Freshly crowned Indianapolis 500 winner and new championship leader Marcus Ericsson of Chip Ganassi Racing joins this week’s The Race IndyCar Podcast.
With just a couple of hours sleep the night after the race, Ericsson outlines how he celebrated the biggest victory of his career, before detailing how his team supported his success and what he was thinking in the closing stages when he made a crucial victory push by overtaking three key cars.
There’s more joking about Ericsson’s omission from The Race’s 2021 mid-season driver rankings from previous shows, and how the fact it was podcast co-host Jack Benyon’s first Indy 500 on the ground must make him a lucky charm for Ericsson.
As always, JR Hildebrand is the perfect driver’s-eye guide to the Indy 500, in which he finished 12th for AJ Foyt Racing despite strategy struggles that he explains in more detail.
He analyses why Ericsson’s defence was so impressive in the closing stages and why driving Turn 2 at the Speedway – which caught out Romain Grosjean and frontrunner Rinus VeeKay among others – is just so difficult in the podcast’s general race debrief.
Pato O’Ward and Arrow McLaren SP’s bittersweet second place, Penske’s third sub-par Indy 500 win in a row and Andretti’s struggles are also part of the breakdown.
– Listen on Apple Podcasts
– Listen on Spotify
