Oilpressure

On Monday, I wrote about some of the surprise teams as I saw it after the first seven races of the 2023 NTT IndyCar Series season. I included the teams of AJ Foyt Enterprises, Junco Holinger Racing and Andretti Enterprises as my pleasant surprises so far this season. You are free to agree or disagree, as this is just my opinion.

Today I’m going to look at the disappointments, seven races into the 2023 season.

The most obvious disappointment to me is Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLLR). Since the team expanded to three fulltime entries in 2022, they seem to be on a backward trajectory. In 2020, the two-car team of Graham Rahal and Takuma Sato finished sixth and seventh in the championship. In 2021, Rahal finished seventh in the final standings, while Sato finished eleventh. There were several drivers auditioning in a third RLLR car at selected races in 2021, which may have distracted from the efforts of the two fulltime efforts.

In 2022, RLLR expanded to three fulltime cars. Rahal finished eleventh in the championship, rookie Christian Lundgaard finished fourteenth and new team member Jack Harvey finished a very disappointing twenty-second in the standings.

While this team has been trending in the wrong direction for years, the bottom has fallen out this season. Seven races in, shows Christian Lundgaard leading the team in points – in thirteenth-place. Graham Rahal is eighteenth and Jack Harvey is currently twenty-third. Except for the anomaly of the GMR Grand Prix that saw all three cars qualify in the Top-Ten including the pole, the RLLR cars have not been good on non-ovals and far worse on the two ovals so far.

All three cars were out to lunch at Texas; qualifying twenty-fourth, twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth. The race wasn’t much better as all three Rahal cars finished eighteenth, nineteenth and twenty-fourth. It got worse for the Indianapolis 500. Katherine Legge ran a fourth RLLR car, and hers was the only one to not have to fight it out in Last Chance Qualifying. The cars of Lundgaard, Harvey and Rahal had to fight it out with Sting Ray Robb, as four cars battled for the final three spots. Graham Rahal was the odd man out. It was only due to Stefan Wilson’s back injury that Rahal got to drive in the 500 at all this year.

At Detroit, the RLLR cars qualified eighteenth, twenty-fifth and twenty-seventh. The poor results continued in the race as all three cars finished sixteenth, seventeenth and twenty-fifth.

This is a well-funded team, with good drivers. But something is wrong. I won’t pretend to know what the problem is, but it needs to be fixed. They have some loyal sponsors that have been with the team for years, but even they are going to grow tired of the dismal on-track performance. The team needs to fix this before that happens.

Another team that is going backwards is Meyer Shank Racing (MSR). Michael Shank has shown he knows how to run a race team, with the success his teams have had in IMSA over the years. Two years ago, they lost Jack Harvey just as they were expanding to a two-car team. It’s hard to believe, but it looks like that departure has hurt both parties.

They made an emotional decision to hire Helio Castroneves for the second car, on the heels of his fourth Indianapolis 500 victory, and the only IndyCar victory of any kind for MSR. In hindsight hiring a driver that old, with diminishing road racing skills was probably a poor decision. On paper, it was hard to argue with the hiring of Simon Pagenaud as the driver of the primary car. He was younger than Castroneves, and was only three years removed from his Indianapolis 500 win. That has not worked out that well either. Currently, Castroneves and Pagenaud sit twenty-second and twenty-fifth in the championship standings after seven races. Marcus Armstrong sits five spots ahead of Castroneves in the points, yet he has started two fewer races.

Again, I don’t know how you fix this. I don’t think the drivers are the problem, but they are the easiest ones to blame. I suspect neither of the current drivers will be back with the team in 2024, unless something changes drastically.

Is it possible to label Arrow McLaren a disappointment so far this season? They have yet to win a race, despite the fact they have been so close. Currently. Their drivers sit fifth (O’Ward), sixth (Rossi) and tenth (Rosenqvist). I think if you were to ask all three drivers, none would say they are happy where they are right now. This is a good team, with excellent drivers and a superb staff. I’ll be shocked if they don’t win a race soon. They may not win the championship this season, but they will be there up until the very end. I’m not really that worried about them, but I am surprised they are winless headed into the eighth race of the season.

Dale Coyne Racing has definitely taken a step back from where they were a year ago. I’m not sure that anyone expected much from the No. 51 car, moving on from Sato to rookie Sting Ray Robb. But David Malukas had the whole paddock talking near the end of last season, and he has not done much at all this season.

Other than a fourth-place finish at Texas, the second year driver has finishes of tenth, twentieth, nineteenth, twenty-sixth, twenty-ninth and twenty-third. Just a few months ago, people were talking about Malukas driving a Ganassi car in 2024. Those talks have gone silent, as his season has.

Of course, the shakeup at Ed Carpenter Racing (ECR) had everyone buzzing last week. Conor Daly was fired on Wednesday and less than twenty-four hours later, it was announced that Ryan Hunter-Reay would be replacing Daly. It’s hard to call Ed Carpenter Racing a disappointment for this season, because I never expected much out of them to begin with. But when you look at where they sit currently and compare it to where they finished last year, they have regressed and Daly’s departure seems justified. That’s saying something when you haven’t been that good in the first place. Last year, Rinus VeeKay finished twelfth in the points. Currently, he is fifteenth. Conor Daly was seventeenth in the final championship standings last year. After what was ultimately his final race for the team in Detroit, he was twentieth in points. This is a team in need of a new direction. They have gotten very stale over the past few years. perhaps Ryan Hunter-Reay can breathe some new life into this team.

So there you have it – my assessment of each fulltime team seven races into the 2023 season. Two are right where we expected them to be (Penske, Ganassi), three are pleasant surprises (Foyt, JHR and Andretti) and five are disappointments (RLLR, MSR, McLaren, Coyne and ECR). That’s how I see them. I’m sure many of you disagree. Let me hear why, if you do.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on June 14, 2023 at 4:02 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.