Ranking the top 10 IndyCar drivers of 2021

The 2021 IndyCar Series was a thriller, with seven different drivers prevailing in as many races at the start of the season, and nine in total.

Three drivers entered the final round with a chance of the title, but none had a realistic hope of toppling the year's standout performer Alex Palou.

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But while the Ganassi driver emerged at the top of the pile, there were numerous noteworthy performances in the year as IndyCar welcomed new names to its fore that helped to increase its global profile and underlined the quality of its existing cast. 

Here are Autosport's top performers. 

10. Alexander Rossi

Alexander Rossi, Andretti Autosport Honda

Photo by: Joe Skibinski

It involved some inward debate as to who should get the last spot in our top 10. Rinus VeeKay, a winner in the Grand Prix of Indianapolis, did a tremendous job for Ed Carpenter Racing in the first half of the season, and his acrobatic driving also paid off in Detroit race one with a fine second place. But, after the collarbone fracture that made him a non-starter in Road America, he never looked the same driver again, barely registering on the attention meter – until wiping out himself, Scott Dixon and Alex Palou at Gateway.

Jack Harvey was another contender for P10 here but, although he was a frequent top-six starter, he and the team struggled to take advantage of the weekends when they hit the right set-up, and sometimes that came down to curious pitstop strategies.

So Rossi it is who gets the nod. You may regard his 2016 Indy 500 triumph as lucky, but he’s paid off his dues in misfortune over the past two seasons, and then some. He lacks Colton Herta’s qualifying pace, but Alex is an excellent racer. His errors at Gateway and Laguna Seca lost him two podiums, but poor strategy may have cost him the win at Barber Motorsports Park, and he was profoundly unlucky to get knocked out in Texas race two and Nashville, and to pick up mysterious car damage in Long Beach. Worst of all, though, was that like Dixon, he was an Indy 500 victory contender who was stymied by the closed pit/fuel starved/engine struggling to refire scenario.

His runner-up finish at Portland was excellent and deserved, but he’ll need several more performances like that one to maximise his options in 2022, his contract year.

9. Graham Rahal

Graham Rahal, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

If Graham Rahal could start higher consistently, he’d be top five in the championship every year. With the field as densely packed in terms of pace as IndyCar in 2021, starts and restarts from mid-pack are heart-in-mouth affairs every time, on any type of track, because there are countless opportunities to get punted, damaged, and escorted off-track by the desperados around you. Yet somehow, Rahal, despite patchy – occasionally mediocre – qualifying form, went on to deliver seven top-five finishes.

His crashing out of the Indy 500 with a detached wheel was upsetting – although few agree with him that he was on target to win that day – but several people have sprung to Rahal’s defence over his qualifying struggles. Being one of the larger-framed drivers, one engineer reckons Graham may alter the car’s CoG to such an extent that he loses one- to two-tenths to the jockey-sized drivers on road courses.

Maybe Rahal’s new team-mates for 2022, Harvey and Christian Lundgaard, will help provide further insight and/or maybe help RLL find more one-lap pace.

8. Simon Pagenaud

Simon Pagenaud, Team Penske Chevrolet

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

The 2016 champion’s seventh and final year at Penske was one of his disappointing ones, with only two podiums, although it should be pointed out that the team as a whole was not firing on all cylinders every time, particularly in the first half of the season. Interestingly, too, Pagenaud appeared to have improved his overall performance, in that the gap between himself and whoever was fastest on the team had compressed compared with other years when he had struggled. It’s also worth noting that Pagenaud made fewer mistakes than his team-mates, but there were also days when he could barely put daylight between himself and Scott McLaughlin, a rookie with near-zero open-wheel experience.

But in the Indy 500, he salvaged some pride for Penske in a largely calamitous ‘Month of May’ for the squad. Indeed, he was so quick and incisive as he clawed through the field, that had it been the Indy 520, he might well have scored his second victory there.

Being chosen by the winning team, Meyer Shank Racing, for 2022 may well elicit the prime version of Pagenaud that we saw most profoundly in 2016 and 2019.

