Rossi and ECR planning "big step forward" for 2026
- Morgan Holiday
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
Written by Morgan Holiday
Off the back of a productive off-season, Alexander Rossi is coming in hopeful to his second IndyCar season with Ed Carpenter Racing (ECR).
Rossi joined ECR in 2025 off the back of two seasons with Arrow McLaren, making the step down to a lower performing team than he had been used to in his IndyCar career. It showed in his results, his 15th place finish in the standings was his worst overall finish to date, and it was his first year in 10 years of IndyCar racing where he did not stand on the podium.
That being said, there were a lot of positives for Rossi and ECR to take from last year. Christian Rasmussen brought the team back to the podium at Worldwide Technology Raceway for the first time since 2022, and later in the season took his first IndyCar win and ECR's first win since 2021.
On top of that, Rossi's two top-five finishes in 2025 came in the final three races of the season. His hope is that the team's progression, especially through the latter half of the 2025 season, will carry them forward to new highs in 2026.
“I think, a huge amount of momentum the last third of the season,” brought up Rossi when speaking about last year and his hopes for the coming season. “Obviously Christian's win in Milwaukee was huge for the team. It had been five years since [ECR] had a car in Victory Lane. Just a good reminder from everyone, top to bottom, that you can do this. The effort is not in vain, that sort of thing.
“I think the change the team had going into 2025 came pretty late in that off-season, so you're not going to see all of the effects, the positive effects, of that immediately. This stuff takes a lot of time.
“The back end of last year was trending in the right direction. I think this off-season we've been able to deploy a lot of the resources and capital that the team now has and hired quite a few people, changed the structure a little bit.
“Everything is moving in a really great direction, which is all great and fine, but you need to prove that out on track. There's only so much you can do at the shop without driving.
That being said, we're really excited about the opportunity that we have. We feel that 2026 can be a really great year for ECR.”
Improvements for Rossi and ECR during the off-season
For drivers like Rossi and teams like ECR looking to capitalise on momentum from the previous season, the off-season can be crucial. It’s not just about taking a break and getting some rest, but analysing every aspect of your performance and looking at what needs to change for next season to get better results.
Rossi spoke to DIVEBOMB on IndyCar’s media day about the key points of his first full off-season as a member of ECR.
“What I will say is when Ted [Gelov] came in in 2024, that was fairly late October, November-ish time,” he commented. “It doesn't really matter what you deploy from a resource standpoint, you're not going to be able to hire everyone you want to hire; you're not going to be able to start all the projects you want before you're on track March 1st. Some of the lead time on this stuff is a year, a year plus.
“What you started to see at the end of last year was some of these things kind of trickle down the pipeline and get applied to either the cars or the pre-event work going into race weekends. So all of that was in small pieces starting to come together.
“Now you add six months of an off-season where it's so hard in the year, especially with the calendar that we have, it being so condensed, it's hard to develop when you're going from race to race to race to race, right? At some point you're just trying to keep your head above water, get to the next event, do the best you can.”
But according to Rossi, once the off-season hits and you have time to breathe, that’s when it’s time to start taking a deeper look at the details you didn’t have time for during the rush of the racing schedule.
“You take all of those lessons, you take all of the new toys, if you will, the new tools and software and everything, you start applying that piece by piece through an off-season and start building your tool chest, if you will, going into a new year.
“You're all of a sudden way further ahead than you ever were at any point in 2025. That's the things that we're looking forward to. It will certainly lead to performance on track.”
What you do in the off-season has the potential to put you in a great place to start the new season, or it has the chance to ruin your year.
Contrasting the start of the 2026 season to the start of last year, Rossi said: “Expectations are much higher. I kind of talked about that before in terms of Ted has made it very clear that he's involved in this, yes, because he loves the sport and yes, because he uses it as a good marketing arm for his products, but also because he's a competitor and he's here to win.
“I think the atmosphere within the organization, everyone is excited. Everyone believes that after a long time that we are now starting to get the pieces together to go out and compete with the best.
“Now, does that happen overnight? Absolutely not. Are we all of a sudden going to be a CGR? No. Are we going to take a big step forward over where we have been? Yes.”
That kind of confidence bodes well for Rossi and ECR, as they look forward to the start of the 2026 season which will kick off in St. Petersburg on March 1.
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