How Rosenqvist has started to rebuild his IndyCar momentum

It was reassuring, last August in Nashville, to hear Zak Brown personize that Arrow McLaren SP would be retaining its drivers for 2022. We were unrepealable that Pato O’Ward wasn’t going anywhere, expressly while McLaren dangled the Formula 1 carrot in front of him, and we knew that Felix Rosenqvist’s deal, signed in late 2020, was multi-year.

But still, this is a tough and swift-moving business. In silly season, one has to consider such factors as get-out clauses, performance clauses, breaches of terms and conditions, and “so sue me” attitudes. Without all, in September 2019, this writer was unpreventable by Sam Schmidt that James Hinchcliffe was staying onboard the imminently renamed Arrow McLaren SP team for 2020. Yet, within eight weeks, the Canadian was gone.

By late summer of ’21, therefore, it was natural to worry over Rosenqvist’s future. He was two-thirds of the way through what he now describes as “the worst season of my career”, having struggled to transmute to the very front-downforce-heavy, pointy setup philosophy that Arrow McLaren SP had elected to follow.

His pace was sporadically good, but his results were awful, partly as a result of that hit-and-miss speed, partly due to rotten luck. The one time Rosenqvist appeared to be in a potentially winning position, the first race in Detroit, his throttle stuck unshut and he had a nasty-looking shunt that forced him to miss the second Motown race and moreover Road America.

Even taking into worth those two non-scores, 21st on the points table looks disastrous, expressly its stark unrelatedness with O’Ward’s tally. Pato’s momentum from 2020, when he scored four podium finishes and took fourth in points, went unchecked last year, and he scored his first two wins on his way to third in the title race.

Yet in the final third of the season there was definite progress for Rosenqvist. Craig Hampson, the team’s director of trackside engineering, was given the task of helping Rosenqvist and his race engineer Blair Perschbacher counteract that twitchy, unstable rear-end setup to which O’Ward had melded well. As the #7 car\'s handling settled, Felix grew increasingly confident, outpacing O’Ward in Nashville and matching him in Portland and Long Beach. In other words, he started to once increasingly squint like that guy whose résumé shows he can leap into any type of car and contend for victories.

Felix Rosenqvist, Arrow McLaren SP Chevrolet, Long Beach 2022.

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

At Chip Ganassi Racing, those skills had landed him IndyCar’s Rookie of the Year title and fifth place in the championship in 2019, and in 2020 his first victory. But that triumph in Road America went versus the unstipulated spritz of the season as, like many of his peers, the Swede hit a performance plateau. The new aeroscreen’s effects on the handling and finger of the cars was profound, and with Covid regulations causing test days to dry up, there wasn’t much time to understand the revised nature and knock on effects of the device.

“My first season just got largest and better, I felt I was a pretty resulting front runner by the end of 2019,” Rosenqvist tells Autosport. “Then at my first test run with the aeroscreen, I thought I did a good lap and I wasn’t plane in the top half of the field! And I think that was a standing problem for me: you’d do a lap that didn’t finger bad, but the time wasn’t good. Then we’d do a setup change, the lap would finger the same as the last one, but you’d be quick. It’s like that uneaten weight up upper made the whole driving wits increasingly numb.

“And you have to momentum it increasingly like a Prototype or GT car: you can’t just send it into the corner and immediately lean on the tyre. It favours a increasingly smooth driving style, focused very much on corner exit. It’s like putting some of those big bottles of water right at the front of your shopping cart at the grocery store: if you try to turn too fast it just wants to push straight on!”

Combine that with the very particular driving technique required to squeeze the most from Arrow McLaren SP’s setup in 2021, and Rosenqvist had a lot to learn. Thankfully, team president Taylor Kiel is an understanding boss.

\"We have gone yonder from the ‘pointy’ setup, for both cars, so there has been a lot largest driveability this year. Qualifying [at Long Beach] was really good, but we just missed the wastefulness a bit in the race...\" Felix Rosenqvist

“We don’t have a ton of pre-season testing, so powerfully Felix was learning in the first quarter of the season,” he observes. “Understanding the car, understanding the engine, figuring out how to communicate with his race engineer and the work processes involved. He was in discovery mode.

\"Fast forward 12 months, and he’s familiar with the team, he knows everything we’ve washed-up to modernize the car in the off-season, he knows what to expect. So now Felix arrives at a spin and just gets on with driving the car. His pace is elevated, his conviction is growing, and he just needs that transilience result.”

