Why Rossi signed for midfield IndyCar team and the huge plan behind it
Thu 26, Sep, 2024
Source: The Race
This is far more than just ‘midfield team signs hard to read and rate driver’.
It’s one of the best teams at the Indy 500 signing an Indy 500 winner on a full-season deal for the first time in over 10 years. It’s part of a massive new co-ownership deal that could put this stumbling team on a track back to the front of the grid.
It’s also the latest move for one of IndyCar’s hardest to understand talents who won seven races between 2016-19 but has only won one since despite being at teams that have regularly won races with other drivers in that time.
Alexander Rossi has moved from McLaren to Ed Carpenter Racing as team-mate to Christian Rasmussen, in a move that would have been impossibly hard to see coming until recently.
We dissect why this deal is so important in the IndyCar silly season, from Splenda to the FBI…
Is Rossi a good signing?
At the end of 2019, Rossi was highly coveted by Team Penske. Very few people ever turn down a move there but Rossi elected to stay at Andretti where he won one more race but not until 2022 at the Indianapolis road course - although he was penalised after that race for using the weight of the drinks bottle to reach the minimum weight.
A move to McLaren for 2023 promised much but hasn’t delivered the kind of peaks of earlier in Rossi’s career or that Pato O’Ward was able to extract as team leader of McLaren in Rossi’s time there.
However you weigh this up, a driver who is still only 32 going from turning down North America's greatest team, to leaving one of motorsport's most famous brands by choice to join an inconsistent midfielder, is a fascinating chain of events.
The expectation of Rossi being a title contender or even more than just a random race winner has disappeared (though he suggested both will be his goals at ECR still), but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t Carpenter’s best choice.
He’s an Indianapolis 500 winner, and while he hasn’t extracted the level of performance needed out of two of the series’ best teams (Andretti and McLaren), there’s no reason he can’t be a very effective driver fighting for top fives and top 10s.
After all, his consistency has been impressive in recent seasons. This year his average finish was only 0.4 worse than O’Ward, even though that equated to four positions in the championship because O'Ward won two races and was in the top five more.
With that level of consistency, Rossi can be a safe pair of hands to guide this team comfortably into the Leaders’ Circle, which gives $1million for each car in the top 22 in its standings at the end of the season.
You could argue that is no different to what Rinus VeeKay has been for ECR since he joined the series in 2020, and he is eight years younger than Rossi.
I think VeeKay deserved the chance to stay and grow with the team, but also, there are benefits to freshening the line-up after four years and trying to go in a new direction.
Rossi’s friendship with team owner Ed Carpenter is well documented, so that’s likely another plus here.
Of the free agents on the market, none had the resume or experience Rossi does and this was a no-brainer signing for the team given that.
The only questions are likely will he do better than VeeKay, is the salary ECR had to pay him to get him here worth it and will the fact he’s exclusively worked for sprawling, well resourced operations and not smaller teams like Carpenter be a problem?
But if ECR can keep Rossi focused and extract his many years of experience in those top teams, this could be a strong move.
And if Rossi wants to continue to earn a large wage in the series, he’s got to be motivated to make this move a success. He's already described it as "more than a two-year deal" on his own podcast with James Hinchcliffe.
Why this could be key to Indy 500 success
Rossi won the 2016 Indy 500 and brings that experience to a team that regularly qualifies on the front row at the event. It’s struggled to make its race performance live up to where it starts in recent years, but it’s well accepted that ECR is one of the best teams at Indy and certainly better there than anywhere else.
That’s a lovely combo.
Rossi’s also been in the top five for the last three 500s, and only twice out of the top seven, after a crash followed an unsafe release penalty that ruined his race anyway in 2020 while fighting for the win, and 2021 when he ran out of fuel while waiting for the pits to be open.
The 500 is an exciting possibility for both driver and team.
How the new franchise system led to this
On Tuesday, ECR announced that it had welcomed a new co-owner, Ted Gelov, who owns the Indiana-based Heartland Food Products Group which produces Splenda sweeteners, among other things.
Given the noise that is made when an ECR car - Carpenter himself an Indiana native and three time pole winner at the 500 - does something good at Indianapolis, it seems like a perfect match.
It’s clear the team has struggled for funding in recent years and VeeKay’s car even ran without a main sponsor for a chunk of this season. This could certainly help with that.
Racer claims the deal is worth $40million, which would be enough to run a two car team at the sharp end of the grid for a couple of seasons alone.
Additionally, The Race understands that the new franchise model IndyCar announced on Monday is absolutely crucial to this move.
Among other benefits, the charter system means a team is guaranteed of being on the grid, and in turn that attaches a value to the entry into the series. Teams can buy and sell these charters.
That puts a tangible number on the entry’s worth. So if you elect to leave the series or want to generate cash by downsizing, it’s not just equipment and facilities that you have to sell. It’s the entry too.
It also means that hypothetically people can buy percentages or the charter outright. We don’t know how this deal is structured, but Gelov might own one or both charters for the team or he might own a percentage of those charters. It gives teams some innovative options for generating funding that wasn’t there before.
This new system was key to attracting Gelov. While it’s not a perfect system, deals like this wouldn’t have been possible without it.
What does that mean for the future of ECR
ECR was a top four finisher in the championship before Josef Newgarden left for 2017, and since then it’s had to settle for a single win (VeeKay in 2021 at the Indy road course) and three poles with Carpenter at the 2018 Indy 500 and a couple on road courses with VeeKay in 2020 (Indy) and 2022 (Barber).
