“I can't have a year like that again, that's not the way I need to perform.”
Marcus Ericsson was one of the hottest silly season properties ahead of the 2024 season as he was chased by Andretti, got a late offer to stay from Ganassi and even received a last-ditch bid from Arrow McLaren.
That was all off the back of being in regular championship contention, winning the 2022 Indy 500 and, some would argue, being robbed of victory in the 2023 event, too. He rightfully became one of IndyCar’s biggest names.
Fast forward to the end of 2024 and what played out would've been difficult to imagine - with Ericsson 15th in the championship and his new Andretti team-mates either fighting for the championship (Colton Herta) or solidly in the top 10 (Kyle Kirkwood).
As ever in IndyCar though, things aren’t as they seem.
His season-opening St Petersburg race might have been a sign of things to come, where an air filter issue cost him fifth. At the Indy 500, he was taken out at the first corner. At Iowa, he had a pitstop issue. At Toronto, he was caught up in Pato O’Ward’s crash. At Gateway he had an MGU failure. At Milwaukee, he was involved in a dubious shunt with Josef Newgarden.
It was exhausting just typing that, as that’s six races - yes, SIX - where things basically out of his control took him out of races.
We can’t forget that there were mistakes on his side, too. But in a 17-race season where consistency is king, to lose six of those to events outside of your control means it’s time to revise how we look at Ericsson’s 2024.
He’s had time to take a deep dive into the season as a whole and joins The Race to discuss it.
“On a personal side, one thing that was clear when we did analysis after the season is that we were by far the biggest sort of outlier if you look at championship position and average pace during the season," Ericsson claimed.
“On average race pace, I had the eighth-best average race pace in the field, and I finished 15th in the championship.
“Everyone else on average race pace versus championship position was like one or two positions up or down, everyone is within one or two positions usually, whereas I was seven positions out of my sort of average pace.”
That disproportionate championship position is partly down to his DNFs, but to get a bit more specific, the ovals were the big problem. On road courses he had the ninth-best average finish, on street circuits he had those issues at St Pete and Toronto but finished the other two fifth and second.
In contrast on on ovals, mostly from the issues above but also crashing at Nashville, Ericsson’s results read 33rd-9th-23rd-24th-27th-5th-25th.
All of those oval races where he had issues, he was running in the top 10 and even in the top five at times, too. But it’s still a cause for concern with Ericsson.
“I hardly finish any ovals!” he added. “I had a terrible record on the ovals which is- I felt myself at least going into last year, ovals was one of my biggest strengths as a driver, street courses and ovals is my two strong points.
“I think that ovals were the big outlier, where we didn't get any results out of it. That's something that we've been focusing on and making sure, we need to do that better.
“The good thing with it, though, is that, for example, Colton was super strong on the ovals, so it's not like we need to, as a team, find a big chunk of time. I think we have the potential there in the car, a lot of things that didn't go our way on the ovals last year.”
The Indy 500 would be the perfect example of that. While Herta crashed out running third, given Ericsson winning in 2022 and almost repeating in ’23 you’d be forgiven for thinking Ericsson might have done better than Herta in that scenario.
But Ericsson wasn’t there - he’d been taken out by Tom Blomqvist at the first corner. Ericsson wasn’t innocent in that; the only reason he was at the back - so in the wrong place at the wrong time - was because he crashed in practice and a back-up car can never be as well prepared as a primary car for the Indy 500 where work on next year’s car starts the day after the previous Indy 500.
Ericsson did feel Andretti had done a great job on the backup car as, while it was tough to qualify and he almost got bumped out of the race, after two more practice sessions he felt he had a top-five car again, only for it to be taken away in the race.
It did help in one area, though. The bruising 500 in particular helped cement a bond with his new crew.
“That experience also gives me some strengths going forward,” said Ericsson.
“It really gelled our group together, and I felt like it was really a good experience looking back at it. It wasn't fun at the time, but I think it's gonna make us stronger going into Month of May this year.
“It sort of sums up our year as well, in a way. Things didn't really want to go our way.”
Of all the drivers in the field, Ericsson is one of the best at - at least in terms of discussing this openly - being able to look inwardly, accept flaws in his performance and work on them. It's why, even outside of the observable evidence, his assessment of his 2024 season is easy to buy into - he's generally well ahead of the curve of drivers still full of bravado looking for any excuse to blame their poor results on. He works with a mental coach and, it feels like at least, he has learned so much from some rough times in the F1 spotlight.
He's always willing to admit his own errors. Colton Herta is similar in this sense, and it’s no fluke that these two drivers often come back from an off-season having improved on an area of weakness.
As he said at the start of this feature, Ericsson can’t have another year like this - but to a certain extent he has some wiggle room there because he has a contract that lasts at least through the 2026 season, so 2025 is not a contract year.
But he knows he needs to build the momentum behind him again, the same momentum that catapulted him to this Andretti mega-deal in the first place. The only way to do that is with better results.
“On a personal side, it was this funny year but I've also used that, it has given me a lot of drive this off-season,” Ericsson adds.
“I’ve worked extremely hard in the off-season. I've been really putting in the work and being really honest with myself, [about] what I need to do to be better, and really been hard at it.
“The off-season in IndyCar is the longest off-season in motorsport. It feels like never ends.
“But what it does is gives you an opportunity to become better. So that's what I used the off-season to do. And I think the year we had gave me an extra push of motivation to really give it an extra gear.”
A long off-season… to punish yourself? - The Race asks as a follow up.
“Exactly,” Ericsson grins.
It’s very easy to forget that, while IndyCar is a spec-chassis series, all of the teams do extensive development and have their own philosophy and cars that require certain driving styles. This can explain why someone of Felix Rosenqvist’s calibre can go from a rookie of the year and race winner at Ganassi to a 21st-place championship finish at McLaren, and then to recording a pole position for Meyer Shank.
It’s an under-discussed area of IndyCar, and therefore when drivers move teams sometimes more slack is needed before making judgments.
There might be a bit of that for Ericsson. But if we just call an apple an apple, if you gave back even a couple of those six incidents well outside of his control he’d be much closer to Kirkwood and at least the top 10, which would be a much more palatable first season at his new team.
It was in any case a bad year - of course it was - but there are plenty of signs there that he can turn this around and add to Andretti’s increase in form.
The Andretti changes
And on that topic, this is The Race’s first opportunity to ask an Andretti driver what all of the changes in the off-season will mean for the team.
Michael Andretti is stepping back to a more advisory role, and while the team’s management structure isn’t actually finalised - at least in public - you’ve got Dan Towriss taking a much bigger role and Doug Duchardt stepping in as chief performance officer.
It’s a lot of change at a time when this team had just posted its best IndyCar season in years. But Ericsson isn’t worried.
“Everything that's been happening, it's been in a positive way,” Ericsson adds.
“There is a lot of motivation within the team. It's a lot of resources being poured into the team. So, we have all the tools and opportunities at our disposal to be the team to beat, and that's where we want to be. From the owners and down, everyone is really determined and pushing hard to win.
“I think everything that's going on is going to be a positive for us on the IndyCar side as well.”
There’s a lot of change going on at Andretti, so 2025 is going to be another fascinating year to benchmark its upward trajectory and a lot of things happening in the background against performance and reality.