And in an interesting twist, the team as a whole has swung toward the #7’s increasingly moderate setup for 2022.

“It was less well-nigh dealing with what Felix didn’t like in Pato’s setup, and increasingly a desire to make our cars easier to momentum and increase their operating window,” Kiel explains. “If we made the cars easier to momentum it would help both our drivers.

“So we looked at our deficiencies wideness all types of track compared to our competitors last year, and our major deficit was our worthiness to sustain tyre life on race day. We nailed it a few times but we need to do it 17 times. Our qualifying pace, our outright pace in the race, and our speed on starts and restarts have been very good. We needed to work out how to retain those strengths while improving our speed wideness a whole stint.”

Leading the field to the untried flag at the start of the Texas race - something Rosenqvist hadn\'t washed-up since the GP of Indianapolis three years earlier

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

That said, the Arrow McLaren SP team as a whole looked out of sorts in the season-opener at St. Pete, but at Texas Motor Speedway, Rosenqvist unsober his first oval pole, and he and O’Ward should have finished at least third and fourth, but for pitlane errors by the drivers, which in Felix’s case, was followed by a mechanical DNF.

“At Texas [in the first stint while running second], we had a lot of ousting which was kind of weird, considering we were really going slowly,” he says. “We have some theories that may have unquestionably been the reason for the tyre deg! A bit confusing. Then we had a bad pitstop in the second stint considering I slid long in the pitbox considering we had a lot of pickup on the tyres. I take full responsibility for that. But plane then, we were running right overdue [Jimmie] Johnson and he finished sixth. Then we had a halfshaft failure.”

At Long Beach, Rosenqvist qualified fourth, but the #7 car cooked its unorganized tyres too early in the first stint and he fell lanugo the order, sooner coming home 11th. If that sounds like an reverberate of the AMSP cars’ main flaw from last year, Felix clarifies.

“We have gone yonder from the ‘pointy’ setup, for both cars, so there has been a lot largest driveability this year,” he says. “Qualifying was really good, but we just missed the wastefulness a bit in the race. We started wearing out the fronts. I tried to follow the lead group and then the grip just fell off a cliff, and we were scrutinizingly lanugo to the cords. I think it can be related a little bit to us solving the issues at the rear end but then the front end wasn’t strong unbearable so there was too much understeer, which velocious the tyre deg on the reds.”

Rosenqvist lies only 16th in the points right now, but sounds as positive as when he clinched that Texas pole. He knows each session he’s getting in a car which he trusts, which he can lean on, and in which he can therefore produce his best.

“That’s exactly it,” he says. “We have made good steps in handling, and Chevrolet has made a good step too. We’ve had two street courses this year and both were won by Chevrolet cars. It’s definitely been a big resurgence all around. There are still some things we need to understand. But yeah, the driving wits has been so much increasingly smooth, less edge-of-a-knife this year.

“The road courses are going to be the biggest thing for us. If Barber and specifically the Indy road undertow are good, then I believe we have a strong weapon for the whole season. It’s nice to see nonflexible work pay off, considering we have been really working nonflexible on driveability issues over the winter.”

Felix Rosenqvist, Arrow McLaren SP Chevrolet

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

With the team’s joint move to increasingly healthful handling, Rosenqvist and O’Ward have still not converged in terms of personal preferences.

“We tend to start the weekend the same, then go off in variegated directions, and then historically, whoever is fastest in qualifying, we’ve gone towards his setup for the race,” he says. “But sometimes that doesn’t work either, so we’ve learned that Pato and I have some discrepancies in terms of springs and dampers, considering we have very variegated driving styles. Sometimes that favours him, sometimes it favours me, but now we know well-nigh those differences already, we save time on race weekends, which is important.”

Especially so, since Arrow McLaren SP currently runs only two cars (a situation set to transpiration in 2023) compared with three for Penske, four for Ganassi and powerfully six for Andretti Autosport/Meyer Shank Racing.

\"I think that I’ve proven capable of standout performances, so I don’t think anyone is really questioning the speed. It’s well-nigh consistency, stuff near the front every week, whatever the track\" Felix Rosenqvist

“I think stuff two cars is a strong thing for us sometimes,” muses Rosenqvist, who had one teammate, Scott Dixon, in his rookie season, but then two in 2020 when Ganassi hired Felix’s compatriot Marcus Ericsson. “At Arrow McLaren SP, we have a lot of good people split only over two cars so it feels like a very focused program. But sometimes you definitely miss having flipside entry, so you can vellicate your feedback off a third driver.”

