How Ganassi's pursuit of perfection is paying off

Scott Dixon made it two wins from two as IndyCar hit Indianapolis Motor Speedway in anger two months later than planned for the Grand Prix of Indy.

A promising day for Will Power went south for the second time in as many races, while Simon Pagenaud resurrected a lowly 20th place grid slot to finish third, behind Graham Rahal.

But beyond the apparent ease with which Dixon had controlled the race, there were plenty of important discussion points, not the struggles of Andretti Autosport - with Colton Herta its only representative in the top 10 - and an unintended side-effect of the aeroscreen.

Autosport picks up the five key takeaways from the first of two visits to the track, which is set to be repeated for the Harvest GP in October.

1. Dixon makes the difference

If the Texas Motor Speedway season-opener showed that Chip Ganassi Racing was on a different level to its opposition, last Saturday's GP of Indy suggested that the team's five-time champion Dixon was the differentiator. Yes, the timing of the caution period knocked polesitter Power out of contention and he had plenty of pace in reserve, which we didn't get to see because initially he was going for a two-stop strategy.

And it's very interesting to consider what Rahal might have achieved had he done the same as Power and switched to a three-stop. After all, when the Rahal Letterman Lanigan team gets things right set-up-wise, it tends to get them very right - see Barber Motorsports Park in 2019 or Detroit in 2017.

But Dixon's form was so imperious in the second half of the race that public claims by any of his rivals that the #9 CGR-Honda was beatable would be greeted with scepticism.

This latest race also demonstrated that Dixon and new race engineer Michael Cannon are sympatico already, and that has to be a knockback for anyone among the opposition who hoped the pair would take some time before meshing like well-oiled cogs.

"Everyone talks about how good Scott is at saving fuel. But when he's not saving fuel, he's even better. The speed he has in reserve is pretty shocking, and it's really hard to beat a fast car and a fast driver" Michael Cannon

So how did the team progress from looking okay but nothing special on Friday morning to scoring a comprehensive victory? Cannon, who previously worked with Santino Ferrucci at Dale Coyne, is the man in the know.

"We're not under the gun to start the cars on the same set-up as each other, but we felt it was prudent to do so," he told Autosport, "and sure enough, by the end of Friday practice and qualifying, Scott, Felix [Rosenqvist] and Marcus [Ericsson] all had very similar complaints.

"Actually, if we could have put the second half of our first lap and the first half of our second lap together then Scott would have been on pole, so the car was in the ballpark but still, there were improvements to be made and we listened to the drivers' verdicts. Overnight we tidied up a few things so that in morning warm-up Scott was fastest and that's the set-up that we took into the race."

There was little debate over how to approach the race. The Ganassi cars would initially remain flexible for two or three pitstops - that would be governed by the pace of the race and the wear on the red-walled, soft compound tyres - but all three cars would start on Firestone's harder, primary tyre.

"We went in expecting a two-stopper," said Cannon. "But then we looked at the pace and realised that anyone doing a two-stopper would require so much fuel-saving and so much work to try and make his tyres live, that we had the pace relative to them to make up the deficit of coming down that long pitlane an extra time.

"Having decided that we'd rather die on our feet than live on our knees - and we all came to the same conclusion within a lap - we decided to put the cars on three stops, pull them in and get them off the blacks and onto reds as soon as possible."

The Ganassi team's pre-race concern about a 'green' track being unkind to the softer compound Firestones was justified. The amount of rubber down by lap 10, when Dixon and Rosenqvist stopped (Ericsson would pit on lap 11), was not quite enough to keep the reds together, and Dixon ran into some handling difficulties in his second stint, to which he alluded afterward.

"On the first stint on the reds, I went really hard and kind of burnt the rears off," he said. "We made a couple of changes to try and help that and it just made the car better and better."

Dixon needed help from Cannon, but Cannon needed Dixon to also help himself by adjusting his driving style. For both, it was a case of 'ask and ye shall receive...'

"We chopped some front aero out of the car at the first stop and that was enough to get the balance closer to ideal," explained Cannon. "We had basically started the race with too much front wing."

After the race's sole caution period, Dixon was fourth behind leader Rahal, Spencer Pigot in RLL's temporary third entry - the Citrone/Buhl Autosport machine - and Conor Daly of Ed Carpenter Racing. All three were on two-stoppers, running on the primary tyres and needing to be very careful with fuel, making them inevitably vulnerable to Dixon.

From fourth on lap 41, he was into the lead on lap 48 and pulling away at a seemingly absurd rate. His pace advantage was of course exaggerated by his closest pursuers being hobbled by their team's strategies, but still, every onlooker knew then that, barring mechanical or pitstop issues, the race was as good as over.

