Rossi confirmed to Motorsport.com that he has signed a new contract and that it will be announced in three to four weeks, citing legal reasons why it can’t be revealed now. Asked what was his priority when weighing up options for a new deal, the 2016 Indy 500 winner said: “I want to win the championship. It’s all about the championship for me. The Indy 500 is awesome, it’s great, but the biggest motivation for me on Sunday is the chance to gain double points.”
When quizzed as to how many IndyCar teams he believes are capable of winning the IndyCar championship, he responded, “Three,” and asked if one of those was Andretti Autosport, he replied, “We haven’t been for a long time. Just look at the stats: there was 2012 with Ryan [Hunter-Reay], and nothing since.
“Now, that said, I do believe Colton [Herta, teammate] could have won the championship last year, but some circumstances he had hurt him badly. He was leading Gateway but had car failure, and Nashville… yeah, he ultimately made a mistake but he was super-quick and kept getting put back in the pack. If he had won there and Gateway, instead of DNFs, that would have been more than enough to win a championship. He’d have almost 80 more points, and the others would have had less. And I came pretty close in 2018. In ’19 we were strong up until the middle of the year, and then we lost it. So yeah, there’s that to consider.
“But for the last decade there have been two teams dominating the title [Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske] and now I think there’s three teams capable. Our cars are fast enough to win it – I keep telling people our cars are potential championship-winning racecars, fast almost everywhere we go.”
Taking a drive at Arrow McLaren SP would of course involve Rossi switching manufacturers, from Honda to Chevrolet, which some might find surprising. HPD paid a substantial sweetener to help keep him under the Honda umbrella when he inked a three-year deal with Michael Andretti in the middle of 2019 and spurned a potential opportunity to join Team Penske. However, management changes at HPD in recent years have seen the company’s priorities shift, says Rossi.
“My relationship with Honda is good,” he said, “although everyone’s relationship with Honda is different from what it was. David Salters [HPD president], with his engineering background and what he came in to do, is very much focused on the numbers side of things, the performance. Whereas I think Ted Klaus [predecessor] and Art St. Cyr [Klaus’s predecessor] were more of your kind of corporate guys and had more of a one-on-one relationship with the drivers.
“Dave’s great; if I want to call, he’s right there. But in terms of the driver/manufacturer relationship, it’s more a thing of the past – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I think for a period of time, Chevy was kicking our ass, and there was a huge directive and push at HPD to rectify that. David’s a part of that, and he’s done a great job to get us to where we’re at now from a reliability and competition standpoint.”
Former F1 driver and GP2 star Rossi has been with Michael Andretti’s team since he joined IndyCar in 2016. He won Indy as a rookie but partly due to Honda’s inferior manufacturer aerokit, didn’t score his first road/street course win until the penultimate round of 2017.
Into the universal aerokit era, Rossi became a title contender in 2018 and ’19 and racked up five more wins but it’s now been more than 40 races since he last went to victory lane in an IndyCar. Andretti Autosport as a whole struggled for the first half of 2020, when the aeroscreen altered the cars’ dynamics but no one could go testing due to COVID-19 restrictions. Rossi delivered five podiums, but finished only ninth in the championship, while last year he finished in the top three just once and was 10th at season’s end.
Although he has been profoundly unlucky in getting caught in other people’s misdemeanors over this period, he has also made a couple of high-profile errors himself. However, he’s also frequently had his efforts nullified by lamentable pitstops, as the team struggles to find personnel who can work as a slick unit to match the swiftness of the Penske and Ganassi crews. Rossi has had a different crew line-up at each of the first five rounds of the 2022 IndyCar season.
“The team is well aware of my frustrations with the pitstop situation and they’re doing their best to address it,” he said. “I’ve been told that the best group that is possibly available will be on my car for the 500, and I do believe them.
“Within the team, the relationships are great, the engineering department is one of the best, maybe the best in IndyCar. My frustrations lie in small details, and when things are as competitive as they are here, you have to have it all.
“I’m not saying that every other team is perfect, that would be insane, but I’ve been concerned and have expressed my concerns for the past couple of years now. Some have been addressed, don’t get me wrong, but some haven’t. That’s a major frustration – the small details – because like I say all the time, our racecars keep getting faster. We have really great cars.”
