INDIANAPOLIS — The scheduled portion of our ride is coming to an end, as Alexander Rossi’s papaya-orange McLaren GT approaches the Indianapolis Motor Speedway tunnel entrance.
But instead of taking a right turn to pass underneath the Turn 1/2 grandstands, Rossi continues onward.
“We’ll drive past this,” Rossi says. “Let’s at least hit an on-ramp so we can go quick in this thing for you. Otherwise, a 35-mph ride in a McLaren is pretty lame.”
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We’ve just spent the last 15 minutes making the slow drive on 16th Street from downtown Indianapolis to the venerable speedway, which hosts its 107th Indianapolis 500 on Sunday. Rossi, who won the 100th Indy 500, in 2016, was wrapping up a photo shoot with his Arrow McLaren teammates on the city’s Monument Circle when he met up with The Athletic for a drive-and-talk interview.
It was fitting, because McLaren had given each of their drivers a loaner for the month of May — adorned in their Indy 500 liveries, numbers and branding. Rossi has his own new McLaren at home — it was part of his contract when he signed with the team — but he’s letting his engineer use it this month.
The plan was for The Athletic to hop in the passenger seat — if we can figure out how to open these upward doors, anyway — and have Rossi drive us to the racetrack. After wrapping the photo shoot, Rossi placed his helmet bag in the front compartment (where most cars would have an engine) and put the rest of his stuff in the small trunk that sits atop the mid-engine area.
Then we were off, navigating the streets of downtown Indy with plenty of curious glances coming our way.
“We’ve really only been using these for media appearances,” he says. “At every stoplight, it feels like someone honks and wants you to roll your window down. It’s the color more than anything else.”
Rossi enjoys his life in Indianapolis, a city of which he is now a seven-year resident. That’s the longest the 31-year-old Californian has lived anywhere in his adult life since he moved to Europe as a 16-year-old to pursue Formula One and later spent five years in London.
Indy and London couldn’t be more different, of course, and Rossi has occasionally wondered if he should move to a different place than the streets he’s currently navigating. Ultimately, though, he feels at home here.
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“Every couple years, I’m like, ‘Man, I’ve done my time, I want to go somewhere else,'” he says. “Then you start looking around and it’s like A) Why? and B) Where are you going to go? The quality of life here in terms of convenience and affordability is hard to beat, and the people are wonderful.”
When Rossi first arrived from London after his brief F1 career (five races in 2015), IndyCar racing seemed like more of a temporary stop. Then he won the high-profile 100th running of the Indy 500 in his first shot at the world’s biggest race, and life changed.
Shortly thereafter, Rossi ditched his rented apartment and bought a townhouse downtown, where he was roommates with Conor Daly. Autograph dealers figured out when he’d be traveling back from races and stood in the arrivals area at Indianapolis International Airport waiting for him, pictures in hand.
“That felt a little invasive,” he says. “I didn’t love that.”
But ever since the post-500 swirl died down, Rossi has been able to live a normal life in Indy. If he’s not wearing branded gear — or driving this orange McLaren with his No. 7 on the door — people typically don’t recognize him around the city. At the same time, he enjoys the small-town feel of Indy and finds he and his fiancee, Kelly Mossop, constantly run into people they know when going out to restaurants, bars or shows.
They now have two dogs and a house far enough away from the city center to have a yard and pool but close enough to keep the same barber he’s always had.
We leave the tall buildings behind as we head west on 16th Street. The conversation turns to his new team, Arrow McLaren, which he joined this season after a long run at Andretti Autosport.
Pato O’Ward and Felix Rosenqvist, who were just at the photoshoot with him, immediately welcomed Rossi into the team. He calls them “very good friends,” though his quiet personality is much closer to Rosenqvist than the bubbly O’Ward, who is “very energetic and excited about seemingly everything,” as Rossi puts it.
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“There’s a great mutual respect and trust there,” Rossi says of his teammates. “For as new of a group as we are, you don’t put four cars into the top nine (of Indy 500 qualifying) and have a better qualifying average than Ganassi without having a very good working relationship and environment. The results speak for themselves.”
It didn’t start off that way. Rossi’s arrival meant a rapid expansion for McLaren, which hired a “s— ton of people.” Half the people on Rossi’s team, he said, “had never seen an IndyCar before.” There were growing pains across the organization, when all three cars showed up to February’s preseason test at the Thermal Club near Palm Springs and were way off.
“It was like, ‘Oh my God, what have we done?'” Rossi says. “But when we got to Sebring (for the next preseason test), the majority of the problems were gone and it was just minor stuff. Then, when we got to St. Pete (for the season opener), even the minor stuff was gone.
“Every single day I showed up at the track, everything was just better. And that rate of development has continued every week.”
And Rossi needs McLaren to keep giving him good cars if he’s going to return to form. Rossi won a combined five races in 2018-19, finishing second and third, respectively, in the championship standings. But since then, Rossi has won just once and finished ninth, 10th and ninth in points.
