No wins in 3 years, decision to separate, Alexander Rossi and Andretti deliver 1 more time

INDIANAPOLIS -- Alexander Rossi’s emotionally-draining 2021 IndyCar campaign looked as if it was finally starting to turn. Way, way too late to think about a championship but in a year where the 2016 Indy 500 winner was well out of the Astor Cup race by the checkered flag at the Indianapolis 500, his podium finish in Portland and front-row start at Laguna Seca was, if nothing else, a last-ditch reason for he and his father and manager, Pieter Rossi, to think about moving on from Andretti Autosport.

Then an instance of rubbing wheels with teammate Colton Herta, something Rossi had weathered many times, went horribly wrong. That instant the steering wheel was ripped out of his hands on Lap 2 at Laguna Seca, sending him limping home to 25^th while Herta surge to his first of back-to-back wins to close the year, may very well have signaled the end of Rossi’s seven year career with Michael Andretti.

It would take more than eight months for the news to become public, but Pieter told IndyStar on Sunday while atop the Victory Podium at IMS that something about that otherwise rather innocuous run-in with Herta felt like a sign. Neither driver did anything wrong – Herta had dropped a wheel and gave Rossi plenty of space as the teammates went side-by-side.

Touching wheels was otherwise normal racing but the force of the jolt ripped the wheel out of Rossi’s hands and, at least inside, he and his father would decide in the coming days that enough was enough. Enough bad luck. Enough struggling for pace, for consistency, for those top-5s, podiums and wins that had seemingly come so easy to the No. 27 Honda crew in that summer of 2019 when Rossi decided once again to make Andretti Autosport home for three more years.

Rossi’s near wire-to-wire win at Road America in the summer of 2019 – by more than 28 seconds, no less – put him within 7 points of Josef Newgarden in the title chase. It gave the ex-Formula 1 driver five podiums over a seven-race stretch and was the exclamation point to the news he, Michael Andretti and Honda would announce weeks later. One of the most dominant trios in IndyCar was sticking together. If it didn’t make the rest of the paddock nervous, it should’ve.

But for 1,133 days and 49 series starts, Rossi failed to win a race. Eight months ago, he decided he’d had enough. In June, he announced his plans to shift to Arrow McLaren SP and Chevy for 2023 and beyond. And all of that – the mistakes, the tense moments, the shortcomings, the split and the now finite, impending ending to it all made Rossi’s win Saturday on the IMS road course just that much sweeter.

'It was time for a change'Alexander Rossi moving on from Andretti Autosport

“I think if you look at anybody’s career, if you had a drought like he did and you can’t point to any one thing and just put it up to mojo or chemistry, you probably want to change the environment,” Pieter Rossi told IndyStar on Saturday. “And it has nothing against the people or the organization. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work, and I think that’s where we got to.

“But did it demotivate him? No. You can see he’s more motivated than ever. I think he’s managed it great, and yes, he’s been disappointed, and yes, it’s been a tough go, but he’s realized it’s not all about him, and that tells a great story about teamwork.”

The closing of Rossi's Andretti Autosport chapter

At first, we chalked it up to flukiness; Rossi’s messy, unexpected, disappointing start to his new three-year deal with Andretti Autosport to begin 2020. The nearly three-month delay to the start of that season, combined with the lack of testing and practice and the addition of the aeroscreen’s 60 pounds of protection was always going to catch somebody out. Outside Herta grinding out a run of top-10s, among the series’ biggest teams, that somebody was Andretti Autosport.

As team COO Rob Edwards explained Saturday, taller drivers bared a bigger brunt of the weight distribution change with the aeroscreen’s debut in 2020, and that combined with a couple mechanical failures, a pitlane penalty in the Indy 500 and a freak accident before the green flag at WWT Raceway turned an already rough start to 2020 into a nightmare.

Then suddenly, four-straight podiums, followed by a commanding 7-second lead well past the halfway point in the season-finale at St. Pete. This was the Rossi we’d been expecting all year, but suddenly there was the Rossi we could hardly recognize. A terrible mistake, spinning up in the marbles on cold tires put him in the wall. Instead of an all-but-certain win to end the year as the hottest driver around, Rossi had wrecked and came home 21^st.

“We had that one in the bag, and if we’d gotten that one, we wouldn’t have had to talk about how many races it had been since Alexander had last won a race,” said Edwards, who until this year had been calling strategy on Rossi’s radio. “That one hurt. We had dug deep and made some progress and turned the corner, and that would’ve all been much more concrete.”

Instead, the start of 2021 was, in many ways, worse. “We quickly realized that a championship was not a realistic goal, and that was hard for sure,” Edwards said. “After 2018 and 2019, the whole thing with the No. 27 in signing that deal was about winning and going for championships, and these last two years have been frustrating.”

Insider:Michael Andretti seeks change in struggling IndyCar team, hopeful F1 venture

'It all came to a head today'Inside Andretti Autosport feud that went public at Mid-Ohio

And as it so happens, Rossi said earlier this week on his podcast ‘Off Track with Hinch and Rossi’ that last weekend at Iowa Speedway, where he finished 13^th and 18^th may have been the deepest low.