"Everyone talks about how good Scott is at saving fuel," Cannon chuckles. "But when he's not saving fuel, he's even better. The speed he has in reserve is pretty shocking, and it's really hard to beat a fast car and a fast driver. It doesn't matter what your strategy is if the guy's able to haul ass.

"We could have run that race, that strategy, with Joe Blow and it wouldn't have been the same result. We made the choice, but Scott made it happen" Michael Cannon

"From the moment we did the lap 10 pitstop we knew what was going to happen... That sounds arrogant, but honestly, you sit and look at the math and think, 'I'm pretty sure we've got this.' And the strategy wouldn't have necessarily worked without Scott's pace."

I reminded Cannon of Ross Brawn's comments from back in his Ferrari days, whenever Michael Schumacher appeared to win through the Scuderia coming up with an imaginative strategy that wrong-footed the opposition. Brawn would be at pains to point out that his tactical masterplans were only feasible because of Schumacher's superior and relentless race day pace.

"That's exactly right," agreed Cannon. "We could have run that race, that strategy, with Joe Blow and it wouldn't have been the same result. We made the choice, but Scott made it happen.

"You know, people have been very kind and commented on what a good job I'm doing with Scott, but I point out that he'd won 46 races before he ever set eyes on me! I'm just happy to be part of it now."

2. What's going so right at Ganassi?

Never underestimate the scale of Chip Ganassi's ambition and the refusal to rest on laurels. Given the closeness of the competition, some team owners might regard a championship near-miss as something that can be remedied for the following season by just making a couple of tweaks here and there. But Ganassi isn't built that way. He regards his team's annual haul of laurels as insufficient if they don't at least include a championship and/or an Indianapolis 500 win.

Cast your mind back 20 years and note that this is the man who, having seen his team win four straight championships with the Reynard-Honda combination, tried to steal a march on the opposition by changing both and running Lola-Toyotas for 2000. So even before Dixon atypically finished outside the top three in last year's championship, there was no way Ganassi was going to shrug it off.

New blood, including Cannon, was brought in over the off-season alongside existing members of its Ford GT IMSA team, which is largely responsible for the staffing of Ericsson's third car.

After last Saturday's victory, Dixon commented: "It's kind of a new team for us, a lot of new people, so obviously we've got a lot more depth this year because we kept most of the other people, as well - they just kind of moved around to different areas and helped for support and management.

"It's nice to have a fresh set of eyes not just from Michael Cannon but also the Ford GT program, especially in endurance, which I think was a big help. Brad Goldberg [Ericsson's engineer] has been massive in just thinking about different ways of looking at dampers, car setups and oval stuff. There's definitely areas over the last few years that we've kind of let slip and maybe not been as dominant as we should be as a team and were kind of on the back foot a lot."

Cannon is a modest man, so question him about his role in Dixon's 2020 season-opening blitzkrieg, and he passes the praise onto the team.

"The thing about Ganassi is that there's so many bright people in one place," he observes. "I can't say enough about Chris [Simmons, Cannon's predecessor who is now competition manager], Blair [Julian, crew chief], Julian [Robertson, technical director and Rosenqvist's race engineer] and Brad. But also there are a lot of people whose names are less familiar that make a huge contribution.

"The thing I was completely unprepared for when I went there was how open and helpful everyone was - 'What can we do for you? What can we do to help you?' It's a truly unique place to work."

Such support has not been just a psychological boost; it's of genuine practical help.

"Chris attends the races and I use him as a sounding board," explained Cannon. "Literally in the middle of qualifying last Friday, I turned to him and said, 'I think I've made a mistake by adding downforce. What's your opinion?' He said, 'Yeah, I think you're right,' and we moved on accordingly.

"These people are totally, totally dedicated. They have not backed into their championship successes" Michael Cannon

"People talk about team resources and automatically think of it in terms of dollars and cents - and that's part of it, for sure. But it's about human resources, too. Having guys like Chris, Brad and Julian and others means I'm able to grab a lot of information from some very bright people. There's an impressive vibe of wanting to help your co-worker, and you certainly don't get that at every place.

"There's that, and then there's the incredible effort that these guys put in. Barry Wanser [team manager] is an animal! Chris is an animal, too: I will get emails from him at 10.40 at night, and then 5.30 the next morning! These people are totally, totally dedicated. They have not backed into their championship successes."

Given this momentum we've witnessed so far in 2020, it's surely time for Dixon to earn his second Indy 500 win: it's been 12 years since his one and only victory in 2008, despite regularly being a potentially winner. Ganassi's last Indy triumph came with Dario Franchitti in 2012.

"Winning the 500 is the plan," confirms Cannon. "I've promised Scott that his car for Indy will be better than his car for Texas. That said, Tony Kanaan summed it up well when he said that the track chooses who wins.

