WILL THE CASTRONEVES-PAGENAUD COMBO TAKE MSR TO THE FRONT?
“Jack Harvey’s a very good driver, but why was he so excited to leave Shank and go to Rahal’s team?” remarked one entirely objective paddock luminary to Autosport last week. “I think he needed to be a bit more patient, give it another year – because I reckon he’s quit Meyer Shank at exactly the wrong time, and he’s going to be kicking himself…”
This comment came just a couple of days after new recruit Simon Pagenaud and former part-time – now full-time – MSR driver Helio Castroneves finished 1-2 in a 14-car test at Sebring, and just a couple of weeks after the pair helped MSR win the Daytona 24 Hours. Yes, our observer may be right about MSR hitting its stride in 2022.
Pagenaud (who turns 38 in May) and Castroneves (who’ll be 47 the same month) wouldn’t have been everyone’s picks for a team expanding to two full-time entries for the first time. Notwithstanding his brilliant fourth Indy 500 victory, Castroneves needed his other five Indycar outings last year to blow the rust off on road and street courses. And, frankly, we still don’t know if that task is complete, and whether he can get back to the form he showed at Team Penske before ‘The Captain’ moved him across to his IMSA squad for three years.
There are question marks over Pagenaud too. When he’s confident, the 2016 champion flies – he can’t help excelling at Indy (where he won in 2019) and Toronto, for example. But since the universal aerokit was introduced in 2018, he never looked a consistent match for erstwhile Penske team-mates Josef Newgarden and Will Power.
Pagenaud can remedy that. He’s already adapting to the Andretti/msr-derived ‘family’ of set-ups, and he’s enjoying the Honda’s progressive power delivery, and working with his new race engineer Garrett Mothersead. “It’s difficult for me to express too much about it because I don’t want to betray anyone at Chevy and I respect them and all the success we had,” says the Frenchman. “But… the set-up is drastically different to what I used to run with Chevy and Penske. I was talking to my engineer Garrett because I have been shocked by some changes that he makes that work really well but didn’t work well for me in the past.”
Asked if he was a dark horse for the Indycar title, Pagenaud responded: “Yes, I would like to be seen that way.”