How Rosenqvist is stepping up from sidekick to star with MSR

Felix Rosenqvist, the favorite teammate and sidekick to an established star. That was the Meyer Shank Racing driver’s reality when he graduated from Indy NXT to IndyCar in 2019 as understudy to future six-time champion Scott Dixon.

Chip Ganassi Racing loved Rosenqvist — as did Dixon during their two years together — and when he accepted a lucrative offer to join Arrow McLaren in 2021, it was more of the same. New teammate Pato O’Ward, who’d finished fourth in the championship in 2020, became best friends with the Swede, all while asserting himself as its top driver when the Mexican placed third in the 2021 standings.

There wasn’t much to choose from between the combo in 2022 when O’Ward took seventh and Rosenqvist claimed eighth in the championship, but like Dixon at CGR, there was no doubt about where Rosenqvist fell in the internal pecking order. O’Ward charged back to fourth in 2023 as his pal dropped back to a distant 12th, and it was time for another change as Jim Meyer and Mike Shank were looking to reboot their midfield team.

That’s where Felix Rosenqvist, favorite teammate and first-time IndyCar team leader, came to be in 2024. With a rookie teammate in IMSA DPi champion Tom Blomqvist and a team in need of starting fresh after a few fruitless seasons with ex-Penske veterans Helio Castroneves and Simon Pagenaud, the full weight of expectations were placed on Rosenqvist and the initial results were encouraging.

Holding fifth in the championship after the three opening races, the potential of Rosenqvist’s No. 60 Honda MSR entry were on display as the month of May approached. He’d add a 10th-place finish at the Indy GP, but a blown engine in the Indy 500 started a trend that saw Rosenqvist slide down the standings to 12th by the end of the year.

In hindsight, the hot start and progressive decline ended up being a positive for Rosenqvist. He’d done well in his first attempt to step up and be the leader that MSR needed, but the struggles also revealed some shortcomings in his approach.

That’s where Felix Rosenqvist, assessor and fixer of holes in his game, emerged entering 2025.

Rosenqvist says soaking up all the technical data he can has been key to his performance surge: “All this technical stuff I’m learning, I see it as a strength.”

Off to the best start of his IndyCar career, Rosenqvist sits fourth in the championship — one spot ahead of former teammate Dixon and two clear of O’Ward — as MSR and its new technical alliance with CGR have turned the No. 60 Honda into a serious contender. Working with Dixon’s former race engineer Ross Bunnell, who was assigned to Rosenqvist via CGR, has been a catalyst as their chemistry and results have been impressive from the outset.

This weekend’s Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix mark’s the 100th IndyCar start for Rosenqvist, and he’s nothing like the character who showed up to the sublime road course for the first time in 2016 as an Indy Lights rookie who simply wanted to go fast and win races. Felix Rosenqvist the team leader is on a quest to fill in the pieces of the puzzle that turn contenders into champions.

“I’ve been working quite a lot and understanding more from the car,” Rosenqvist told RACER. “Ross has been a perfect fit to our camp. He’s very competitive, but he also has a good sense of humor. He’s a ‘I don’t take any s**t’ kind of guy. He’s a good guy to have in your corner, and he’s been pushing me very hard, pushing my technical knowledge more than any other engineer. Just the way he talks about stuff; there’s a lot of times where I have to be like, ‘Hey, slow down. Like, what? What is this? What do you mean? What does that thing do?’ He’s really taking me to another level, which I think is super cool.

“Even if I’ve been in IndyCar for seven years, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot of new things, then you have the alliance with Ganassi and it opens things up for me to learn more than I ever have about the car. They turn different knobs than (former MSR technical partner) Andretti (Global) did on the car last year. So now we’re changing stuff that we never changed with Andretti, and it was the same when I went to McLaren. So all this technical stuff I’m learning, I see it as a strength.”

Joe Skibinski/IMS Photo

Some drivers just drive and leave the rest to their engineers and strategists. Many championships and Indianapolis 500s have been won in that manner, but it’s an older way of doing things. As competition gets closer every year and the margins between success and failure have been reduced to fractions of a second, Rosenqvist realized it was time to take a more modern approach to influencing his results by inserting himself in all areas that affect where the No. 60 Honda finishes in each race.

Taking a deeper and ongoing dive into the chassis setup side with Bunnell was the first step for Rosenqvist to take greater control over his fate. The second step involves MSR COO Adam Rovazzini, race strategist on the No. 60.