On the immediate priority list is another Indy 500 win, which he’d appreciate vastly more than his first one. Now well-versed in the rhythms and traditions in the buildup to the 500, Rossi savors the busy schedule all IndyCar drivers experience this month.
“We get asked to do a lot, but it’s May, man,” he says. “It’s part of what makes it special. And we should have commitments; it’s the largest race on Earth.
“Yes, at times when you’ve had a bad day and you have to get pulled out of engineering (meetings) to go to something, it’s annoying. But big picture, you look forward to the traditions. Each of them seem small, but you add them up and it makes something special.”
McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown is known for making bets and promises with his drivers (the Associated Press noted O’Ward asked for Brown’s expensive watch if he wins the 500, for example). But Rossi has no interest in anything extra aside from 500 glory.
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“If I win? No, I don’t really care (about a bonus gift),” he says. “Zak can buy me a nice burger or something.”
We’ve now passed the speedway, heading for the promised on-ramp to speed. Sure enough, as he spots an open gap on I-465, Rossi guns the engine and the McLaren launches us like one of those roller coasters that fire you out of the station from a standstill.
“See, when the boost comes in, it’s pretty good,” Rossi says calmly while our eyes see those lightspeed lines from Star Wars.
The launch causes his IMS parking pass to fall down and he snatches it with his left hand, then holds onto it as he uses the paddle shifters and leaves the other hand for steering. We’re going quite fast now, and a peek at the dashboard reveals a number that the state police probably wouldn’t have loved (or maybe we couldn’t accurately see the number with our eyes popping out).
Hey, if you give a machine like this to a race car driver …
“The power comes in very smooth, which is what I like about it. It doesn’t upset the car,” he says, spying an exit. “We’ll get off here and turn around.”
Rossi hits the throttle and the tires squeal all the way up a curved ramp, the car seemingly just on the edge of grip without sliding or drifting one bit.
How did he know he could push the car to that limit on the ramp without the back spinning out from underneath us?
“You can just feel it,” he says, nonchalantly. “All road cars are going to be biased toward understeer, and they do that so people aren’t wrapping cars around poles.”
Oh.
“But really, you just know.”
Easy for him to say.
We’re going the other way on the highway, heading back toward the track. It seems like Rossi is willing to entertain our speed questions, so here’s another one: Since IndyCar drivers experience such extreme speeds, does going that fast ever become ho-hum?
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“It’s funny, you drive around for the beginning of the month at 220-226 mph,” he says. “And yeah, that feels fast, but your body and mind acclimatize to it pretty quickly. But then you turn up the boost for Fast Friday and you start doing 230, 231 maybe. That feels substantially quicker than 225.
“And then, I’m telling you, every half-mile per hour over 231 feels like 20 (mph) more. You get up to 231.5 and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s legit.'”
During qualifying last Saturday, Rossi crossed the line on the first of his four laps, looked down at his dash and saw “234.5.” He says he thought “Holy s—,” because “I’d never seen that before.”
“And keep in mind, that’s the average for a lap,” he adds. “So when you’re turning in (to the corner), you’re doing it at like 243.”
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Watching Rossi at Indy can be one of the most spectacular sights in motorsports, as we discovered in 2018. His fearlessness and ability are the sort of thing that make you realize why only a few humans on Earth are capable of excelling in this race.
But Rossi feels there’s still a disconnect, because he hears people make claims like, “I can do that; I went 105 in my M3 on the way to work.” And others get extremely good at iRacing, then believe their skills could translate straight into the real world.
“With sim stuff, people learn by crashing,” he says. “You press reset and go time and time again. But (in real life) you can’t get good at driving race cars by shunting every 15 minutes. The risk associated with it is not only for yourself, but you’re going to get fired if you crash race cars. So you have to be able to know how to go to the limit and extract 100 percent of performance out of the car without often overstepping it.”
From the outside, it feels like some race car drivers can’t deal with that pressure. We see it across all forms of racing: They have bad results, crash too often and seem to spiral while trying to regain momentum.
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So we ask Rossi: Are drivers affected by outside pressure and expectations?
“Honestly, man, I don’t think so,” he says. “You don’t get to any level of professional sports without being a Type A personality and being very competitive. I want to win at everything. It could be a game of checkers; I don’t care. So most of the pressure comes from yourself.
“All of the other stuff is just managing distractions. It’s not that it adds pressure, it’s that you don’t want to have to be talking about it or dealing with it or thinking about it.”
Now we’re turning into the racetrack and dipping into the tunnel, and our ride is over. But this reminds him of when he qualified seventh the other day, which was his second-best starting position for an Indy 500 — but left him unhappy. And as much as anything, that tells you about the mindset of a professional race car driver.
“I was pissed and went to bed pissed,” he says. “I thought we didn’t do as good of a job as we should have done. Did we have a car for pole? No. But we should have been third, fourth, fifth.
“Ultimately, the difference between fifth and seventh is nothing, but it still matters to us. Management was thrilled and happy, but the drivers were like, ‘Well, that sucked.’ That’s just who we are as people.”
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(Top photo: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