“It was, without a doubt, without question, the least-competitive event I’ve had in seven years at Andretti Autosport – by a factor of 10,” he said. “It wasn’t even close. No disrespect to any drivers or teams, but when you’re getting driven around by everyone in all phases of the race, it’s pretty tough.”

As he sat on the podium Friday in the IMS media center next to his potential AMSP teammates next year, Rossi said, cheekily, “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this or not, but I was pretty happy that they were good in Iowa because we were really not. So I was like, ‘Well, we still have that to potentially look forward to.'”

And yet, being sent up to talk to the media Friday, having qualified 2^nd at a track where he and his teammates have historically lapped competitive one-lap speed, very well may have been a sign of what to expect for Saturday. Because with as fluky as things had been for Rossi over these last three years, despite Andretti’s momentous test on the road course a month ago, he’d built up enough a karmic deficit with the racing gods to be owed a day like Saturday.

'He's a warrior'

Did it need to happen at Herta’s expense? That part of Rossi’s win Saturday stung a bit and made him pause just a moment. Rossi leading a virtually unchallenged 44 laps to cap the 85-lap Gallagher Grand Prix came only after Herta suffered some sort of gut-wrenching mechanical failure from the lead on Lap 42. The two, along with rookie runner-up Christian Lundgaard, were clearly the class of the field Saturday, and without Herta there running a nearly identical setup to jockey with up-front, Rossi rode a lead that bounced between 2.5-4 seconds over the Rahal Letterman Lanigan driver straight to Victory Lane.

“It sucks what happened to Colton, but I’ve had my share of things,” Rossi said post-race. “It comes full-circle, I guess.”

'It's a relief': How Rossi won Saturday and broke his lengthy drought

More:How Will Power fell to 16th in Saturday's race then took over first in IndyCar standings

Since Rossi’s last IndyCar victory, though, Herta had won six times. With three more seasons of experience, Rossi moves back ahead in career wins by one.

“It’s just relief, right? I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s human nature to start questioning things when it continually doesn’t fall your way,” Rossi said. “You just have to remember that you’ve done it before, that you can do it again – that type of thing. It’s nice to reestablish that, and this race is so much about how you’re only as good as your last race. It doesn’t matter who you are.”

That goes for Rossi’s No. 27 car crew – 70% of which, he said Saturday, has been the same since 2017. Through all these struggles, they’re perhaps the unsung heroes in this story. Because despite his winless streak and lack of consistent competitive results, Rossi found a new home with what’s believed to be a nice bump in compensation. More than likely, most of those team members will start next year in their same spots with a second-year Kyle Kirkwood in search of a way to right the ship on a consistent basis and bring the No. 27 back to its title-contending glory.

And though Rossi’s pit crew was shuffled more than a deck of cards in Vegas through the first four races this year, he, his father, Edwards and Rossi’s new strategist, Brian Barnhart, noted Saturday how resilient they’ve been through rumors and rough results alike.

“It would’ve been a pretty sad story if we weren’t able to (win before the end of the year),” Rossi said post-race. “That’s not the goal, because I’m not thinking about 2023, but yes, I’m happy that we don’t have to have that conversation, like, ‘Oh, well, it’s been cool, to bad we couldn’t win in three or four years.

“When we started this three-year journey in 2019, this wasn’t the expectation, so I know that’s been hard on everyone, but this is a nice reward because no one ever quit. No one ever stopped, like, ‘Oh, Alex is leaving, so who cares anymore?’ That was never a thing, and I’m so appreciative of Michael and all the engineering staff for continuing to push to give me the best possible equipment. I’ve been in situations in the past where that’s not necessarily been the case, and I think that’s a testament to them as people and as a race team.”

Now, they head to Pieter Rossi’s new home in Nashville, a city that means quite a lot to his son and that has, in many ways, become a second home in recent years.  And in prime Rossi fashion, he – at least publicly – was quickly ready Saturday to turn the page and prove himself all over again. “It’s nice to be back up here, but we have another (race) in a week, so it all resets again,” he said.

But, as his father said, inside his son, things haven’t been all as they’ve appeared over these last few years. Though the younger Rossi’s tough exterior and dry humor evokes the idea of someone who’s never fazed, Pieter said Saturday parts of these last three years have been as tough as you might imagine combing through the results. Though he doesn’t like to show us, this chapter of his career has been debilitating at times – which means these next couple days should be pretty sweet.

“He’s a warrior,” Pieter Rossi said of his son. “He weathered it all brilliantly, and I think he was able to manage the disappointment in a way that was really professional. His intellect and the way he processes the ups and downs is amazing to see, because he becomes more analytical about it and digs deeper, and it all motivates him more. Whereas a lot of athletes, if they have a drought like that, it’s going to affect them mentally and go in the opposite direction, I’m really proud that this version of him never left.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar: Alexander Rossi ends drought as time with Andretti winds down