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Every year a team or driver threatens to impose, but every year it’s Andretti Autosport, Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske dominating in IndyCar.
That’s even though there is a same-chassis formula.
In 2020, these three teams won all but one race on the calendar.
Choosing between them is akin to splitting hairs, but as part of The Race’s pre-season look at IndyCar racing we’ve picked out some key categories, rated each of the triumphant trifecta in each area and given them a rating out of five. That means a 3/5 is above average within this rating system.
Ultimately all the teams are top quality, but breaking them down in this way may help to give a clear picture as to why, and how they come out on top each year.
We’re judging these teams for 2021, so while historical context has been accounted for there’s a heavy weighting towards 2020 and the off-season impacting the team’s current standing.
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Recent success
Penske: 5/5
Ganassi: 4/5
Andretti: 3/5
Bear with us on this one.
Ganassi hasn’t won the Indianapolis 500 since 2012, and Andretti hasn’t won an IndyCar championship since that year either!
Since then, Penske’s bagged four IndyCar championships (equal with Ganassi) and three Indianapolis 500s (equal with Andretti). While Andretti and Ganassi appear brilliantly adept at either event or championship, Penske consistently bags both at the highest level.
It has to score higher than the other two here, and the trailing duo have to be marked down for slipping behind.
Indy is the event everyone cares about and it’s also as big – if not bigger – than the championship itself, so you might think Andretti should score higher here. But it squandered a pole and other strong starting positions last season, and hasn’t won the race since 2017 even if it had a strong run before that. So it’s scored less than Ganassi here for that reason.
After all, if we’re addressing the elephant in the room here and saying Ganassi’s the championship team and Andretti’s the Indy 500 favourite, Ganassi won last year’s title and Andretti’s gone barren for three 500s.
Driver line-ups
Penske: 5/5 (Simon Pagenaud, Will Power, Josef Newgarden, Scott McLaughlin)
Ganassi: 4/5 (Scott Dixon, Marcus Ericsson, Jimmie Johnson/Tony Kanaan, Alex Palou)
Andretti: 3/5 (Colton Herta, James Hinchcliffe, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Alexander Rossi)
This one is quite easy as we recently published a feature on The Race ranking the 2021 IndyCar line-ups, and Penske won our version.
The fact that it was the only team where three of its drivers won races last year, plus they are all champions, and that Newgarden fought for the title, tips it over the edge. The addition of Scott McLaughlin will add another data point for the team and the other drivers are convinced he’ll win a race this year so it appears he only strengthens last year’s set-up.
Of course, any team that contains Dixon ranks highly. Marcus Ericsson has plenty of experience and Alex Palou is an exciting young driver with a different set-up approach which could broaden Ganassi’s horizons. Jimmie Johnson will take a while to get up to speed but what a great story, and Tony Kanaan should be competitive in the #48 car on ovals.
Still, there’s two returning drivers without a win or championship, so there’s uncertainty even if there’s upside.
Only Alexander Rossi and Colton Herta are regular win-threats in the Andretti set-up this year, but James Hinchcliffe and Ryan Hunter-Reay are still brilliantly consistent and capable of pushing the team forwards. Once the car was sorted last year Herta and Rossi looked potent and could be again in 2021.
It’s a tricky one to judge, but Dixon pushes Ganassi’s overall rating here as he – and Penske’s three returnees – all have titles and 500 wins. Rossi has the 2016 Indy 500 triumph and Herta is almost undoubtedly a future champion, but there’s still a lot to prove there.
Engineering talent
Andretti: 5/5
Ganassi: 5/5
Penske: 5/5
It might be slightly disappointing to say this category is a much of a muchness, but it only takes a brief look through success in recent history and the CVs of the ace engineers underpinning it to realise that the three teams are unsurprisingly evenly matched.
Penske, led by Roger himself who was still calling Will Power’s strategy until the end of 2019, and Tim Cindric are the big names at the top. But scratch under the surface and the engineers of all three of its returning cars from last year are IndyCar champions.
