Alexander Rossi and Scott Dixon, both feel that grown numbers at Andretti Autosport and Chip Ganassi Racing will benefit them in the 2020 IndyCar season.
For each car fielded by an IndyCar team, resources required to run the team increase, and, sometimes, this is to a point where it may adversely affect the cars the outfit is running, as each driver will likely be allocated less of the team’s focus , and money.
Despite this, Andretti have expanded to six full-time entries in 2020, with Zach Veach, Marco Andretti, Colton Herta, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Jack Harvey (depending on who you ask, as he is more involved with Meyer Shank than Andretti) and Rossi.
In fact, three races in the upcoming 2020 IndyCar season will feature seven Andretti or Andretti-supported cars, with the addition of James Hinchcliffe to the team for the Indy GP, Indy500, and Texas rounds.
However, this higher quantity of drivers does not concern Rossi, as the Californian native believes that more input is always beneficial for a team. “Hopefully that was the missing piece: keep adding cars until we get a championship,” he started, jokingly.
“No, I think it’s really cool to be able to bring Colton on kind of into the fold full-time I guess. He was kind of already there with the Harding Steinbrenner Andretti relationship we had last year.
“We have already noticed a positive difference having the engineering staff back in the office and everyone kind of under the same roof, being able to just more efficiently kind of bounce ideas off each other, just progress the whole team forward.
“Colton is a super big asset for us. He has a lot of just raw pace. He certainly was already contributing in his rookie year last year. Really excited about it. Obviously the partnership kind of got made with Meyer Shank racing and Jack Harvey .
“It’s kind of a similar deal to what we had this Colton last year where Jack will be working with us on race weekends in some aspects. I think in a time where, as I’ve said before, it’s so competitive, you’re looking for tenths and hundredths of seconds, to have a variety of inputs is a positive thing.
“The important thing for us at Andretti is to make sure we have an ability to get through all that information in an efficient way. We have processes in place. We’ve been a big team for a while now. It’s not that we ‘ re going from two cars to five cars We’ve been four ever since I’ve been a part of the team This is kind of just the natural progression.
“We’ve done a lot of really positive things this off-season. Hopefully it’s enough to finally break through that barrier and we can come out of the last race with a championship.” CGR’s Dixon was of a similar mindset to Rossi when he spoke about the addition of Marcus Ericsson to his team, which is now made up of three cars.
It will be Dixon, Ericsson, and Felix Rosenqvist. “I think we’ve gone from two to four then back to two, adding a third this year,” he said. “The most I can see from right now is just the amount of personnel we’ve been able to bring on. We’ve kind of been pretty thin there for a while, especially in the engineering department.
“We’ve been trying to hire people for almost two years. Just couldn’t find the right fit. We added actually a lot of people this year, probably four or five on the engineering side, then the depth of the whole GT program coming over has helped as far as management and also crew people as well.
“I think personnel-wise the team is probably in the best situation I’ve seen it in the last maybe five or six years. So I think off-season development has been really good. Also the change of mindset. I think we kind of got stuck there a lot of times just doing the same thing and looking for different answers, which just wasn’t working in some of our weak areas.
“We definitely have always had a very good base. Marcus, again, it’s difficult, as Rossi pointed out, the lack of testing doesn’t really get you down that road too quickly. I think the addition of him and more cars on the team is going to be great. I think we’re looking for big things from him especially with his second year.
“The first year is always fairly daunting trying to get up to speed, going to a lot of circuits you haven’t been before. Pretty much a Team Swede now with him and Felix. It’s been a lot of fun so far and hopefully we can keep building on it. “
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