Imagine what it’s like to sit in an engineering debrief with Andretti Autosport during a typical NTT IndyCar Series race weekend.
The team has five full-time drivers, all with different driving styles. Throw in a satellite team in Meyer Shank Racing with driver Jack Harvey and the part-time Andretti Autosport effort for James Hinchcliffe and that is seven sets of data to accumulate and decipher.
So, the debriefing room would be jammed with seven drivers and seven race engineers, as well as Andretti Autosport technical director Eric Bretzman and chief operating officer Rob Edwards. Throw in a few more data acquisition engineers and frequently officials from Honda Performance Development, and the “debrief” can be anything but brief.
With so much data and so many different engineering concepts, how do the participants in this forum deal with information overload?
“With great difficulty,” Mark Bryant, Zach Veach’s race engineer at Andretti Autosport, told SPEED SPORT. “It is a massive task. Having another driver again for this coming season is a huge task.
“It is really trying to pick out those really important things in the debrief and making sure we work together as a group to point us all in the right direction, rather than the nitty-gritty details of certain things that aren’t specific to your driver that need to be portrayed. You look at how the setup has evolved over the weekend, rather than focus on every little detail.”
There are many advantages to having a multi-car operation. Each driver can work on different race setups in practice to determine which one is best for the entire team. Testing becomes more valuable because more can be accomplished simply by having more drivers and engineers.
Andretti Autosport, however, has taken multi-car teams to a new level. For years, it was a four-car operation. This year, Andretti Autosport, took over its partner team at Harding Steinbrenner Racing, which features 19-year-old Colton Herta, giving the team five full-time entries.
Another entry and another set of data.
Meyer-Shank Racing provided the sixth car when its previous technical partner, Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, merged with Arrow and McLaren. That left team owner Michael Shank, who is a Honda loyalist, searching for a new team alliance.
Shank, who fields Acuras in IMSA, reached an agreement with Andretti Engineering for his Honda-powered Indy car wheeled by Jack Harvey.
Ryan Hunter-Reay, Alexander Rossi and Marco Andretti are the veterans on the five-driver Andretti Autosport squad that also includes Herta and Veach.
Add Harvey to the mix on the partner team and this is a very interesting collection of racing talent, as well as driving differences.
“We all get along really well,” Herta told SPEED SPORT. “We are more similar behind closed doors than most people think. We get along really well and that helps with a healthy relationship.”
Each driver has a different style and that is what makes this collection so interesting.
“Some people have some strong suits in their driving where they can repeat better at other tracks,” Herta explained. “Rossi runs exceptionally well at Long Beach. I was really good at COTA and Laguna Seca. Ryan is really good at Iowa. You can go through and see where these guys are really good. Through all five of our drivers, we have places where somebody is good at that track and we can learn from them.”
Rossi’s driving style is as different as any of these six drivers.
“Alex can make things work,” Bryant said. “That is very true. Sometimes, it’s about being in the right zone, the right frame of mind. Some guys are able to pull that off more often than others.”
Finding the similarities and capitalizing on the differences are key to success for multi-car teams. That is why it’s important for each driver to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses while trying to help each other perform better.
“I think we try to help find things,” Herta noted. “Over the years working with teammates, you see patterns of what works for them and what works for you. That’s something that I enjoy. It’s something that you work toward through the years of experience. There is some stuff that is really clear that we want to do with the car and then there are other things that are not.
“You can see what happens to them when they do the change,” Herta added. “If there is drastic change and you are struggling with oversteer and the drastic change is for understeer, it is something you would want to try regardless of whether it suits your driving style or not.
“I’m probably more like Ryan Hunter-Reay when it comes to driving style,” Herta continued. “Marco Andretti is on a different spectrum. He likes a lot of understeer and Alex is on the opposite end of the spectrum. He likes a lot of oversteer.”
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