Two of those three have Indy 500 wins too,. The one lacking is Gavin Ward (pictured below) – the long-term Red Bull F1 race engineer turned aerodynamicist and electronics expert who joined Newgarden for 2019.
Ganassi had one of its biggest shake-ups in a long-time last year as it restructured its programmes and Dixon’s long-serving engineer Chris Simmons moved into a higher role within the team as performance director.
That didn’t effect Dixon though as he won the championship anyway with the fresh approach of Mike Cannon, signed from Dale Coyne to replace Simmons. Led by the brilliant Mike Hull and with someone like Simmons working behind the scenes, it’s another bulletproof group.
Perhaps the one group more difficult to rate is Andretti’s, as its team was the worst affected by the aeroscreen-induced changes for last season. You could mark it down for struggling in the first half of the year but then you could mark it highly for coming back so strongly and solving its issues like it did in the second half of 2020.
Given the pandemic hit and the reduced schedules gave Andretti less testing and track time to solve the issues, I’m going for the latter and they have just been phenomenal in the past – especially at Indianapolis. Had they started 2020 with the form they had ended it with, Rossi and Herta would have been in the title hunt.
The next leap for that group now is to win a title which the team hasn’t done since 2012 with Ryan Hunter-Reay. Led by Rob Edwards (above) and with people like Jeremy Milless and Garrett Mothersead in the organisation, it doesn’t feel like engineering brains will be a problem in terms of having the package to win a title.
The Race should point out that all three of these teams have a large engineering group and we haven’t even scratched the surface of each car’s mechanic and secondary personnel, so this is very much a whistle-stop tour!
Engineering line-ups 2021
Andretti
Nathan O’Rourke (Herta)
Jeremy Milless (Rossi)
Ray Gosselin (Hunter-Reay)
Garrett Mothersead (Hinchcliffe)
Ganassi
Mike Cannon (Dixon)
Brad Goldberg (Ericsson)
Eric Cowdin (Johnson/Kanaan)
Julian Robertson (Palou)
Penske
Gavin Ward (Newgarden)
Ben Bretzman (Pagenaud)
David Faustino (Power)
Jonathan Diuguid (McLaughlin)
Pitstops
Penske 5/5
Andretti 4/5
Ganassi 3/5
I thought about adding strategy into the mix here as well, but the waters are just too murky for this in IndyCar. For example, if a caution flies at an inopportune moment, that wasn’t necessarily mean a bad strategy call as you can’t decide what you’re going to do with hindsight. Of course, you can predict well, but it’s sometimes more luck than science.
Of course, some teams get it right more than others, but none of the big three got strategy abysmally wrong in 2020 and thus I’ve decided not to factor this in for fear of it being too imprecise.
I’ve gone with pitstops instead which is still a murky stat-ground but taking a snapshot of the season we can make better judgements here. IndyCar does so, with Firestone’s ‘Pit Performance Award’.
It changed in 2020 to rank cars based on the least time spent on pit road. As you can see, there’s a direct correlation between fighting for the championship/wins and a good pit crew.
2020 least time on pit road over the season:
1 Penske #1 Josef Newgarden (second in the championship)
2 Ganassi #9 Scott Dixon (first in the championship)
3 Andretti #88 Colton Herta (third in the championship)
4 Penske #22 Simon Pagenaud (eighth in the championship)
5 Penske #12 Will Power (fifth in the championship)
6 Andretti #27 Alexander Rossi (ninth in the championship)
11 Ganassi #10 Felix Rosenqvist (11th in the championship)
12 Ganassi #8 Marcus Ericsson (12th in the championship)
13 Andretti #28 Ryan Hunter-Reay (10th in the championship)
17 Andretti #26 Zach Veach/James Hinchcliffe (21st in the championship for Veach, who missed three races)
23 Andretti #98 Marco Andretti (20th in the championship)
Based on the fact that Penske has all three cars from last year in the top five here, it gets an easy 5. Maybe it should even get a 7/5?
