Andretti Autosport special, Part 1: Sum is greater than the parts

Andretti Autosport’s well-established multi-car approach has paid dividends in the Verizon IndyCar Series.

Andretti Autosport has never been a team to get shy with its Verizon IndyCar Series car counts, and its 2015 full-time lineup of three, plus a fourth entry with a rotating driver roster, and a fifth Dallara-Honda at the Indianapolis 500, continues the theme.

True, this might mean that individual drivers don’t get to be the full focus of the team’s effort the way their counterparts in single-car teams do. But Ryan Hunter-Reay has won both an Indy 500 and an IndyCar Series title as a component of a much larger machine, and he believes that the benefits are worth the complications.

“At times, taking on more cars is definitely a challenge,” he says. “There’s nothing easy about it, no matter how big the team is or how many personnel there are. But we use that to our advantage, because five cars means we get five times the amount of data for the Month of May.”

According to Hunter-Reay, the structure that makes it a success comes from the top, but it requires a focused effort from the guys in the trenches to make it work.

“The structure and the working environment have to be there to make it a success,” he says. “To translate into results on the racetrack, it has to be very organized and I think that certainly has to come down from upper management.

“But the guys on the shop floor have done such an amazing job of preparing cars capable of winning, whether it’s on a road or street course, or at the Indy 500. The team as a whole has become very, very effective at adapting and taking on more cars. And each additional entry is prepared with the same amount of detail as the regular-season cars.

“The results speak louder than anything else. When you have someone come in like Carlos Munoz did with us at Indy in 2013, or Kurt Busch last year, you see the cars are just as fast as the full-season entries.”

In Munoz’s case, the result was second overall; for NASCAR ace Busch it was sixth, with both earning Rookie of the Year honors.  

But, to work effectively, the multi-car ethos requires a specific type of mindset from a driver to buy into the idea of the sum being greater than the parts.

“You have to have a lot of cooperation,” Hunter-Reay says. “You all need to have a ‘team first’ mentality. You can’t be guarded or selfish about what you find on the racetrack. The more you work with your teammates, the more you all communicate, the better your results will be on race day.”

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