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It’s rare to hear a lead driver declare his team has “sucked globally”. But those are the words Alexander Rossi used to describe his and Andretti Autosport’s 2020 IndyCar season.
A combination of bad luck, failing to adapt to the handling characteristics/tyre performance brought about by the new aeroscreen, some driving mistakes, and good old-fashioned bad luck plagued the team through at least the first half of 2020.
It meant after nine of 14 races Andretti’s talisman driver since 2016, Rossi, was 18th in the points. Much soul-searching was needed.
The Indianapolis 500 was a big blow. Marco Andretti put the team on pole but fell back, and Rossi was fighting for the victory before being pinged for an unsafe release while racing Takuma Sato out of the pits. Rossi then crashed shortly afterwards while the team’s highest finisher was James Hinchcliffe in seventh despite the team having had four of its six cars in the Fast Nine in qualifying.
After alluding to some “tough conversations” that were had in 2020, Rossi was asked to expand upon those conversations and what they addressed.
“No, I just think we sucked globally,” he said.
“Like there wasn’t anything we were doing right, whether it was qualifying performance, whether it was race performance, pit stops, my driving. None of it was good.
“I think Indianapolis was quite an eye-opener for everyone in terms of how fast all the Andretti Autosport cars, and to come away with really nothing was not good. It wasn’t a good Monday.
“We just all were honest with each other, and we all kind of discussed things that were good and things that were not good, and we took 2020 as an opportunity to learn from our mistakes.
“I think there’s an advantage and so many positives we can take out of it, and like I said, I think the end of the year went really well for us for the most part, minus St Pete, which is on me.
“There you go. I’m not going to get into the details of it because it’s not necessary, but I think we’re operating at a really high level right now, and I’m excited to get on track in Barber.”
After Gateway last August, the last five races went impeccably for Rossi and Andretti. Rossi scored four straight podiums and looked like he could net a first win of the season before an unforced error led to a crash at St Pete, leading to his first winless season in IndyCar. It was a fitting way to end such a disappointing year, but the four previous podiums pointed to a breakthrough.
Much of that came from set-up work needed thanks to the aeroscreen.
“It’s finding out how to make our dominant set-ups from last year work with the aeroscreen and the weight that it moves,” Rossi’s team-mate Colton Herta told The Race last year when asked where the late-season upturn in form had come from.
“So we had an idea of what we thought it was going to do, and it didn’t do that, so we’ve kind of been trying ideas on how to get our set-ups back to where they should be, or back to where they were last year because we had a lot of really good race cars last year.
“I think we kind of found it, this thing that works, so we can come to the track with our set-ups from last year and they’re relatively similar and they work relatively well.
“That’s not to say that that’s [how it is] everywhere. Obviously it changes on different weekends. But we definitely made a big breakthrough in the last few races.”
Sophomore driver Herta had better luck and a much more consistent season to score a career-best finish of third in the championship, while 2012 champion Ryan Hunter-Reay had two top-fives in that end-of-season stretch to score his seventh top-10 points finish in eight attempts since that title nine years ago.
There’s been a big reshuffle at Andretti in the off-season, with Hinchcliffe coming in full-time and effectively replacing Zach Veach. Marco Andretti will only do the Indy 500, which means the team will only have four full-time cars in 2021, in a year when its two biggest rivals Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske have both expanded to four.
There’s pros and cons to more cars. The more cars, the more data, which can be especially valuable when you have less track time or you’re trying to take advantage of testing. It also can take away points from the opposition.
But more cars can also stretch your organisation and leave it thin on the ground in terms of manpower. There can be a bit of a lack of focus, or drivers with differing styles can get left behind if a global set-up direction prevails.
The negatives in this case don’t really apply to Andretti as it still has the Meyer Shank Racing entry of Jack Harvey in its engineering debriefs as part of its link-up with the team, while the organisation has never really had an issue with the number of people working there.
“I think that’s always kind of a concern, is when you start to get a lot of cars, are we spread too thin, which I don’t think was the case,” says Herta. “I think there’s actually more than enough capable engineers and mechanics at Andretti to make it work. So I don’t feel any different about it.”
What it might do is just help tailor a bit more attention to each entry, honing each car for the respective driver’s style and use that to give it that bit more sharpness heading into 2021.
“Obviously having four instead of five can make it a little bit easier in terms of focus, for sure,” says team boss Michael Andretti.
“Yeah, we’re real happy with the way things have gone. We’re real happy with our driver line-up.
“I think we have four great full-timers that are going to help each other to hopefully have four of them fighting at the end of the year for the championship. That’s our goal. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Marco Andretti and Veach finished 20th and 21st in the points respectively (admittedly, Veach missed the last three races) last year, so there’s no doubt the team is stronger with Hinchcliffe.
In a year where a double Supercars champion, seven-time NASCAR champion and ex-F1 driver join the fray as well as all of the top 12 from 2020 staying on in the series, the following may be a bold statement but it shows the level of confidence within the Andretti organisation right now.
“I would argue it’s the best driver line-up throughout the whole series,” says a bullish Herta.
“We have four really good drivers. We’ve shown we have really good cars. Now just have to capitalise on that. Drivers need to do their job.”
Herta sounds every bit the team leader as he enters his third season a much more rounded IndyCar driver. Rossi’s a regular title contender, Hinchcliffe’s a race winner and Hunter-Reay a title winner.
All the ingredients are there and with some continuity between the end of 2020 and 2021, the Andretti team will be a factor in IndyCar once more this season.
