Chip Ganassi Racing ready to kick off bid for third straight IndyCar crown
No team in recent years has pulled off a run of IndyCar season championships like Chip Ganassi Racing’s 4-for-4 streak from 2008-2011.
Guess who’s in position to win a third straight in 2022?
The Ganassi team kicks off its bid for No. 3 in this weekend’s IndyCar season-opening Firestone Grand Prix on the temporary street course at St. Petersburgh, Florida. Alex Palou enters the season as the man to beat, having won the IndyCar championship last season. It backed up Scott Dixon’s sixth career championship for Ganassi in 2020 and set up the possibility for three in a row when the season begins February 27 at the Firestone Grand Prix at St. Petersburg.
Just don’t mention three-peat too loudly around the Ganassi gang.
“I know a lot of people talk about it, but we’ve never looked at it like that,” Mike Hull, managing director of Ganassi’s IndyCar program, told AutoRacingDigest.com. “We really live by the adage that we work on today.”
The competition is too close in IndyCar to take anything for granted. Team Penske won two straight with Simon Pagenaud in 2016 and Josef Newgarden in 2017, and Newgarden is looking for his third championship after finishing second the past two years.
There’s no downplaying the Ganassi team’s record of excellence -- 14 IndyCar championships, including four straight with Dixon in 2008 and Dario Franchitti in 2009, 2010 and 2011 -- or its potential with a driver lineup capable of delivering again this year. Besides Palou and Dixon, Marcus Ericsson won twice in 2021 and seven-time NASCAR Cup champion Jimmie Johnson will drive the entire season after racing only road and street courses last year.
“The terrific thing with four drivers here is we have world-class, globally recognized talent driving those cars,” Hull said.
Dixon enters his 21st season with the team and ranks third all-time with 51 IndyCar victories. He finished fourth in the 2021 standings and seems determined to make a strong run at a seventh championship. Hull says the fire he has seen in Dixon this offseason is intense.
“It’s a larger fire than it was last year, if it wasn’t already large to start with,” Hull said. “He has devoted himself this winter to working on himself and working with the team. The team has done the same with him. He’s a very driven guy.”
Palou, who turns 25 on April 1, won three races last year and recorded 10 top-five finishes, among them a second place in the Indianapolis 500 after a duel with winner Helio Castroneves that wasn’t decided until the finish.
Palou also handled adversity like a veteran, especially late in the season when every point toward the championship became vital. He lost the lead to Pato O’Ward of Arrow McLaren SP after a mechanical issue in the August race on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course and a crash the following week at World Wide Technology Raceway. Palou remained positive, and he won at Portland, finished second at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca and fourth in the finale at Long Beach to clinch the title.
“Alex re-focuses immediately and he re-energizes the people who are working for him in the worst of times to create the best of times,” Hull said. “That’s very rare in athletics. He’s a terrific, unselfish teammate, and he’s got enormous talent.”
Ericsson, beginning his fourth year in IndyCar after five seasons in Formula One, won twice last year.
“He has that intangible commodity that winning race drivers have,” Hull said. “When you have an intangible commodity and put him in a situation where he’s not tentative about being able to win, that’s hard to beat. The biggest problem is that he has teammates who are trying to do that same thing. On any given day, the guy can win a race.”
And don’t discount Johnson, the NASCAR champion whose first year in an Indy car came on road and street tracks he’d never raced on before.
Hull’s prediction: “We’re looking for greater and bigger things with Jimmie in ’22 than what we saw in ’21. I think he’ll do enormously well on the road and street tracks this year. And I think he’ll open some eyes on the ovals. Kurt Busch, for example, did a heck of a job (finishing sixth in the 2014 Indy 500 in a one-off drive for Andretti Autosport). That step is easier for a NASCAR driver than the step to do road and street tracks. So what Jimmie did, he did the hardest part first.”
Ganassi’s four drivers tested last week at Sebring, the team’s only on-track running before this weekend's opener. Hull wasn’t specific – no surprise – about the test agenda.
“If you work on 10 items, and one out of 10 works and nine don’t, the nine that don’t probably give you better direction than the one that does,” he said. “It’s a very methodical process to create something that the drivers can work with.”
And necessary, especially for a team with a chance to win a third straight championship.