ROSSI: The sum of the parts ...

Teamwork. The attribute that is engrained into our heads from elementary school all the way through our journeys in sports, business and even the Wednesday morning spin class we go to. It is about putting individual ego aside for the greater good of the group.

While we hear about this ad nauseam in basketball, football and every other sport that requires a ball, it is often overlooked in motorsports; aside from the couple of times a race when we come in for tires and fuel. The driver is put on a pedestal and the end results are centered on whether or not a driver performed well that day. A driver's performance, while still most important, is only a piece of the puzzle.

Let me explain.

I could be the best driver to have ever put on a helmet, but without a car that is fast, I won't be competitive. Knowing how to make a car fast consistently is equivalent to knowing how to cook a pancake right every single time. It's hard. It's a lot harder than people think. You would not believe the amount of effort that goes in behind the scenes on a daily basis from both an engineering and a mechanical side to develop a race-winning car. It takes a nine-to-five job and turns it into a 12-plus hour day the majority of the time, and these guys never flinch. They are as competitive as the drivers themselves. We feed off each other's energy and bond over a shared addiction to winning, and it's just a fundamental part of us as human beings. There is no agenda, no search for compliments; just everyone doing their job to be successful. It is only at this point where the opportunity to win presents itself.

Now, let's take a step away from the engineering and mechanical side of things and look at a driver's relationship with his teammates. When I came into the Verizon IndyCar Series at the beginning of the 2016 season, I knew very little about the championship, and even less about the car and tracks. In Formula 1, you had a working relationship with your teammate, but that is where it ended. There was a data share, but no advice, explanations or suggestions on a direction to go with your driving or car setup. At Andretti Autosport, this is the polar opposite of how the team is run, and a huge reason as to why the team has seen so much success, particularly at Indianapolis.

From day one at the Speedway last year, I relied on the other drivers to help me understand concepts that were completely foreign to me, since it was only the second oval I'd ever seen. We spent every evening as a group debriefing in a roundtable format, sometimes until midnight, discussing the positives and negatives of each driver's day. We would take the good and try and apply it to our own car, and cross the negatives off our list. Without a doubt, this is why all five of our cars last May had a chance to win, and we went into that Sunday knowing that we were the strongest team.

As many of you know, my Indianapolis 500 was a hectic one, with fueling problems in the pit stops that caused us to go from being toward the front to solidly in the back. I assume you've all heard the story of how my engineering team on the timing stand developed a strategy that was either going to win us the race or end in heartbreak, as I could potentially have run out of fuel before the finish. But what you don't know is that one of the primary reasons I won that race was because of two of my teammates – Ryan Hunter-Reay and Townsend Bell.

They both had an issue earlier in the race and were two laps down, so instead of just running their own race and being done, they both made the last third of their races about helping me get to the end. Allowing me to sit behind them and save fuel, is without question, what made the difference that day.

So the next time that you see a victory celebration and the driver doing donuts or spraying champagne (or drinking milk) know that there was an entire team trackside, back at the workshop and sometimes even on the racetrack, that all played a pivotal role in the result. The driver is the face in the helmet, but the rest is the men and women that commit everything to the sport that they love and are already thinking about how they are going to win the next one. This, in my mind, is what makes motor racing the ultimate team sport.