Ericsson at Andretti: What is happening with IndyCar’s Mr. Consistency?
- Archie O’Reilly
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
He was so close. So agonisingly so.
Fourteen laps between himself and a storied second Indianapolis 500 crown. Thirty-five miles from etching his name - his legend - deeper into the history books. Fewer than 10 minutes from a stunning way to signify lift-off after a faltering start to life in Andretti colours.
But it was not to be for Marcus Ericsson. Instead, utter despair.
At the start of Lap 187 last May, the Swede caught unawares behind two squabbling backmarkers, so audacious and oh-so-canny was Álex Palou to slide his No.10 Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR) machine to the inside into Turn 1. Seemingly not expecting the Spaniard’s move, the lead and race victory was snatched away from Ericsson.
There was a gut-wrenching familiarity to it. For the second time in three years at the Indy 500 since his victory with CGR in 2022, Ericsson led late but was left crushed.
In 2023, he was passed by Josef Newgarden on the final lap of his attempted defence of the crown - something, at the time, not achieved in two decades and done only five times in history. At the mercy of the all-conquering Palou, it was sheer heartbreak again in 2025.
Bizarrely, though, maybe none of it was to matter anyway this time around. While he held on for a runner-up finish, one day later Ericsson was moved to the rear of the classification due to an illegality on his car. If he had won and undergone the celebrative post-race formalities, would that same action have been taken? A question eternally unanswerable.
As it was, it only piled onto an emotionally torturous 24 hours. It was hardly something to soften the blow for Ericsson, who had still been through the emotional toil of losing victory that race-day night. Again. How can you possibly process it all?
Ericsson had started his second season with Andretti well enough, in his eyes, after a false start to life at the team in 2024. Leading up to last year’s Indy 500, he had again struggled for headline results - only one top 10 with three results of 20th or lower - but had exhibited good speed in qualifying, starting inside the top seven in the opening three rounds.
There was a sense of there being more to be positive about than the same time the year prior, when a practice crash had derailed his Indy 500 campaign and forced him to qualify for the race through Last Chance Qualifying. Owing to that, he was caught up in an incident at the back of the pack without even completing a single race lap.
But one year on from that, the turmoil of coming so close again in the 500, enhanced by the confusion afterwards - how was he supposed to feel given it may not have mattered anyway? - sent his second campaign with Andretti snowballing too.
“It was a lot of different things that contributed to what happened last year,” Ericsson reflected, speaking on IndyCar’s annual media days. “That negative spiral after the Month of May was something that was really tough for us and for me.
“The start of last year was really strong. I was one of the fastest leading up to May. Just need to get back to that, get back to the basics. I’ve looked a lot at myself: what can I do better, how can I work better with the team to get the car I need and balance I need.”
Ericsson had been buoyant, in many ways, ahead of the 2025 season. He had confidently cited all of the hard work he had done in the off-season, leaving no stones unturned after 2024, at the end of which a championship finish of 15th marked his worst campaign since 17th in his rookie year with Arrow Schmidt Peterson Racing in 2019.
Especially with teammate Colton Herta having finished second in the standings, Ericsson knew the season had been far from up to standard. He was encouraged, though, by the fact his first year with CGR in 2020 was underwhelming too before improving drastically, as he finished 12th in the standings in year one before jumping to sixth in year two with the team.
But as the rounds went on, the leap he desired in and forecast for 2025 never came. Once again, it became a year plagued by inconsistency. And up another notch.
His fifth-place finish in Toronto was his only top-10 result in the final 16 races after starting the season with sixth on the streets of St. Petersburg. From the 17-race calendar, eight top-15 finishes marked not even half of the season as he regressed to 20th in the standings.
It was a far cry from his time at CGR, where he was renowned for his consistency above much else. In his final three seasons of the four under Chip Ganassi’s guise, he finished sixth in the standings every year. Across that three-year period, he only finished outside the top 10 on 12 occasions - and was outside the top 15 only four times - in 50 races.
He departed CGR with a 14-top-10 campaign in 2023. But in two years with Andretti, he has fallen five short of even that tally with only nine top 10s, seven of which came in 2024, five of which came in a five-race run in the mid-portion of that largely wretched opening campaign.
