It’s one of those questions owners and managers hate to hear and loathe to answer: What’s gone wrong?
So far this year, Ed Carpenter Racing, Meyer Shank Racing, and Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing have been in the uncomfortable situation of falling short of expectations in the early stages of the new NTT IndyCar Series season.
ECR has endured three rough races for Rinus VeeKay and Conor Daly; they’ve yet to earn a top 10 finish, and the Dutch-American duo sit a distant 22nd and 23rd in the drivers’ standings. RLL is in a better position with Graham Rahal owning the team’s best result so far of sixth, and he and Christian Lundgaard have their hands on 13th and 14th in the championship while Jack Harvey, the third member of the trio, is 19th. But where ECR made no significant changes to its engineering group for 2023, RLL made wholesale alterations and invested heavily in its engineering corps to improve its fortunes, and to date, its plans to break out of the midfield have not been realized.
With this Sunday’s Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix completing the opening quarter of the championship, there’s still plenty of time left for ECR, MSR, and RLL to turn their seasons around. But with the month of May swiftly approaching and rapid fire runs through the Indianapolis GP and Indy 500 to complete, the pressure is on to fix whatever needs fixing and prevent their early season slides from including the most important event on the schedule.
Among the three, MSR has been a particular anomaly due to its longstanding relationship with race engineering provider Andretti Technologies. With Andretti Autosport’s strong start to the year, which includes two poles, two podiums, and one win across St. Petersburg, Texas, and Long Beach, the gap from Andretti to the MSR cars driven by Helio Castroneves and Simon Pagenaud has been a frustrating affair.
At present, Castroneves sits 20th in the championship and Pagenaud is mired in 24th in the 27-car field, and drivers both have experienced plenty of adversity along the way. Rather than leave each race focusing forward, extra time has been required to analyze and find the root causes of the issues that have blighted MSR’s results.
“We work constantly on every little thing that happens, whether it’s the team side, engineering side, or driver-wise,” Shank tells RACER. “You know, there’s stuff we can control from the shop or the pits, but there’s also some things that are out of our hands. We can’t do anything about Simon ending up in the overflow in qualifying for St. Pete; we qualified second to last and that killed our race. Helio spun in Turn 1 by himself, lap one, at Long Beach. Nothing we can do about that.
“But at Long Beach, we screwed the pit stop up for Simon, and he was fit to have a top 10 day for sure; he was racing with Will Power, who got sixth and we put Simon down to 15th because we messed the pit stop up. So there’s not just one thing to correct and make everything better. It’s three things or four things that we have to do to make sure that we’re on top of it and do a better job than we’re doing.”
With the same dampers, chassis setup info, and performance data made available from Andretti, plus the engineering staff supplied by Andretti for MSR’s Nos. 06 and 60 Hondas, the separation between Andretti and MSR in pace and results has been head-scratching. Their diverging results this year highlight another key point that is often overlooked. Despite having the ability to put Romain Grosjean’s pole-winning setup from St. Pete on the MSR cars, or Kyle Kirkwood’s Long Beach-winning race setup on the Nos. 06 and 60, what works to perfection for Grosjean might not mesh with Pagenaud’s needs. And Kirkwood’s rocket-fast setup that got him into vic tory lane might be perfect for him, but it could be nearly undrivable for Castroneves.