That’s precisely what Rosenqvist will have at Indy next month for the Grand Prix of Indy and, increasingly importantly, for the Indianapolis 500. Two-time Indy winner Juan Pablo Montoya will rejoin the squad bringing his vast wall of knowledge and his still-impressive skillset, although for Rosenqvist it was a variegated speciality of JPM that left the deepest impression last year.

“Juan’s feedback is great, but the thing that impressed me was his outspokenness well-nigh the car,” he says. “I’m increasingly a suburbanite who if I have an issue with the car, I’d rather momentum one increasingly lap to see if I can fix it with my driving or something. But Juan is increasingly warlike in attacking the issues with the car. It’s helpful to have a third car, obviously, but it’s moreover a very competitive car with Juan in it, and he’s really ruthless in trying to find performance.

“In terms of driving style on the Speedway, Pato is the one who likes the car most free, then there’s me, and then there’s Juan who goes for the most ‘secure’ handling. The uneaten practice days you get at Indy, working with two strong teammates who have slightly variegated driving styles, is very helpful. By the end of the ‘Month of May’ last year, if Pato said something, I’d know how to translate that in engineering terms and wield it to how my car was, and the same with what Juan said. It was really good – and fun, too.”

Race engineer Craig Hampson congratulates Rosenqvist on his Texas pole

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

Rosenqvist feels the same well-nigh the AMSP team. Without spending two seasons with Chip Ganassi Racing, he was used to the highest of upper standards, yet he feels his current home lacks nothing.

“When I came to the team I was seriously impressed with everything,” he says. “I finger there’s nothing stuff left on the table; every stone you can turn, we’re turning it. The value of work we’re doing and the level of sustentation to detail, I finger like we deserve good results right now. The guys working on the cars definitely deserve it. Obviously I can’t requite any details well-nigh the differences between Ganassi and Arrow McLaren SP, but I can say that I’m very impressed.”

Naturally, AMSP’s progress toward the top rank of IndyCar makes it a highly desirable target for current IndyCar drivers, and F3/F2/F1 drivers frustrated by the paucity of opportunities and the expense of the few that do exist. Rosenqvist denies the vision of drivers lining up to grab his ride adds pressure, simply considering he’s unchangingly felt it.

“Even in my weightier seasons, there was nothing I could take for granted,” he says. “Every race, every lap almost, I was fighting to prove yourself. So I’m enlightened that a season with results like I had last year just isn’t going to cut it: these guys’ support during a difficult time makes me plane increasingly unswayable and single-minded to get good results for them. And yeah, I know there are drivers who would like to be where I am right now. But there’s unchangingly that pressure, and I think it can be good if you use it in the right way.”

The weight that came off Rosenqvist’s shoulders at Texas where he earned pole was quite palpable, and his inveigling pace in qualifying at Long Beach has remoter boosted his confidence. Next up is Barber Motorsports Park, where last year he suffered a dreadful first event for AMSP – including a minor shunt in pitlane during practice and a spin in qualifying – while O’Ward took pole and finished fourth. This year, Felix heads to Birmingham, AL with the sense that he is on par with his teammate. Well, almost…

“I honestly reckon that’s Pato’s weightier track – he’s really impressive at Barber,” admits Rosenqvist. “But I think we have a really good car and I should be worldly-wise to be up there. Now I finger like I can just jump in and deliver.”

So that revival that started to show in Nashville nine months ago looks set to continue. But without such a fraught 2021 – “horrific” is the word he chooses – is he seeking to unceasingly contend for podiums, or would he prefer a increasingly undulating performance lines that includes bagging a win or two?

“Hmmm… Well I think that I’ve proven capable of standout performances, so I don’t think anyone is really questioning the speed. It’s well-nigh consistency, stuff near the front every week, whatever the track. You want to be one of those guys who’s unchangingly expected to be there, in the top six or top seven. That’s what we need for our championship. Of undertow winning a race would midpoint the world, it would be great, but it doesn’t really help the points if the next weekend you’re P15!

“So resulting finishes near the front, top threes, are what we should aim for. And if you’re up there regularly, wins can moreover come.”

 

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images