Inside Rossi’s first year with ECR in IndyCar
- Archie O’Reilly
- Jul 23
- 9 min read
This time in six weeks, the 2025 IndyCar season will have reached its conclusion. And with it, the first year of the Ed Carpenter Racing (ECR) revolution will draw to a close.
Last off-season played host to what team owner Ed Carpenter described as the team’s biggest reset since it was established for the 2012 season. Partnering with Indiana-based businessman Ted Gelov as co-owner, there was a major influx of investment ahead of this current campaign, enabling plenty of freshness within the ECR organisation.
Included in that was the significant addition of the vastly experienced Alexander Rossi - the 2016 Indianapolis 500 champion, an eight-time race winner and former championship runner-up - from Arrow McLaren to pilot the No.20 car on a multi-year deal.
Since, it has been a mixed year with a smattering of highs - for both Rossi and sophomore teammate Christian Rasmussen - and promise heading further into what is a long-term project for ECR.
Rossi started the season with three top-10 results in four races - his best result eighth at Barber - but has only been in the top 10 once more in the subsequent nine races. The greatest highs have come from Rasmussen, who is yet to score a road or street course top 10 but has finished no worse than eighth across four oval races.
A maiden career podium for Rasmussen at Gateway - the team’s first in three years - has been the greatest high of the team’s season.
“It’s been hit and miss,” said Rossi in a media call, particularly hinting at peaks and troughs in qualifying - as good as sixth and as poor as 24th. “Unfortunately if we had the answer to [solve] that, it probably wouldn’t be hit or miss - it would be consistent all the way through. It’s something that we’re continually trying to identify and understand going forward.”
As it stands with four races remaining in 2025, Rasmussen is 15th in the standings and Rossi 18 points further back and 60 points off the top 10 in 18th. Both are sitting lower than Rinus VeeKay’s worst finish across five years with ECR before departing last off-season.
A hint of inconsistency is something ECR will have to cut out, albeit Rossi has only finished outside the top 15 once in the 10 races he has seen the chequered flag.
The Indianapolis 500 is an obvious loss of points for the former winner, who looked a possible win-contending car before a mechanical issue took him out of the race before halfway. Another mechanical issue saw him retire in Race 1 at Iowa Speedway before an innocuous wall hit in Toronto destroyed the right-rear corner of his car.
But there has been encouragement stemming from the peaks after a tougher few years for a team which finished as well as fourth in the standings with Josef Newgarden in 2016. Their championship positions in a tight mid-pack are not necessarily representative.
“From a performance standpoint, I would say it’s probably honestly higher than what I was expecting,” Rossi admitted. “Maybe that’s not a fair thing to say but the performance has been good in a lot of scenarios.
“The execution on race day has been lacking. Some of that has been there are elements that are completely outside of the team’s control. We’ve unfortunately had quite a few mechanical failures this year. It’s the way the sport works; you look up and down the grid this year and by no means are we alone in that category.
“There’s so many variables and you try your best to control all of them but sometimes that’s not possible and it’s just a tough go for a little bit. But I would say the hardest thing to fix for any race team or driver is true performance. I don’t feel that’s our biggest issue.
“Obviously it needs to be better and we need to make more appearances in the Fast Six [with only one in 2025]. But we’ve been knocking on the door pretty much every weekend. That’s good. We will try and clean things up on Sundays to finish out the year better.”
His best result of the season on an oval being 11th at Gateway, Rossi acknowledges Rasmussen has maximised the performance better than he has. But that is the discipline where the team has the clearest idea of what is working and what could still develop further.
“It’s something that you dream to achieve on the road and street courses as well,” Rossi said, “which is obviously something we haven’t found yet.”
It is not only ECR with gains to make; it has been a bizarre season throughout the field. Not until Pato O’Ward won Round 11 at Iowa Speedway had a team not named ‘Chip Ganassi Racing’ or ‘Andretti Global’ - or a Chevy-powered team - visited Victory Lane in 2025.
The field spread has been its largest in recent memory. Álex Palou’s dominance has seen a gap fluctuating around 100 points at the front of the championship since very early in the season, with O’Ward the only other driver inside 172 points of the championship leader. Christian Lundgaard, at 219 points back in fifth, is already out of title contention.
All the while, a bewildering year of misfortune and some shortcomings in execution means Team Penske’s best-placed driver is Will Power in ninth, followed by Scott McLaughlin and Josef Newgarden in 13th and 16th.
“Ultimately there’s really one or two teams - two-and-a-half teams now I guess - that have been the benchmark,” Rossi assessed. “And everyone else is following considerably short. I’d say that’s not specific to ECR. There’s been a lot of surprises this year in terms of general performance or lack of results up and down the field.
“There’s low-hanging fruit [for ECR] on the operation side, on the performance side, on us as drivers to improve in the off-season. It is exciting to think about that. But it also takes a lot of effort and buy-in from everyone to accomplish that and start seeing the fruits of that labour.
“It’s not just: ‘Oh, we need to do this. We believe we need to do this. You actually have to do it. There’s quite a big gap for all of us to close on these three teams this year.”
ECR is the third team for which Rossi has driven across 10 seasons in IndyCar. And after seven years with the famed Andretti Global team and two years with the massively-resourced Arrow McLaren organisation, it is a smaller environment for him.