“I need to get back to that consistency that I had with Ganassi,” Ericsson asserted. “That’s the sort of consistency you need to be running up front - and I know I can do that because I’ve shown that in the past.
“The key point for me is to get back to that, to have a car underneath me that I can trust every weekend and know what it’s doing, then be able to deliver those performances when we get to the races. That’s a big, big focus point for me.”
There was a stark familiarity to many of Ericsson’s comments. Painfully for him, the same sorts of things being uttered as one year ago. About hard off-season work in a bid to rebound. About shortfalls - not big successes. A sense of inquest again.
It is not a lost cause, though. Things have not meshed and Ericsson has not been entirely comfortable driving an Andretti machine, but alterations aplenty are being enacted.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time with the team,” Ericsson explained. “Got a new engineer, new strategist this year, so a lot of changes there. Excited to see all of that come together and see where we are.
“There’s a lot of self-reflecting and seeing what I can do better as a driver. I know the team has worked extremely hard to also do things better and there’s a lot of changes there as well. It’s not one thing you can point at. It’s just a lot of small things together that makes a difference. We’ve put down the work to really make sure we are better and stronger.”
As part of that work, Ericsson knows every driver will speak every year about having trained better than ever in the off-season. The same stock statements about feeling in the best physical shape they ever have. Sure, he believes he is the same.
But where he works to gain an edge is on the mental side. For much of his career, he has worked with a mental coach - and to his credit is extremely open about the perks.
Especially after two years of adversity, and particularly given the negative spiral of last season, he feels he can make significant headway on that front. This off-season, that has included working on more new techniques from a mental standpoint.
“It’s still underestimated, the importance of mental training and mental strength,” Ericsson acknowledged. “When you have a tough season like I had last year, it’s really even more important to focus on those things and really build yourself up and have a strong mental approach to things.
“That’s where I can learn a lot from last year, how I got into a bit of a negative spiral after the Month of May and I couldn’t really break out of that. And that affected my results and my performances throughout the last part of the year. I’ve been analysing that, learning from that and have tools now to use how to not get there.
“It’s an interesting thing and [there] is still a lot you can learn from the mental side. Everyone is different there as well. I’m lucky I have a very good coach in Sweden, Stig, that I work with and we’ve had some really cool stuff that we’ve done that I think is going to really pay off this year.”
This off-season, Ericsson made a conscious effort to put himself in new situations outside of his comfort zone. That included the first GT3 races of his career - most recently the Daytona 24 Hours but also the Malaysia 12 Hours at the Sepang International Circuit in early December, where he was teammates with his brother, Hampus.
Going six months without IndyCar racing, it has been an educational period for Ericsson.
“I wish I could have tested an Indy car every week for the off-season and work on different things… but you can’t do that,” he exclaimed. “You need to think outside the box. One of the things I wanted to do this off-season was to challenge myself, go outside my comfort zone.
“That’s why I did a couple races in GT3 because I’ve never driven GT cars in my life. So that’s been really interesting and it’s been a great thing to learn things about myself and, as a racing driver, how I adapt to different situations.”
After his chance to reset and reflect in recent months, it is now a crucial season ahead, with Ericsson’s career as a driver for a front-running IndyCar team possibly on the line.
Now 35 years old, his Andretti contract is up at the end of 2026. Waiting in the wings, you could speculate, is reigning Indy NXT champion Dennis Hauger, participating in his rookie season with Dale Coyne Racing, who have formed a technical alliance with Andretti this off-season, maintaining a bond with Hauger after his title-winning year with their junior outfit.
It is pressure-on for Ericsson. But this is the sort of high-stakes situation he has learned to relish across his career.
“It’s a bounce-back year for me,” he insisted. “You can do as much talking as you want outside the track but it’s the results that matter. I need to focus on that and I need to be on the level I’ve shown I can be and running up front, winning races and fighting with the best.
“Always throughout my career I’ve performed my best when it’s high pressure - and I think that’s why also the 500 is something I do very well at, because it’s the most high-pressure race of the year. I have a good feeling about it.”
Now, more than ever, Ericsson needs to rise to that mark when it matters most.
