Why Ganassi's newest winner is still on an upward curve

"G'day," says Felix Rosenqvist in a passable Swede-attempting-a-Down-Under accent as he picks up the phone to Autosport. For a man who's spent his IndyCar Series career to date absorbing all he can from his illustrious Chip Ganassi Racing team-mate Scott Dixon, it seems that it's not just in the areas of driving, set-up or racecraft that he's been influenced by the Aussie-born Kiwi.

Aside from picking up random speech mannerisms, for Rosenqvist it's been the trials and tribulations of working an IndyCar race that have meant a very steep learning curve.
Since winning the 2015 Formula 3 European Championship, his career had moved in maverick directions, quick in a variety of machinery in Europe, North America and Japan.

It was a couple of eye-opening tests at Mid-Ohio - a year apart - that encouraged Ganassi to take a punt on him with a two-year deal for 2019-20. And, finally, that breakthrough win came last month at Road America after a superb drive from seventh on the grid. To be fair, it was overdue for a driver who'd led on his IndyCar debut at St Petersburg, back in March 2019.

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"That was a very quick lesson straight away in St Petersburg, the first race," he says, readopting his familiar clipped Swedish accent. "You just need to be very complete, not only being fast, but you need to be aggressive in the race. If you're not aggressive you'll never go forward and you get stuck behind someone, and if you get stuck behind someone early in the race then you can look after the race how much that hurt you from not being in clear air.

"Also strategy-wise, you need to be more involved than in other series where you basically just get guided by the team what to do. You need to get a better feel for what's happening in a race and if the team calls something wrong. That's something you really learn by experience. That's what Scott does pretty well. He just has a really good idea of what's happening in the race.

"And then you have the ovals as well, which is something completely new. That's for me the hardest part, just learning how to manage yourself, how to improve the car, just a million things that you need to learn. Some drivers have an easier time to learn it, and some it takes a lot of work to get up to speed. It's a lot of new challenges."

Dixon is the master of that. It seems that, whatever circumstances are thrown into the melting pot of a race - cautions, weather - the #9 Ganassi Dallara-Honda always emerges at the front, even if the team has been struggling for pace earlier on. Such are the racing brains of Dixon and the Ganassi strategists that it buys them the flexibility to do that. For most IndyCar drivers, most of their results - particularly on ovals - can be put down to good or bad luck on strategies and yellows. Not so the five-time champion.

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"Yeah, it's true," reflects Rosenqvist. "That's why everyone is very amazed about him - he can turn an average day or a bad day into a good day. I think that goes with what I said before. Sometimes you just get a feeling for what's going to happen in the race, and as a driver being around the cars, you get a different idea of how strong certain cars are, if one car has a lot of deg. He has that feeling, and based on that he makes the calls that turn it from being lucky to being calculated.

"My big focus during the whole off-season was definitely just improve on ovals, improve on ovals" Felix Rosenqvist

"A lower driver gets lucky and they win the race based on a yellow, and if you're in IndyCar for x amount of time that's going to happen to you eventually. That's what we always try to work on, how do we calculate, how do we turn the odds in our favour?"

Turning those odds was a work in progress in 2019. For example, Rosenqvist's first (and to date only) IndyCar pole, at the Indy GP in May of that year, was converted to an eighth-place finish, and there was a wreck the following month at Detroit Belle Isle. But in August, he finished right behind Dixon in a Ganassi 1-2 at Mid-Ohio, and a few weeks later was second again at Portland. Then there was a drive from 14th on the grid to fifth at the Laguna Seca finale (below).

"What is the reason for the good result?" he asks. "Is it luck or have you got there on merit? I think we were leaning to that [latter] direction. Even if I had a rough start to the day or the weekend we could still salvage something.

"Like Laguna, I got disqualified in qualifying and started P14 but I was still able to get back to P5 in the race. Road America I went from P18 to P6. I felt that we got into that rhythm at the end which was really good, but unfortunately we weren't able to carry that into this season, where it's become really up and down again, but I think that's the same for almost every driver."

Indeed, apart from that Road America win, the best result for Rosenqvist this season has been a lowly 14th. But there was a strong run at Texas Motor Speedway at the first round, when IndyCar finally emerged from hibernation following the three-month delay owing to the coronavirus pandemic. On the 1.5-mile oval, Rosenqvist charged up to second, and was chasing Dixon, before he showed his inexperience by crashing through impatience.

It was another frustrating outcome for a driver who made no bones of his difficulty in adapting to ovals during his Indy Lights campaign of 2016, and is still yet to register a top-10 finish on tracks of that nature. But at least he'd shown pace, and he credits a surprising byproduct of the coronavirus delay in helping in that respect.

"I think something that helped me was all the iRacing stuff we did with IndyCar," he professes. "After St Pete got cancelled we just spent so many hours, and we did mainly ovals.

"Even if it's not really the same thing, you're still racing against the same people and just the way the races turned out based on what kind of grip or wind or things like that, you get a good idea quite quickly of how that specific race would turn out. That wasn't for nothing for sure. My big focus during the whole off-season was definitely just improve on ovals, improve on ovals."

To be fair, there had been previous flashes of speed on ovals. For example, on Rosenqvist's Indy 500 debut in 2019, Ganassi struggled in qualifying, with Dixon 18th and Rosenqvist 29th. The team then went onto an alternative strategy, enabling the new boy to lead twice before pitting, and look ensconced in the top 10 when he became one of the collateral victims of a belligerent piece of driving from Sebastien Bourdais against Graham Rahal that resulted in a pile-up.

"The whole build-up to the race, and the race itself, it was just overwhelming to be honest," he recalls. "I was watching all the videos, I had all the clever guys like Dario [Franchitti, Ganassi advisor, below right] telling me what to expect, but when you're there it's different.

"I had a really, really tough build-up to the race, both Ganassi cars were struggling in qualifying with car balance, but in the race I think I probably had the better car in the team. I was actually going really well, and at the time when Bourdais and Rahal got together I think I was in the top 10, from a starting place of nearly last.

"Unfortunately I couldn't finish the race, but it was a great run and definitely a top 10 was possible, so that would have been a good first year, but good to have that experience in the bag. You're always one set-up change away from turning around the car completely, so you can't really give up, you've got to keep working on it.

"Sometimes you think there's something that can't be fixed, and then they make the change and you feel, 'Wow, that definitely made me a lot faster'."

"The speed we showed at Texas was really promising, and that's probably the biggest indicator for Indy. We couldn't really be in a better position right now" Felix Rosenqvist

A decent oval result is surely just around the (banked) corner for Rosenqvist. He feels in a good place, not just because he has the ultimate barometer in Dixon alongside him at Ganassi, but also, for 2020, his friend and compatriot Marcus Ericsson.

"Yeah, I think we have a good chance at Ganassi," he enthuses. "And the speed we showed at Texas was really promising, and that's probably the biggest indicator for Indy. There's still a question mark over Iowa, where we were struggling for balance [Rosenqvist was 14th and 15th in the two races there], but it's a very different track.

"We couldn't really be in a better position right now. Our team is leading the championship [thanks to Dixon's three-on-the-bounce at the start of the season, before Rosenqvist made it four in a row with his maiden win], and we've made a huge push for Indy this year.

"All season the engineers have had that as the biggest focus - to get Ganassi back in the winner's circle for the 500. We're all really excited for it."