But even at those teams not regarded as powerhouses, the quality of the personnel remains at the same high standard. The difference is that these lower-resourced teams can become a little more stretched, which is something ECR wants to address as its evolution continues.
But the varied size of the operations is about as great a change as Rossi has experienced in his move to ECR.
“It might surprise you but it’s not that different,” he explained. “When I show up to the track in an ECR shirt versus a McLaren or Andretti shirt, it doesn’t feel any different. Walking into the trailer, you feel pretty proud being part of any of those organisations.
“The scale is the biggest thing. But what makes this series so challenging and so rewarding at the same time, all of these teams are very good. All the engineers, mechanics, management, drivers… everyone has earned a right and worked their way to get to this level. Just the amount of people [is different].
“At McLaren, there’s in some departments two people for one job, whereas at ECR it might be one person for two jobs, which is something that is a target of the organisation to build strength in personnel and to take some of the workload off the people who have been managing a lot of different departments all at once.
“That’s pretty high up on the priority list. But ultimately hiring people in this sport is very challenging. It’s not easy. You don’t want to hire people for the sake of hiring people either. It’s not just as easy as saying: ‘Oh, we’re three people short in the engineering group, let’s go hire three people.’”
Rossi knows about the hiring challenge all too well. He came onboard at Arrow McLaren in a brand-new third car for the team in 2023, adding to the existing lineup of O’Ward and Felix Rosenqvist. But his first season with the team was plagued by teething problems.
It was simply not as easy as adding an additional car’s worth of personnel and getting immediate rewards. That is why ECR’s measured and methodical approach to utilising its extra investment deserves a fair dose of credit.
“At Arrow McLaren in ’23 when we added the third car for me to come onboard, it was very difficult in the beginning,” Rossi recalled. “That whole year felt like a little bit of a waste in terms of a lot of those people had never even seen an IndyCar before.
“They got to the point where they’re very good but you’ve got to have a lot of runway in order to make hires like that. It’s a constant challenge - not just for us but for everyone.”
Rossi had previously remarked about how much ECR had already continued to evolve during his first off-season with the team from late September through to the start of the season at the end of February. And the team has taken lots of lessons to carry into its second off-season under new co-ownership.
Even as early as St. Petersburg in Round 1, there have been elements in development. But as Rossi suggests, “the time constraints and the personnel constraints” limit those actually being applied during the rigours of the season.
“Once you get into the season, it’s very difficult to really do much outside of focusing on the trackside performance side of things and really just try and put your best foot forward,” Rossi explained, “whether that’s through sim days or whatever.
“The year’s split up into two categories; you have pre-Indy 500 and post-Indy 500. The post-Indy 500 run is pretty intense for everyone. There’s not a lot of evolution that can happen. What you have is what you get.
“The real big step will come as we go into this off-season.”
Patience has been a watchword throughout Rossi’s time with ECR so far. It was never going to be a case of ECR gaining new investment and suddenly being able to fight with IndyCar’s proven front-running teams.
There is lots that needs to be applied over time and, as Rossi learned first-hand at Arrow McLaren, snap decisions or rushing into things can actually be counterproductive. But ECR has a clear direction in which it is moving and possesses a defined long-term view.
Only this month, it was announced that the team plans to relocate to Westfield, Indiana and open a new state-of-the-art, 76,000 square-foot facility housing advanced engineering and technical development spaces. On top of that, it will feature a public viewing area of the team’s operations, a merchandise store and a Java House café.
With his Heartland Food Products Group company and its consumer brands Java House and Splenda - the primary sponsors of ECR’s two cars - Gelov continues to show significant commitment to both the team and IndyCar. Imprints include the fact that Java House will be the primary sponsor of this weekend’s Grand Prix of Monterey at Laguna Seca.
The project continues to be an exciting one. And initial results are only building blocks of a much wider process of continued development on a performance and operations front.
“If you look at where the new ownership group came in, there’s a big change in what Ed Carpenter Racing is,” Rossi said. “That’s not an overnight thing. Those people need to have an understanding of what the sport is, what the sport requires to compete at the very top, identify areas that need to be tweaked and adjusted to get the most out of everybody.
“That’s not something you can do in October, having one day of a test at Indianapolis, to March and having the first race. We’ve all made a lot of notes and had a lot of conversations about things we need to improve in order to be better next year.
“At the same time, when it’s five races in four weeks, that’s not something you can really implement on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday going into a Thursday prep for a weekend.”
Heading into the closing rounds of the season, the focus for ECR is on setting themselves up as best as they can for IndyCar’s extensive off-season period.
Especially with two ovals to come, there should be opportunities for Rossi to improve upon his current season-best result of eighth. But in the bigger picture, any errant results at the back end of the season are not catastrophic so long as they provide ECR with solutions.
“At this point, points are irrelevant,” Rossi insisted. “We want to make sure we have answers to questions going into what is a long off-season. It’s always one of the struggles with IndyCar [when] you have all of these events stacked on top of each other; it’s hard to keep up any development programme, because everyone has to be trackside focused.
“You get into this off-season and it’s all development focused. You don’t have any opportunity to validate it on a track. We’re really trying to answer some questions for some heavy-hitting topics that we know that we’re weak in and struggling on.
“These four races should actually be fairly good for us with two ovals and two road courses. This year has been full of surprises. Points are not really relevant but I want to get some good results for the whole organisation and the morale going into the off-season.”
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