"What we can do now is come up with a good enough car to run at the front, and then on the day, come up with a good enough strategy to stay there. But as long as one of the Ganassi cars wins, I'll be thrilled."

This season, more than at any time in the past few years, it seems foolhardy to bet against the Dixon/Ganassi combo winning Indy.

3. Andretti unable to reap benefits of strength in numbers

Andretti Autosport entered six cars in last week's Grand Prix - full-timers Herta, Alexander Rossi, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Marco Andretti, Zach Veach joined by James Hinchcliffe in the second of his three guaranteed outings. This sextet also pools data with Meyer Shank Racing's Jack Harvey, since MSR is a loyal Honda partner who ended his union with Schmidt Peterson Motorsports when it became Arrow McLaren SP and switched to Chevrolet power.

Yet last Sunday with all this resource at hand, the team could only emerge with a best result of fourth place, courtesy of a decent albeit under-the-radar drive from Herta in the Andretti Harding Steinbrenner entry. After an effervescent rookie season of two wins but only one other top-five finish, the 20-year-old needs to demonstrate such consistency on days when his car is only thereabouts. He took seventh at the season-opener in Texas, qualified third for the GP of Indy and, aside from a brief trip down the Turn 1 escape road, kept his head during the race and drove well.

What will have alarmed fans of the Andretti team was Herta's post-race remark that "we didn't quite have the pace of the guys that finished ahead of us." It looked that way, frankly - just as in qualifying, his teammates Rossi and Hunter-Reay had never appeared likely to make it into the Fast Six and ended up sharing the sixth row.

Of course, they ended up being struck by misfortune on race day anyway - Hunter-Reay was delayed by a tangled air-gun hose in his first stop, dropping him to 22nd, while following the only restart, Rossi suffered the recurrence of a fuel-pressure problem that had afflicted him in practice and had to retire. Rossi described his #27 only as a "top-five" car.

There was no better luck elsewhere in the team. Hinchcliffe, trying to recover from P19 on the grid didn't get all of his fuel during one pitstop, obliging him to coast through a stint; Andretti had an ill-handling car after contact bent his toe links; and Veach threw his car off the track. Harvey, one of the talking points after qualifying on the front row, got buried by the timing of the caution period and then didn't have the pace to fight back. The Briton trailed home 17th.

Every team can have an off-weekend, and having Harvey's Shank car on the front row and Herta's AHS machine on the second row helps boost the team's weekend to a 'C' grade overall. But preseason, Rossi was exceptionally enthusiastic (in his sotto voce way) at the progress Andretti Autosport had made on road courses, and in that light, a merely adequate performance on the IMS road course has shades of mediocrity.

"For whatever reason, Indy's road course has always been a challenge for us," Rossi's strategist and team COO Rob Edwards told Autosport. "Ryan's been quick there before, but it's never been Alex's strongest track. Last year they qualified 16th and 17th so I think we did make a step forward. But clearly there's more work to do.

"On the other hand, Jack and Colton did make the Fast Six, so it isn't like we as a team don't understand what it takes. But with the current format [there was only one practice session before qualifying on Friday] we need to get on the pace with all our cars sooner rather than later.

"I agree exactly with what Alex said, that we had a top-five car, because I think we had definitely made progress between qualifying and the race, but it took us too long to get there."

"If we had normal three-day race weekends, we could maximise the benefits of having all those pieces of information coming in. But when you're challenged just to turn the car around for the next session, a lot of that extra data is just being wasted" Rob Edwards

It's tempting for onlookers to suggest that by having seven missiles in his armory, Michael Andretti should have had at least one that could take down or at least trouble the flying Dixon. But there are a couple of reasons why having so many cars with which to experiment with different setups cannot currently provide the assumed benefits.

For one thing, Andretti Autosport's necessary protocol for working in this wretched coronavirus-afflicted era has caused some interference on the communication lines between each strand of the team. Edwards confirmed that in these times of social distancing, Harvey and race engineer Andrew Listes aren't debriefing with the rest of the team as they ordinarily would.

"We had a new engineering trailer that would enable everyone to debrief together but that is not a sensible course of action given the current circumstances, so everyone's debriefing in their individual trailers," he said.

"That said, everyone has access to the data, and there are meetings that occur in the fresh air outside the trailers.

"To be honest though, I don't think these new protocols are as detrimental to the benefits of having six streams of data - seven last weekend - as the compressed schedules for these weekends.

"If we had normal three-day race weekends, we could maximise the benefits of having all those pieces of information coming in. But when you're challenged just to turn the car around for the next session, a lot of that extra data is just being wasted."

That said, Edwards is positive that Andretti Autosport can rectify its situation this weekend at Road America, where Rossi won by half a minute in 2019, in the first double-header weekend of the season.