7. Marcus Ericsson

Marcus Ericsson, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, Winner, Fountain

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

A fine and decisive battler on race days, Marcus Ericsson may always be let down by errors in qualifying leaving him with too much work when the green flag drops. But his second win, at Nashville, proved he can handle severe pressure, his first win showed he can apply pressure, and his run to second at Mid-Ohio showed just how much more confident the ex-Formula 1 racer has become. He was the fastest qualifier – in a team that includes Palou and Dixon! – and was then relentless in his pursuit of eventual winner Josef Newgarden. From that point onward, the quiet Swede seemed capable of anything on any track – although that included a silly error in the Long Beach finale.

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With the encouragement of Ganassi’s driver advisor Dario Franchitti and his race engineer Brad Goldberg, Ericsson’s feedback has become strong, he’s more ready to speak up if the car is not to his liking, and his determination to succeed – as opposed to driving within himself and ‘settling’ for his current position – has taken a leap forward. When Ericsson is on it, he looks like an ace.

Two wins and sixth in the championship in a field as deep as this, even with a Ganassi car underneath you, is no mean feat. We expect to see more wins from him in the years ahead.

6. Will Power

Will Power, Team Penske Chevrolet

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

Power, like Dixon, was a well-established (read 40-plus years-old) IndyCar ace who had an uncharacteristically low-scoring season in 2021, adding just one win and one pole to his career tally. He wound up only ninth in the championship, the first time he’s finished outside the top five since his part-time season in 2009. Why?

Well, Penske’s collective move to a less knife-edge set-up hurt Power’s ultimate pace – his prime quality – in the middle third of the season, making the car more stuck down, and less likely to induce a mistake, but clipping its ultimate potential and reducing the need for his smooth steering inputs and precise brake-release technique. He found that immensely frustrating.

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But Power also had to reboot himself mentally, learning not to throw away Q1 and Q2 qualifying laps on which he made minor errors and instead pursue them to the end, in the knowledge that most of his rivals would likely have made similar gaffes.

He rediscovered his form in the final third of the season, and his victory on the Indy road course was one of the most convincing of his career. However, bad luck (electronics issues while leading Detroit race one and while running second in Laguna Seca, Harvey’s shunt just ahead of him in Long Beach qualifying) continues to stalk him, as do occasional mistakes (pitlane in the Indy 500 is the most memorable). All of the issues that afflicted him this year need fixing if the 2014 champion is ever to add more titles to his tally.

5. Scott Dixon

Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

It was almost impossible not to feel sorry for Scott Dixon at Indy this year. He appeared to do everything right, finding a great race set-up in practice – and one that was tunable for varying track conditions – before landing a brilliant pole position and then sitting back in the first stint, allowing others to jockey for the lead.

He looked like a driver who had it all in hand. Then, of course, pitlane closed due to a car crashing on its way in, so he was left stranded and fuel-starved on track, and his engine wouldn’t refire for what seemed like an age. It’s impossible to tell for sure, but it felt like that was his best chance to add to his solitary Indy 500 win from 13 years ago.

In a double-points race, that day’s results – he came home 17th with 36 points instead of first with 100-plus – was a huge blow to his championship hopes, too. In the end, he finished the season with just one win – Texas race one – and four other podiums to his name in what was the six-time champion’s least convincing year since 2016. Aside from Indy, there could also have been a second win at TMS, but the team’s pitstop strategy left him caught in a strategic dilemma that resulted in him claiming only fourth place in race two.

But there were several days – too many for one of his quality – when he was somewhat anonymous, struggling (by his high standards) at the Indy road course, Mid-Ohio, Laguna Seca, and Detroit. Palou’s driving style is quite different from Dixon’s, so there were times when the Kiwi legend’s pursuit of the ideal set-up was a somewhat solo venture, with mixed results.

4. Pato O'Ward

Patricio O'Ward, Arrow McLaren SP Chevrolet

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

Pato O’Ward thoroughly deserved to score the first two wins of his IndyCar career, on both occasions – Texas race two and Detroit race two – looking irresistible. However, the Arrow McLaren SP car’s peculiar traits that turn on the softer compound Firestones rapidly, also made it slow on primaries, forcing O’Ward to overdrive too often and burn off his rears. The team’s director of trackside engineering, Craig Hampson, defended the Mexican to the hilt, stating that it was up to the team to deliver a more consistent car, and that it was not O’Ward’s fault that he often on race days had to nurse his tyres in a qualifying-oriented car. And it’s Hampson so he’s probably right!

