2025 IndyCar season outlook: Chip Ganassi Racing
Yesterday at 04:43 PM
With the first practice session of the new IndyCar Season due to begin at St. Petersburg on Friday, February 28, it's time to start ramping up for the launch with a look inside each of the 11 teams.
What's new, what's different, and what has stayed the same? We'll find out from each team.
2024 ACHIEVEMENTS
To understand where the Ganassi team is starting in 2025, let's begin with a look back to where it ended in 2024.
• Drivers' Championship: Kyffin Simpson, No. 4 Honda, 21st place. Zero wins/poles/top threes/top fives/top 10s, one race led for three laps, running at the finish of 13 out of 17 races. Average starting position of 22.8, average finish of 19.3.
• Drivers' Championship: Linus Lundqvist, No. 8 Honda, 16th place. Zero wins, one pole (Road America), two top threes, two top fives, four top 10s, four races led for 27 laps, running at the finish of 14 out of 17 races. Average starting position of 14.8, average finish of 15.4.
• Drivers' Championship: Scott Dixon, No. 9 Honda, sixth place. Two wins (Long Beach, Detroit), zero poles, five top threes, eight top fives, 11 top 10s, six races led for 98 laps, running at the finish of 15 out of 17 races. Average starting position of 11.4, average finish of 9.6.
• Drivers' Championship: Alex Palou, No. 10 Honda, first place. Two wins (Indy GP, Laguna Seca), three poles (Indy GP, Laguna Seca, Mid-Ohio), six top threes, 13 top fives, 13 top 10s, nine races led for 263 laps, running at the finish of 16 out of 17 races. Average starting position of 8.4, average finish of 6.3.
• Drivers' Championship: Marcus Armstrong, No. 11 Honda, 14th place. Zero wins/poles, one top three, four top fives, eight top 10s, two races led for 4 laps, running at the finish of 13 out of 17 races. Average starting position of 11.1, average finish of 14.7.
• Entrants' Championship: No. 8, 15th (using the Leaders Circle contract earned by the retired No. 11 in 2025), No. 9, sixth (earned a Leaders Circle contract), No. 10, first (earned a Leaders Circle contract).
2025 DRIVERS
• No. 8 Honda: Kyffin Simpson.
• No. 9 Honda: Scott Dixon.
• No. 10 Honda: Alex Palou.
2025 KEY POSITIONS
• Team Owner: Chip Ganassi
• Managing Director: Mike Hull
• Director of Racing Teams: Taylor Kiel
• Team Managers: Barry Wanser, Blair Julian, Mike LeGallic
• Director of Performance: Chris Simmons
• Engineering Manager: Julian Robertson
• No. 8 Race Engineer: Luke Goldenstein
• No. 8 Race Strategist: Taylor Kiel
• No. 8 Chief Mechanic: Jason Beck
• No. 9 Race Engineer: Brad Goldberg
• No. 9 Race Strategist: Mike Hull
• No. 9 Chief Mechanic: Tyler Rees
• No. 10 Race Engineer: Julian Robertson
• No. 10 Race Strategist: Barry Wanser
• No. 10 Chief Mechanic: Ricky Davis
MAJOR CHANGES
• Chip Ganassi Racing has undergone significant change since the last lap of the 2024 season was completed. With IndyCar's new charter program limiting three charters per team, CGR was forced to shutter the No. 4 of Kyffin Simpson and No. 11 of Marcus Armstrong and downsize from five cars to three.
• CGR formed a new technical alliance with Meyer Shank Racing where it supplies race engineers, dampers, and chassis setups for MSR's two-car team.
• In shuffling the entry deck, Simpson's No. 4 was retired as a number, which AJ Foyt Racing took for David Malukas's car.
• The 2024 Rookie of the year Linus Lundqvist, who piloted the No. 8 car, was replaced by Simpson.
• Armstrong exited CGR for MSR and has Ganassi's Angela Ashmore, his engineer from 2024, assigned to the car.
• Ross Bunnell, Dixon's race engineer from 2023-2024, has been assigned to MSR's Felix Rosenqvist.
• Ganassi veteran Brad Goldberg, who won the 2022 Indy 500 with Marcus Ericsson and looked after Lundqvist last season, has been moved to Dixon's car.
• Danielle Shepherd, CGR's race-winning Cadillac IMSA race engineer who led Simpson's rookie efforts last year, has left the team.
• Luke Goldenstein, a veteran IndyCar engineer and newcomer to CGR, takes over race engineering duties on Simpson's No. 8 car.
• Added a two-car Indy NXT program to keep and redeploy as many of the former Nos. 4 and 11 crew members, along with some of the newly-departed IMSA GTP program's crew.
• The American Legion, which has been an important sponsor for the team in recent years, is understood to have scaled back on its racing sponsorship program.
• On a related thread, Ridgeline Lubricants, a sponsor featured across multiple CGR cars via Simpson, is also not expected to be seen. Journie Rewards, a savings plan for a range of Canadian gas stations that also comes to the team via Simpson, was shown on the No. 8 car as the primary sponsor during its livery launch.
THE MISSION AHEAD IS TO…
Maintain its grip on the championship and either achieve three in a row with Palou or produce a record-tying seventh title for Dixon. Of all the stats associated with Palou's victory last year, it was his astonishing output of 13 top fives — 14 if you count the non-points Thermal race — that crushed the field. Consistency is Palou's superpower, and it's the top-five component of that consistency where he's been extinguishing the hopes of his closest rivals.