Ranking the other pair was tricky, as Ganassi did have Dixon’s crew firing on all cylinders as the second-best pit crew. However, having Rosenqvist and Ericsson so far down is something it definitely needs to rectify in 2021.
It’s a similar situation for Andretti, but I’ve given it a mark higher for having two cars in the top six, and those were the cars it needs to be up there. OK, Hunter-Reay’s crew in 13th is disappointing, but you have to think that – with Andretti running one fewer car in 2021 than last year – it can refocus and refine its personnel to pick things up for this effort.
‘Distractions’
Penske 4/5 (NASCAR Cup, NASCAR Xfinity)
Andretti 3/5 (Indy Lights, Extreme E, IMSA, Formula E, Supercars)
Ganassi 3/5 (NASCAR, IMSA, Extreme E)
I’ve counted distractions as a bad thing here, so the more significant distractions the lower the score.
We saw in 2020 how freeing up some manpower at Ganassi – after the loss of the Ford GT programme at the end of the previous season – impacted it in a huge way. So let’s use it to add some more colour to the debate of which team is ‘best’ in this department.
Ganassi have scored so low because it self-admittedly benefited from that freedom of person power after 2019, but for 2021 it has added an Extreme E team and a prototype GT programme in IMSA alongside an extra IndyCar entry. It may (and probably will) work out fine for them, but there’s always the chance too many distractions detract from the programmes at hand and stretches the organisation too thin. We’ll have to wait and see but its performance has proven linked to this factor in the past.
Penske’s bagged a four. Sure, NASCAR is a distraction, but Penske has been doing that forever so its certainly one that hasn’t proven to encroach on its IndyCar success. It has dropped its IMSA programme and involvement in Australian Supercars this year as well to basically become a two series team focusing solely on championships in IndyCar and NASCAR. That should help.
Perhaps the only other thing to consider for Penske is the ‘distraction’ of Roger now owning the series and Indianapolis Motors Speedway. The team is set up to run flawlessly on the day to day without regular Roger interference, so that’s not a massive factor here either.
Especially when the other teams and drivers have doubled down on praising Roger for buying and for his stewardship of track and series, despite the apparent conflict of interest that could offer up.
Andretti achieves the same number as Ganassi. It has added Extreme E for 2021, alongside its previous Road to Indy, Formula E (with BMW) and Supercars teams. That’s the most series of these three teams, but only Extreme E is new in 2021 and it’s hunkered down to four full-time cars in IndyCar so that works in its favour.
The winner
Penske 24/25
Probably not a surprise for anyone who follows IndyCar racing that this team comes out on top. But even setting aside its illustrious history the team has delivered on a consistent level its rivals have not been able to match in recent years. There’s no reason that’s set to end. In fact Penske is the scariest proposition its been in a while with four full-time entries on the attack after a rare year of winning neither the championship nor the 500 last season.
Best of the rest
Ganassi 19/25
Ganassi has scored so much success and to be second on this list is no loss. All three of the entries are magnificent teams and ones that deserve respect.
Ganassi’s probably lost out significantly to Penske in that it appears to struggle to perform at the highest level across multiple entries. Dixon’s car is always a factor but its other entries have often struggled.
More distractions in other series may not help that this year – along with below-par pit performance for 2/3 of its cars last year. But if any team can turn around some of these minor issues, bank on Ganassi.
A podium finish
Andretti 18/25
This team is in a similar position to Ganassi, except it’s not managed to win a series title since 2012 and consistency over the course of the year is both vital in IndyCar and something Andretti has struggled with.
Its Indy 500 successes are a big plus in its rating as that event still means more than a championship to some, but the championship is still of utmost importance and its here Andretti can make big gains.
Small improvements in the areas covered in this feature will obviously help. With the set-ups seemingly fixed from last year’s issues, expect a really strong bounce-back year in 2021, and I expect Andretti is the most likely team to have three cars in the top 10 this year besides Penske.
All in all, such a tricky task to distinguish these three, and slight gains in any area could prove the difference in 2021.
