Last year in Detroit, Ericsson scored his first IndyCar win after a late-race stoppage, while in Nashville he took off from the back of another car on the opening lap yet came through to win, after several race stoppages.
Today in the 106th running of the Indianapolis 500, having passed the two Arrow McLaren SP-Chevrolets, he built up a three-second lead, only for it to be scrubbed as the field was bunched up under yellow and then stopped under red following his teammate Jimmie Johnson’s crash on Lap 194. However, Ericsson held off a strong challenge from Pato O’Ward to clinch the team’s fifth Indy 500 win, 10 years after its fourth.
O’Gara joined team owner Chip Ganassi and managing director Mike Hull afterward to address the media, stating: “This is the definition of teamwork, is what the past two weeks have been here. We work together to get the cars ready. We work together in qualifying. We work together in the race.
“What matters is that one of Chip's cars won. We did that. For whatever reason the #8 car group, I guess they don't like to win the easy way. Our win in Nashville last year was a challenge, our win in Detroit was after a red flag. Today we had a pretty sizable lead and the racing gods decided to make it a little more challenging!
“Marcus focused forward and got it done today.”
O’Gara later added: “Marcus understands race craft. This is his third year with us. He gets it. When we're on the radio, I don't have to explain why we're staying out or why we're pitting or saving fuel or pushing. He gets it.
“I think between him and Brad Goldberg, his race engineer, and myself, we just click. He understands what to do at different stages of the race. Obviously got shuffled back a little bit today. He just stayed with it. We had amazing pit stops, got him to the front. The rest was all him.”
Chip Ganassi stressed the importance of teamwork between his five drivers – polesitter Scott Dixon who led 95 laps, reigning series champion Alex Palou who led 47 laps, Tony Kanaan who finished third and led six laps, and Johnson who also led a couple of laps before his accident.
“I just reflect on the past few weeks and the past few months of having these four or five guys around, working as one team, everybody cheering their teammates on all the time,” said Ganassi. “When someone on the team does something good, the other guys couldn't be happier, you know what I mean? That's what's so nice for me to have to deal with.
“You saw today we had different times of the race different cars in the lead. We came here at the beginning of the month wanting to win the race. That's, in fact, what we did. Nobody's happier than all the other drivers for the team winning, Marcus of course…
“He's taken it upon himself to understand the resource in the team and understand how to use that. You just saw his career start to take off at the beginning of last season, once he understood what we were all about. This is the culmination of that effort.”
Asked what he had spied in Ericsson when he selected him for the #8 car three years ago, after his rookie season in what was then called Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsport, Ganassi replied, “What I look at is no baggageNno baggage, likes to go fast. Just need to get him a good car basically.
“Once he put his mind to that, the wins started to come, the consistency, the points started to come. This type of experience [practice at the Indy 500] where you're out there testing a lot, practicing a lot, really suits his style. I think Mike O'Gara said to me earlier that after the last pit stop, he didn't lift once, just held his foot to the floor. Steered, didn't have to make any changes to the car all day. They just put tires on it. Tires and fuel.
“You always hear that about the cars that win the Indianapolis 500. It's a clean day. They don't touch the car. Sure enough, they win.”
Hull, too, pointed out that Ericsson understood that it was important to help the team win.
“What happens at Chip Ganassi Racing is resource,” he said. “Resource is all the people that work together. Chip said it best a minute ago. If you look at all the drivers we have, and have had over the years, they all have two or three things in common: no baggage is one thing, but the desire to win, be a teammate and be unselfish. That's Marcus Ericsson.
“Looking at his background, it's similar to Alex Palou's. They're a little different age-wise. Formula 3, Formula 3 championship, went to Japan, came back and did Formula 1. He had big car experience and he won races. That's what we look for. It's really difficult to teach somebody to win. There's a lot of race drivers that say ‘if this, if that’… This guy doesn't say 'if'. He says, ‘Let's work together and make it happen.’
“Now with the resource we have, he's very comfortable inside that resource. That's really the big difference. That's what we've seen.”
O’Gara paid further tribute to Goldberg, stating: “It's kind of a new-ish group, the #8 car group is. It was kind of formed when our Ford [GT] program went away. It's changed a bit in the last couple years. Brad has been one constant there.
“I've known Brad since he was in college 19, 20 years old. It was cool to see him grow as an engineer. He's one of the strongest guys we’ve got upstairs in the engineering room. He and Marcus spend a lot of time together at the shop, away from the shop, at the simulator. They're always talking, always thinking. I think Brad has helped teach Marcus race craft, and they've taught each other.”