But that consistency also started to take on the look of being a crutch as the second half of the 2024 season gained momentum. Palou's last of his two wins came on June 23 at Laguna Seca, the eighth race of the year. Put another way, Palou went winless over the final nine races and watched as Colton Herta, Scott McLaughlin, Will Power, and Pato O'Ward won two apiece. Josef Newgarden won one to complete the tally of nine non-Palou victors.
Make no mistake, it was Palou's otherworldly ability to capture 13 top fives from 17 races that handed him the title, but it was also made possible over those last nine contests by his pursuers who took all the wins, but ended up neutralizing each other by failing to fully capitalize on Palou's inability to reach victory lane.
With Herta, McLaughlin, Power, and O'Ward taking pairs of wins, nobody was able to stand out as a primary challenger to Palou; if any had taken a third or fourth win while the No. 10 car lost a tiny bit of its edge, we'd likely be celebrating a different champion. Simply put, the Andrettis and McLarens and Penskes were too busy trading wins to overtake Ganassi's top driver while he was prone.
Dixon snared Ganassi's other two wins, both on street courses, with the last coming on June 2 in Detroit, which further highlights the second-half limitations the team endured. Dixon also went without a pole for the second consecutive season, which delivers the final point on CGR's mission for 2025.
It claimed four combined wins with Palou and Dixon and had three poles thanks to Palou, but that won't be enough to defend the title, not with the Andrettis and McLarens and Penskes in attack mode. Ganassi's ability to remain atop the series will come down to its engineering department and the ideas its research and development team have come up with during the offseason to unleash the same kind of easy speed Palou used to such devastating effect in 2023, with those five wins and a complete season without a single finish outside the top 10.
Dixon gave Ganassi a 1-2 in the championship, with his three wins bringing the tally to eight. In dropping to four in 2024, the team’s mission to get close to its 2023 form is clear.
Part of that year-to-year dip can be attributed to Team Chevy, which whipped Honda last year and scored an easy victory in the Manufacturers' championship. As Honda's flagship team, Ganassi will play a vital role —along with Andretti – in determining whether Honda can win the Indy 500 and the Manufacturers' title, and if Honda Racing Corporation US has made strides to reel in Chevy, we should see a related rise in the win column for both teams.
Simpson's Main Task: Improve his qualifying performances. He has speed, which has been shown, but it rarely appeared when it mattered in qualifying where so much of a driver's race-day fortunes are set. Rolling off the starting grid with an average of 22.8 should become a thing of the past; if Simpson isn't well into the teens, it will be a surprise. But like his rookie season with a rookie race engineer where both had tons to learn, he'll have a far more experienced engineer in Goldstein to work with – but Goldstein's never touched a hybrid Dallara DW12, which means he'll be learning a new car while getting to know a new driver. Altogether, Simpson's ready to take a meaningful step as an IndyCar sophomore, and once he and Goldstein have found their groove, it should become evident.
Dixon's Main Task: Remind everyone that a relatively unremarkable 2024 — at least by his standards — was a fluke. The last time Dixon finished sixth in the championship was 2016 when Penske drivers went 1-2-3-4 and Graham Rahal had a career year by placing fifth. Last season, there was a basic lack of Dixon's perennially foreboding presence in qualifying, where he started 10th or worse 12 times, and in the races where he was just outside the top six on seven occasions. Most drivers would dream of having those results, but Dixon isn't most drivers.
He's one of the all-time greats when it comes to race-day performances; Dixon's made countless runs from lowly starting spots to take podiums and wins, and he did that at Indy, Toronto, and Milwaukee 2. And in an ongoing trend, Dixon's another driver who needs to get more out of his Saturdays to have better Sundays. The note about Honda applies here as well; more heat from those motors in qualifying would make a difference, and with fewer long hauls to make in the races, improved finishes and a greater number of wins become possible.
Lastly, and like Simpson and Goldstein, Dixon and Goldberg have a new driver-engineer adventure shape into something solid before poles and wins are achieved. They've known each other for ages, sat across from each other in a hundreds engineering debriefs, and have a great starting point for what's lies ahead for the No. 9. But their shoulder-to-shoulder working relationship starts now, and if they have instant engineering chemistry, it will show at St. Petersburg. If it takes longer for that bond to be established, it will also show, and potentially limit their early results.
Dixon doesn't want to hear about his age (44) or being on the back end of a career that's entered his 25th season as an IndyCar driver. He wants to win more poles and races and championships. And those are all possible. It's just a matter of how far the team has come on the R&D side, how far Honda has come on the power and reliability side, and how long it takes to get locked in with Goldberg.
Palou's Main Task: Don't change a thing while blending the best parts of 2023 and 2024 together in 2025.
GOALS:
The Indy 500. Ganassi was the team to beat until Penske put the smackdown on this and every other team in May. Palou and Dixon are expected to be major factors in the championship, so there's nothing new in terms of goals on that front, but finding what the team lost at the Speedway and taking the fight back to Penske is by far the biggest push for Ganassi this year.
THOUGHTS FROM DIRECTOR OF RACING TEAMS TAYLOR KIEL:
"From an engineering perspective, it’s a five-car team," Kiel told RACER. "That's something we’re really excited about. When I was at my previous team (Arrow McLaren), we'd done a technical partnership with Mike Shank in 2018 for a few years and he was awesome. Transparent and fair. A great teammate. His team is fantastic. And already to this early point today, the working relationship has been great, and obviously the engineers that are representing CGR on that program are awesome, and they’re accepting the challenge. We're just super excited about it."