That kind of result, twice in one weekend, would catapult Rossi back into the championship discussion - and provide overwhelming evidence that the team's ECU problems in Texas and underperformance at the GP of Indy were just lightning striking twice, rather than being indicative of the team's prospects in 2020.

4. Aeroscreen takes some heat

The very nature of this sport and the eyes-down commitment it requires usually precludes current participants the opportunity to look back and notice they're retreading history. Only once their careers are over and they've had the time to mingle with veterans do the observant come to realise that every previous generation contained roughly the same mix of achievers, believers and self-deceivers and that in each and every era they can find their own approximate equivalents in terms of skill, in-cockpit temperament and nature outside the car.

Similarly, a lot of oldies don't see they have modern-day kindred spirits, but in their cases, the lack of awareness comes from automatic prejudice against the 'young', and the nature of racing in the 21st century. This is never more focused than when they complain about modern-day safety measures.

Of course, your enlightened heroes such as Mario Andretti, Rick Mears, Johnny Rutherford and the Unsers will recognise that times have changed, will welcome it and acknowledge that the best drivers now are as good as the best then. But there are others who regard it as sacrilege that current IndyCar drivers aren't racing 40 weekends a year in seven different types of car on six different types of track and doing it all while wearing open-face helmets, T-shirts and slacks.

This type of critic is almost guaranteed to get in a twist over IndyCar's introduction of the aeroscreen. Their most ardent fans, too, are prone to stupid comment. Having sneered at the (admittedly gawky) aesthetics of the screen when viewed from head on, they are now apparently taking great delight from some of the drivers talking about the lack of airflow in the cockpit.

But the sentiment presented by more than a few keyboard warriors is more than a little oversimplified. Most of the drivers want their head shielded from flying debris, just as they want the rest of their body protected by carbon fibre tubs. But they also don't wish to cook.

The problem isn't the heat in and of itself, but that the drivers aren't in peak condition, currently

"We'll get used to it," one driver remarked, "but it's kinda hard when we've spent our whole careers in totally open cockpits. And I don't like the heat soak when we slow down for yellows or coming into the pits. That's when you notice it. Until then, you don't realise you're getting hot because you're so focused on racing, but you don't want to go slow for long, that's for sure."

Another driver observed that the problem isn't the heat in and of itself, but that the drivers aren't in peak condition, currently.

"Honestly, yeah, it was very physical [at the GP Indy] but you expect that. We're all really fit - there's not an unfit driver out there - but right now we're not race fit. We had an eight-month lay-off, then came back to an oval, then went off again for a month.

"Even if we've been training harder than ever, there's a big difference between being fit with your arms and your cardio, and being race fit. You can't totally simulate what your neck gets put through in a race as one example. When you're not at your peak fitness, that's when you have to work even harder in the cockpit and that's when the heat can get to you.

"That's going to get easier now, with the double-headers and the race weekends packed together. I'll be surprised if anyone complains at the next races at Road America. Gradually it's not going to be a problem and everyone will stop talking about it - and prepare themselves better."

5. IMS gets the Penske touch

Despite the inevitable slowdown of progress during the coronavirus pandemic, Penske Entertainment has already been able to wave a magic wand over Indianapolis Motor Speedway. A month ago, Team Penske president Tim Cindric said it was "unbelievable" all the rejuvenation that his boss Roger Penske has wrought on the Brickyard.

Last weekend, various drivers echoed that sentiment. Part-time AJ Foyt Racing driver and 2013 Indy 500 winner Tony Kanaan described it as "spotless, like his team, his racecars, his trucks, up to Roger's standards in every way".

"IMS has always had this vintage look, but now it looks so new, it looks like the track was just built a month ago," he added. "IMS is such a big place that you think Roger might miss something. But it's like, 'Nope, he got that, too.'"

Most telling were the favourable comments from Ed Carpenter, stepson of the facility's previous owner, Tony George.

"Like I remembered it as a child," he said. "It's all the little details - like it should be. It's just beautiful, and things like the bathrooms have a nice mix of being nostalgic and clean. It's all the little details you'd expect from Roger."

According to IMS, Penske's spruce up of the facility has included five miles of new gate fencing, three acres of new sod, three tonnes of new concrete, 400,000 square feet of new asphalt and 30 new video screens. Penske Entertainment has also focused on "concession stands and restrooms, the reimagined and expanded fan-gathering areas, and the wider Georgetown Road."

Pandemic allowing, the plan is for spectators to experience this promising and extensive facelift from 11 August, when practice begins for the 104th running of the Indy 500. It sounds like they will notice the difference.

As Charlie Kimball explained it: "For a facility that is 111 years old, she looks brand new - fresh, updated and beautiful. IMS has always been about history, tradition and quality, and it's all still there, just younger and fresher."