Alexander Rossi will lineup on the grid next year for a team other than FollowAndretti for the first time in his IndyCar career. But what can we expect from him at ArrowMcLarenSP? DavidMalsher hears from the 2016 Indianapolis 500 winner 📝
There’s something about Alexander Rossi that suggests that moving to Arrow McLaren SP-Chevrolet is already doing him good. His once languid air and occasionally insouciant replies have all but disappeared. It’s like he’s gained a couple of tenths through sheer enthusiasm for his new role: he looks and sounds genuinely eager.
The 2016 Indy 500 winner finished fifth at the Speedway that weekend, and the three cars immediately ahead of him were the Chevrolet-powered Arrow McLaren SPs of his new team-mates Pato O’Ward and Felix Rosenqvist, split the Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda of Tony Kanaan, who will be joining the team for his 22nd Indy 500 start next May. Rossi’s view has barely shifted since that conversation in late May.
“I have a huge amount of respect for what Zak has done on the Formula 1 side,” he comments, “and I think that speaks for itself as far as knowing how to put the right people in place. A team that was struggling has moved forward to have some of their best seasons of late. Obviously this year it’s been different with the rule changes but still, Zak has been part of the upward swing of McLaren F1.
As well as his IndyCar commitments, he raced HPD’s Acura ARX-05 in IMSA’s endurance races – two years for Penske, two for Wayne Taylor Racing – and won the Daytona 24 Hours in 2021 as well as competing in the Baja 1000. But Rossi is quite open in admitting that times have changed at HPD, that there are no longer any “favoured sons”, and so he felt ambivalence rather than guilt about shifting across to Chevy.
“The driver support that I’d had from there in the past wasn’t going to be available any more, so that became a non-factor in my decision. So it just became a case of, ‘Do I want to stay part of the Honda family because it’s comfortable and I believe in what they’re doing, or is it OK to branch out because I see that there’s a positive future somewhere else?’”
Now he joins a team that O’Ward has pretty much made his own over the last three years – that’s the O’Ward who in Indy Lights proved of similar caliber to Herta and was arguably superior at that time. Rosenqvist, too, is an ace-in-waiting. So despite having eight IndyCar wins to his name, Rossi knows that his reputation hangs in the balance in 2023 as much as it ever has done in his career. Yet he insists he is not daunted.
For the first two-thirds of 2021, only one AMSP driver was flourishing away from the ovals. AMSP had followed an F1-style “qualifying is all”-type philosophy and had an extremely pointy, on-the-nose car for road and street courses that rapidly warmed up its tyres. That suited O’Ward just fine in qualifying because his steering inputs and reactions make it appear as if his steering wheel rim comprises a high-voltage electric eel.
Nonetheless, O’Ward and Rosenqvist were seventh and eighth in the championship this season past, which, according to the points table, was dominated by Penske and Ganassi. In the previous two years O’Ward had finished fourth and third respectively.
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