IS ARROW MCLAREN SP CONSISTENT ENOUGH FOR O’WARD (AND ROSENQVIST) TO CHALLENGE FOR THE TITLE?
For some, this is perhaps the biggest question of all. Partly that’s driven by most people loving Pato O’ward’s combination of sparky personality and derring-do on track, partly it’s a love of Mclaren’s rich heritage… But it’s possibly also because so many observers are desperate for some team – any team – to break the Ganassi-’n’-penske nine-year stranglehold on the Indycar championship. As one engineer from a rival team remarked: “You keep writing that Indycar is the most open series, and it’s the most competitive it’s ever been, but it’s always the same two teams who come out on top at the end of the year.”
Can Arrow Mclaren SP end this streak? The team’s extremely front-end-positive set-ups in 2021 proved a double-edged sword, ‘turning on’ the Firestones for late-race restarts, but frequently punishing them over a whole stint. There were even times when O’ward couldn’t take advantage of his tyres warming up swifter than those of his rivals because he had to be mindful of having enough grip 20 laps later.
But AMSP, if it hasn’t already become one of the top-echelon teams, is on the cusp of doing so, and some extremely intelligent folks on either side of the Atlantic have been using their grey matter to find alternative set-up solutions that are kinder to the rubber.
Craig Hampson’s ever-increasing influence over Felix Rosenqvist’s car last year appeared to pay dividends in the final third of the season. The Swede hadn’t liked the team’s road/street set-up philosophy and had been off O’ward’s pace. And then, as his car was made less ‘noseheavy’, and more like the set-ups he was used to from his Ganassi days, Rosenqvist started to flourish. With Hampson as his race engineer for 2022, he may become the star we expected.