his best season in IndyCar yet.
So perhaps we should heed Dixon’s enthusiasm that this expansion to five cars could even be a positive thing for the team.
“We are a pretty big organisation,” says Kanaan.
“If you guys look how many cars we run, not just in IndyCar, but we have two cars in IMSA and a bunch of team personnel that don’t even travel. We were pretty much all set.
“If you think about the 500 as a one-off race, there is no other race that weekend. A bunch of the IMSA guys are actually ex-IndyCar people that we mixed.
“Every year Chip tries to rotate some of the guys so they can have the experience. We have plenty of cars. We didn’t really have to change anything.
“It’s just we added a car.
“My crew chief, which I don’t think I can actually mention his name or anything because we haven’t announced everything, but it’s a guy that was my crew chief before when I was there [at Ganassi] back in the day.
“I’m not trying to sound like it wasn’t a big deal because logistics have to be done, but we have plenty of capable people to do that. It was not a concern at all.
“Again, this news [of running a fifth car] didn’t just arrive this weekend. The team is very well prepared.
“Chip takes the 500 as the race of the team’s life, and we’re there to win, and he knows that I can win, as well.
“So he’s going to give me the exact same thing all my team-mates have, and we’ll go from there.”