O’Ward’s pace certainly left the highly regarded Felix Rosenqvist reeling and error-prone in the first two-thirds of the season, and it wasn’t until the Swede started to go a little more in his favoured direction set-up-wise that he started matching his young team-mate, who can dance any car on the limit. All that being said, it is up to a driver to help steer his team in the right direction technically, and it’s yet to be proven whether O’Ward can do that. But if AMSP come up with the best car, there are few who can match this remarkable talent.

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3. Josef Newgarden

Josef Newgarden, Team Penske Chevrolet celebrates winning

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

Josef Newgarden was super-fast at times and can also make the best of a bad situation, and there were several times when he showed the quality that has produced two championships. Indeed, had his gearbox not failed while he was leading Road America with two laps to go – crucially, handing the victory to Palou – the Team Penske ace would now have a third title. But there were also times when he seemed genuinely baffled by his lack of speed – Texas Motor Speedway race two’s closing stages, when he tried in vain to hold off O’Ward, Indy 500 qualifying, or indeed, several qualifying efforts in the final third of the season.

These are what killed off his title hopes. When he bounced back with pole position at the Long Beach finale, you could detect relief as much as elation that he’d rediscovered his mojo.

Newgarden’s problems were often also Penske problems – this was not a great year for The Captain’s crew – and the mediocre days could only be thrown into sharp relief by his brilliance at Mid-Ohio and flawlessness at Road America and Gateway.

2. Colton Herta

Race winner Colton Herta, Andretti Autosport w/ Curb-Agajanian Honda

Photo by: Geoff Miller / Motorsport Images

Colton Herta has all the necessary speed and work ethic to be Palou’s biggest threat over the next 15 years, should he choose to stay in IndyCar.

There were days where he appeared untouchable and, Nashville apart, he’s another who knows how to stay calm at crucial moments. If he starts at the front, he can dominate. If he starts mid-grid, he can carve his way up the field. All three of his wins – the only driver other than Palou to score three victories – were absolutely top class, and there should have been more. Without that halfshaft failure at Gateway, he’d likely have won, and if he hadn’t suffered what he described as tunnel vision at Nashville and crashed that would have been an easy second place – but the reality is that without the ridiculous number of caution periods, he would have won. He looked several tenths quicker than most of his rivals in both qualifying and the race, and his inward rage at the injustice of finding himself demoted by circumstance caused him to lose perspective… but only after putting on a clinic in the art of passing around the brand new street course.

With Andretti Autosport-to-F1 rumours swirling around in August and September, and Herta being part of that speculation, he had much to distract him. But he handled it like a grown-up, and didn’t let it stop him winning the final two rounds. Sure, he overdrove in qualifying at Long Beach and was only 14th on the grid, but considering he was out front and in control of the race long before half distance, that’s entirely forgivable.

1. Alex Palou

Champion Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

Long before the much-delayed 2020 IndyCar season started, Newgarden was asked who he thought would win the Rookie of the Year title. He named Alex Palou, on the basis that Super Formula can produce super drivers, Palou had already been in a close-fought title battle in that championship – and had only missed out due to his car failing in the final round – and the fact that Dale Coyne Racing was often a potentially race-winning team. In fact Newgarden was wrong, as Palou lost out on rookie honours to VeeKay, and maybe that was why few named him at the top of their list of potential title contenders in 2021, despite a move to Chip Ganassi Racing.

Others among us reasoned it might take the Spaniard a year to get comfortable in the Ganassi environment, to get his head around all the resources – human and equipment-wise – and take full advantage of it… How wrong were we!

He came out of the blocks with a win in the opening round at Barber Motorsports Park and, aside from a mediocre performance at St. Petersburg and an unnecessary crash in Indy 500 qualifying, it’s hard to think of circumstances when he could have performed better.

Palou delivered even on tracks with which he was unfamiliar, remained unflustered even when circumstances went against him – such as those wretched engine-change grid penalties, mechanical unreliability, and clumsiness from the aforementioned VeeKay. He, showed huge determination, often overshadowed his six-time champion team-mate Dixon, and knew when to rein in his enthusiasm if necessary, such as when learning the intricacies of a new track.

Three wins, and five other podiums – yes, top three finishes in half of the season’s races, in a championship of such parity – is no fluke. Palou was without doubt the most complete driver of 2021, and it would have been a travesty if the title had gone elsewhere.

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Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images