Ericsson sees Markham win as proof of season’s upward trajectory

Marcus Ericsson believes his victory in IndyCar’s inaugural race on the streets of Markham was an almost inevitable culmination of the strides the team has taken this season. That said, he didn’t deny there was much plate-spinning by himself and the Andretti Global team to take full advantage of a fast car and go to victory lane.

“It was an eventful race, I think as we expected going into the race,” said the 35-year-old Swede, after his first win since the start of his final season with Chip Ganassi Racing in 2023. “It's a really fun track here, but it's really challenging, especially with the pavement being very high grip on the racing line, but off line it's quite slick. We expected to have a lot of things happening. There were a lot of curve balls thrown at us.”

The No. 28 AG team and Ericsson took a high-risk strategy by delaying their second and final pit stop, because his chances could have been ruined by a caution period. There had been six cautions in the first two thirds of the 90-lap race; the chances of a seventh following the sixth restart seemed high. But Ericsson, who had been the fastest driver on track once Louis Foster had crashed, knew that so long as the race stayed green, he could pull a big enough gap from the lap 62 restart to pit and return to the fray in a potentially race-winning position, but with fresher tires and zero fuel-saving worries.

Remarkably, the gamble paid off and the race stayed green to the checkered flag. On low fuel and completely dialed into his fine-handling car, Ericsson pulled 13s ahead of second-place runner Romain Grosjean, pitted on lap 69 and emerged in sixth. Ericsson then lost a place to teammate Will Power, and sat back to take care of his tires before starting a charge. As others nursed their tires or fuel consumption, having stopped nine or more laps earlier, Ericsson’s relative pace to his rivals kept improving. He finally passed Grosjean’s Dale Coyne Racing car with four laps to go

“I felt all the way through that I had a really fast car,” said Ericsson. “There were key decisions there where we decided to stay out. I was pushing really hard to stay out. I know it was not ideal because I needed a ton of pace to be able to pull out the gap needed to come out in a decent place. But I really felt like the car was just so fast that I wanted to try and stay out and use that to my advantage.

“It was fun, that middle stint, when I was doing quali laps, two, two and a half seconds faster than the rest of the field. That was a good time. It was still tough to make our way back to the lead coming back in seventh. Had to work for it today.”

Ericsson denied, however, that his liberated and almost faultless performance was down to Andretti Global renewing his contract recently.

“I mean, it feels great to have the confidence from the team to continue. But I feel like this year, it's been a trend all season that we've been strong," he said. "I think I'm the fourth-best qualifier in the field on average.

“I feel like we've had quite a few big results and podiums taken away from us from… I hate saying ‘bad luck,’ but things not really going our way, where we've been looking to be on our way to a podium for a long time of the race, but a few things haven't gone our way. All the year, on every type of track, we've been fast.

“I think that says a lot about the Andretti Global organization, the work that Ron [Ruzewski, team principal] and everybody else has done, stepping it up on all types of tracks. I feel like my three years at Andretti, the first two years we had our specialty in street courses. Every now and then we could be good on other tracks as well. This year, that's the big thing – I feel like we don't have any real weakness. We're very strong on all tracks. Not saying we're going to stop. We need to keep pushing. But that's been a big difference.

“For me, the No. 28 crew has been working really well together. I have a couple of new people on my car this year. We've been jelling really well.

“I don't see this as sort of a surprise that we're sitting here winning. I feel like that's been trending that way. I've been telling my guys the last couple of races, ‘If we keep doing what we're doing now, it's going to be a matter of time, not a matter of "if" or not, because we've really been strong every race for a long time.'”

Ericsson told his team it was a matter of when, not if. And today proved him right. Michael Levitt/Lumen via Getty Images

Although this was the 2022 Indy 500 winner’s fifth IndyCar victory, remarkably it was the first one that didn’t entail a red flag.

“And it was probably close to a red flag here today with all the cautions!” he observed. “It's a messy street race. My other street course wins I've been fast as well, but there’s been some circumstances. I think today we won it on pure pace. We were the best car out there, and we won it because we played the game and we pushed when we needed to and we delivered when we needed to. So that felt really good.”

He later added, “This was my strongest win where I really showed pure pace all the way through and had to fight my way back. I really had to work for this one. I really felt like, yeah, I put in the work to deserve to win today. I felt really good.

“But every win is valuable in this series. There's no easy win. There's always so many good cars and teams out there. I appreciate each one of them. I felt like today was a great way to win the way we did it.”

Ericsson also praised the team as a whole, for its “preparation and simulation” ahead of a brand-new venue for the IndyCar Series.

“Coming to a new track like this, it's really tough because you don't have any previous data or videos or anything to look back at, no setups, nothing," he noted. "You had to really do a good preparation to roll off strong.

“I think we really did that. From the first practice on Saturday morning, the cars felt good. Really we didn't do much changes throughout the weekend. It was just fine-tuning from then on. It gives credit to that preparation work.

“I'm of course hoping we can do similar things next week in D.C. A similar scenario, new track, we don't have any previous experience. Yeah, huge credit to Andretti team there.”