IndyCar 2023 mid-season reflections: Meyer Shank Racing – Team Penske

RACER’s three-part analysis at the halfway point of the IndyCar season concludes with three teams who are facing big and very different tasks to close the season.

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MEYER SHANK RACING

Helio Castroneves, No. 06 Honda, 20th in drivers’ standings (-273 points to Palou)

Simon Pagenaud, No. 60 Honda, 25th in drivers’ standings (-289 points)

Lots of questions, not many answers thus far for Pagenaud (left) and Castroneves at Meyer Shank Racing. Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images

Just when it looked like Meyer Shank Racing’s couldn’t get any worse, Simon Pagenaud suffered a brake failure and barrel-rolled his car at Mid-Ohio, sustaining concussion-like symptoms that have kept him on the sidelines since. Amid his worst IndyCar season to date, the Frenchman experienced the harshest crash of his career. The Jim Meyer- and Mike Shank-owned team continues to soldier through a season that cannot end soon enough.

Add in the ever-present spins and incidents with Helio Castroneves in the sister car, and more than any other IndyCar team, MSR is in dire need of a fresh start.

As a single-car team with Jack Harvey at the controls in 2021, MSR performed like a true extension of Andretti Autosport as the No. 60 Honda paid six visits to the Firestone Fast 12. Two years later, the biggest mystery in the series is how MSR, with Andretti Technologies providing dampers, chassis setups, and race engineers, is on an entirely different island than its partners.

With 18 combined opportunities for its cars to start inside the top 12, it’s happened just once, with Pagenaud (Detroit). Andretti sophomore Devlin DeFrancesco’s done it twice, for the sake of comparison. Castroneves’s best qualifying performance has been a 15th (St. Pete), and seven of his nine starts have been 19th or worse.

Before we target MSR’s drivers as the place where the qualifying problem starts and ends, consider how the two veterans have taken a nearly identical downward plunge in 2022-to-2023 average starting positions. Pagenaud owns the greatest retreat in the series (+6.03 positions, from 12.22 to 18.25), and it isn’t much prettier for Castroneves (+5.89, from 14.89 to 20.78). The year-to-year separation from Andretti is particularly alarming.

Consider that Andretti’s best average qualifier of 2022 was Colton Herta (9.22) and that Pagenaud wasn’t too far behind last year (12.22, +3.0 positions). In 2023, Kyle Kirkwood is Andretti’s best average starter (8.89) and MSR’s best is still Pagenaud (18.25, +9.36), but he’s well back on average from where he was a year ago (+6.36). Together, MSR’s drivers are suddenly six spots down on the grid from last year, and when you’re rolling off in 20th or so in most events, you’re in trouble.

Through Mid-Ohio last year, Pagenaud’s average finish was strong (10.44), but as expected, he’s had the biggest negative change among all drivers this season through Mid-Ohio (+8.69, down to 19.13, and only counting the eight races he’s contested). In 2022’s first nine races, he started 12th or so and improved to 10th or so by the checkered flag. In 2023, Pagenaud has started around 18th and finished around 19th, which is sobering.

The slide for Castroneves hasn’t been as bad across the same metric (+2.67, from 15.89 in 2022 to 18.56), but the net result has been where both drivers are frequently crossing the finish line out of sight of the TV cameras and buried among rookies and smaller teams who should be behind MSR.

Short-term fixes are squarely placed on Saturdays, where the eternity between MSR and the Andretti mothership — which has taken five poles — demands everyone’s full attention. Pull the Nos. 06 and 60 up a few spots in qualifying, and the corresponding finishes should mirror that progress.

It’s also worth noting that with such a large year-to-year discrepancy to resolve, the problem MSR is experiencing is significant, and if the fixes were readily apparent, they would have been applied.

Unlike a Scott Dixon who needs to find two or three grid positions to improve his chances of winning, MSR is trying to recover the four or five rows it’s lost, and just as Ed Carpenter Racing is busy hunting for the ground it’s given up in 2023, MSR is mired in the same frustrating and humbling quest. The two organizations share the same reality in that both are loaded with really good people.

Qualifying shortcomings have made for a steep uphill climb for Pagenaud (pictured) and Castroneves. Motorsport Images

But something’s broken in a methodology or something’s getting lost in translation that wasn’t before, and with no immediate answers for how to fix things, MSR’s riding the struggle bus and doesn’t know how to get off the thing. Nonetheless, changes and additions are a must if they are going to break free from the bottom half of the field.

In that regard, Pagenaud was 15th and Castroneves was 18th in last year’s championship, which left everyone — drivers included — feeling dissatisfied. The feeling has only intensified. Castroneves is currently 20th and has hovered there or as low as 23rd for all but one race to date. Prior to missing Mid-Ohio, Pagenaud was 24th, has been as high as 21st, and as low as 26th. He’s 25th and could lose at least one more position after being ruled out of racing at Toronto.

The other unfortunate part for Pagenaud is that the race prior to Mid-Ohio at Road America presented him with a ton of encouragement for where the No. 60 car was headed. It was the first race of the year where things felt great, and the team was expecting it to continue at Mid-Ohio. The brake failure and crash during the opening practice session ruined that trajectory.

After two consecutive seasons of underwhelming results, the winds of change will be present when we reconvene in 2024. Pagenaud’s Toronto sub, MSR IMSA star Tom Blomqvist, is tipped to take over the No. 06, and if Pagenaud can return soon and put up some strong finishes, he’ll be in a better position to get a new contract to stay in the No. 60.

With Andretti as its point of reference, the rest of the season will be little more than a race-by-race measurement of whether MSR is inching forward, holding station, or falling farther behind.

RAHAL LETTERMAN LANIGAN RACING

Graham Rahal, No. 15 Honda, 14th in drivers’ standings (-232 points to Palou)

Jack Harvey, No. 30 Honda, 23rd in drivers’ standings (-282 points)

Christian Lundgaard, No. 45, 10th in drivers’ standings (-183 points)