Carpenter’s decline in the series is for a number of reasons but principally lack of a bigger budget and top quality personnel have been the main ones.
The latter is not team-wide - ECR is widely accepted to have one of the best staffs for taking on the 500 and its results reflect that - but a shortage of staff in the paddock and other teams adding more and more engineers to their roster has led to ECR falling behind the curve.
How Rossi could have ended up elsewhere
McLaren offered Rossi a deal to stay and while he pointed to multiple factors, he did mention financials as one of them. In other words, there was a stalemate as Rossi likely wanted more than McLaren would offer.
All signs in recent weeks were pointing to Rossi and Sting Ray Robb joining Rahal Letterman Lanigan and they were believed to be close to a deal.
Rossi is managed by his father, Peter, who also manages Robb, who brings a significant budget. Combining the two makes sense on the outside. Rossi requires a significant wage after all.
Some have pointed to the FBI raid being pivotal to this deal falling through, but to have turned around and signed for Carpenter in less than a week after that happening makes that being the main reason extremely unlikely.
Robb’s only ever been seriously linked to a return to Dale Coyne where he raced in 2023 and Juncos Hollinger Racing, too. Rahal hasn’t emerged as one of his landing spots in conversations with series insiders.
JHR has long been lined to a deal with Devlin DeFrancesco and his backers but that now appears unlikely.
Conor Daly is believed to have put together a strong budget next year and he did a fantastic job for JHR in the last five races of the season, so an unchanged line-up from the end of the year wouldn’t be a surprise unless someone brings so much budget JHR can’t say no.
It’s also believed to be keen to keep Romain Grosjean.
So Coyne seems the logical choice for Robb as it no doubt needs the kind of budget he brings and that gives the team the chance to support getting a better driver in the other car.
Knowing Coyne, we might need to wait until the week before the first race of 2025 for an answer there.
What happened to VeeKay
Just weeks ago Ed Carpenter was talking about envisioning a future with VeeKay and Christian Rasmussen, but just over a week later VeeKay was informed he was no longer needed.
The Dutchman is a double pole scorer and race winner with the team, has spent his whole IndyCar career there and was believed to be already working on next season with the team when the shock call came to go in a different direction.
He finished 13th in the standings this year and was had the fourth-best average finish on ovals.
Given that VeeKay has had chances to leave but stayed and has impressed in the team, it’s a tough pill to swallow in terms of fairness. But nobody knows what VeeKay’s potential is better than the team that has spent the last four years with him.
It’s a stunning blow for VeeKay who, at such short notice, is unlikely to be able to build a significant portfolio of backing to help ease the transition to a new team.
Which seats remain open
There’s only one unconfirmed seat in the top teams and it's going to Kyffin Simpson at Ganassi short of a bizarre U-turn, it just hasn’t been announced yet.
Rahal Letterman Lanigan is next up as a race winner as recently as 2023 and one of the few teams on the board that can afford to pay a significant salary for drivers.
Unconfirmed seats
Chip Ganassi x1 - Kyffin Simpson
Dale Coyne x2
Dreyer & Reinbold (Indy 500) x2
Juncos Hollinger x2
Prema Racing x1
Rahal Letterman Lanigan x2
Having been heavily linked to Rossi, Rahal has a lot of options it could go with. VeeKay is freshly on the market, while Linus Lundqvist is also available and was the series' rookie of the year and has two podiums and a pole under his belt in 2024. He's on the market due to Ganassi's downsizing and Simpson bringing enough budget to ensure he keeps the third seat there alongside Alex Palou and Scott Dixon.
Rahal also has Juri Vips under contract and gave him a drive at Portland, but it has had multiple chances to sign him and has so far not done so.
The fate of Pietro Fittipaldi may well be decided by how much Rahal needs the budget he helps to bring, but because of that it is likely to keep him on.
Moving to Coyne alongside his brother Enzo has been one paddock rumour discussed, but is not thought to be close to fruition at this time.
Newcomer Prema has long been linked to Robert Shwartzman, and he’s the most likely second driver there at this point alongside Callum Ilott, although it’s complicated by him being offered multiple jobs in Europe.
Juncos is newly boosted by a podium and we've discussed its options earlier in the piece.
Confirmed seats
AJ Foyt Santino Ferrucci, David Malukas
Andretti Marcus Ericsson, Colton Herta, Kyle Kirkwood
Arrow McLaren Christian Lundgaard, Pato O’Ward, Nolan Siegel
Chip Ganassi Scott Dixon, Alex Palou
Ed Carpenter Alexander Rossi, Christian Rasmussen
Meyer Shank Marcus Armstrong, Felix Rosenqvist
Penkse Scott McLaughlin, Josef Newgarden, Will Power
Prema Callum Ilott
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Graham Rahal
In terms of drivers to watch alongside those we've already mentioned, dominant Indy NXT champion Louis Foster's stock is high and he brings some budget as part of the prize. Jacob Abel was well beaten by Foster but in a smaller team (family squad Abel Motorsports vs the might of Andretti) and is also working hard to step up.
Recently dropped Williams Formula 1 driver Logan Sargeant is available and will test with Meyer Shank in November. He's likely to be one of the top IndyCar options coming from Europe's top tiers.
Formula 2 frontrunner Zane Maloney's Formula E deal has taken him off the table and while a full-time IndyCar switch feels unlikely for 2022 F2 champion Felipe Drugovich, he's testing with Ganassi next month.
Theo Pourchaire and Toby Sowery both impressed in part-season outings this year too with McLaren and Coyne respectively, but don't bring a lot of budget to the table.