“Going into the week, I’m studying the strategy aspect more than anything,” he said. “Whereas before it was more like, ‘Hey, where do I need to brake,’ or mostly just driving stuff. I still find it immensely complex, and in the car with the strategy side, it’s definitely the hardest thing to process while you’re doing everything else. The strategy side in IndyCar, I think it’s way more complex than any other form of racing. Because 90 percent of being good in IndyCar is being good with all the strategy stuff.”

Rosenqvist also credits new teammate Marcus Armstrong, who joined the team from CGR and has his Ganassi race engineer Angela Ashmore on the No. 66 Honda, for pushing him in all areas. A mistake by the New Zealander in the first race and a problem with an air hose during a pit stop at the most recent race has Armstrong sitting 14th in the championship entering Barber Motorsports Park, but his ranking in the standings doesn’t reflect the 24-year-old’s true potential.

“I don’t think his results really reflect the speed he’s had; he’s been on pace everywhere,” Rosenqvist said. “It’s been good to have him as an anchor in the whole CGR integration as well. He has Angela, and they’ve been working for years together, and it would be way tougher if he wasn’t there, because it’s nice to just ask him sometimes, like, ‘Hey, how did this feel last year?’ Or, ‘What did you do here last year?’ So that’s been super helpful for us getting up to speed.

“And he’s super relaxed. I feel like I always get on with the Kiwis and the Aussies of the world because they’re similar to the Swedes in the way they go about their business. Very relaxed, but he’s very hard working. I think that’s the big surprise for me, because he was always this quirky, funny guy that I’ve known — not closely, but I’ve known him for a really long time, since he was 14, when I was driver coaching him in Italy one weekend. That’s when I met Marcus the first time, and he’s pretty similar.”

Felix Rosenqvist, the team leader, also knows championships are rarely won by those who don’t out-work their rivals. And teammates.

“He had a lot of confidence back then, and I could tell that he was going to go somewhere, because he seemed very determined on the path he wanted to take in his life, but his work ethic in this team is something like I’ve never seen,” he said of Armstrong. “He’s very hard working in the truck between sessions, with his engineer. He’s just always flat out, working between the sessions. I’ve been more like, I work for 20 minutes, look at my onboard (video), and then I’m done — chit-chat a little bit and try to relax. And he’s just flat out, in the zone all the time. So I’m seeing new things from him for myself that I’m adding with the things I’m learning from Ross and from Adam. It’s a lot, but it’s making me better.”

Honesty is never in short supply with Rosenqvist. Choosing to leave CGR’s No. 10 Honda eventually opened the door to a kid from Spain by the name of Alex Palou, who’s piloted Rosenqvist’s former car to championships in 2021, ’23 and ’24. The seasons spent at Arrow McLaren had some positives — a few poles and a few podiums — but didn’t do much to advance his career.

That’s where the timing of his shift to MSR has been fortuitous for both sides. He was hungry and they were hungry. He was disenchanted and they were disenchanted. Both had something to prove, and both have looked inward to address and resolve what they were missing. Their rise, at least through the early phase of the new season, has the potential to become one of the year’s great stories.

“We all sat down and said, ‘We have shown all these flashes, but how do we tie everything together? What do we truly need to work on here?’” he said. “And we’ve all agreed that the races were our biggest shortcomings. Last year, after Scotty , we were probably the best Saturday performer, but then we finished 12th in the standings. So how do we convert the speed we have? And I think, honestly, between Adam, me and Ross, we’ve done some good soul searching to figure out, how do we attack Sundays differently?

“You take that, in combination with really solid pit stops, how you tackle strategy, good communication on the pit stand as well, and it’s just a lot of little different things that has tied together into a better Sunday product. It’s still early days, and it’s not like we’ve nailed all these races; a bunch of things could have been better. But I would say last year, at this time of the year, the big difference is that then we felt like we over-performed to be fifth in the standings. And now we actually feel like we have more to do to be better than we’ve been. So it’s very exciting.”

Meet Felix Rosenqvist, the evolving team leader who loves his position in life.

“Having been around the block a little bit, this is a full-circle moment, being back with CGR in a way through our alliance with them,” he said. “You know, you can debate whether it was the right decision to go to McLaren, and I’d probably say it wasn’t. But hey, life goes on and I’m really happy. I’m a pretty lucky guy to be where I am with Meyer Shank.”