The contrasting duo holding their own against IndyCar’s elite

In the first two races of the IndyCar season, Penske and Ganassi’s cars have finished in the top 10 with 12 of the 14 opportunities they have across seven cars.

The two teams occupy the top six in the drivers’ standings, with Jimmie Johnson being the only outlier in 11th.

It’s a shockingly dominant start, and Andretti would’ve been in the mix too had Alexander Rossi, Romain Grosjean and Colton Herta avoided trouble in Texas.

Herta holds seventh behind the Penskes and Ganassis, but then come two best of the rest drivers from smaller teams who’ve had great starts to what will be crucial seasons for them: Rinus VeeKay (eighth) and Simon Pagenaud (10th).

These drivers are at the opposite ends of their careers and both are approaching 2022 from opposite viewpoints. Pagenaud is intriguing because he left powerhouse Penske to join the smaller Meyer Shank Racing, while the question for VeeKay is whether he can put a good enough year together with Ed Carpenter Racing to earn a drive at one of the top teams.

Had things worked a bit differently timing-wise it might have been VeeKay replacing Pagenaud at Penske in that hypothetical scenario.

Many people raised eyebrows when Pagenaud’s future became clear. Not many drivers leave Penske, and it’s a shock Pagenaud was able to switch from a Chevrolet team to a Honda-powered rival that won the Indy 500 last year with another ex-Penske star Helio Castroneves.

For Pagenaud, both of his results could have been better so far in 2022. He got caught on the three-stop strategy after being barged out of the way early on by Pato O’Ward and getting stuck in a Jimmie Johnson traffic jam at St Petersburg, finishing 15th. At Texas he was eighth but it could have been better had he not suffered so much tyre drop-off late on.

But Pagenaud has still provided an accomplishment that Meyer Shank has only achieved three times in 30 opportunities as a full-time team: leaving a race with a driver in the top 10 in the points standings.

OK, the 30 starts of full-time competition since 2020 with Jack Harvey came with some bad luck, but that’s still a shocking stat for what essentially is a car that has a lot of Andretti parts and help.

“So far, so good, I would say,” Pagenaud tells The Race of his start to 2022.

“Obviously Meyer Shank Racing is a young team that’s growing really fast. I’m here today and very impressed still by the size of the race shop and how things are going. It’s just evolving really fast.

“We won Daytona [the 24-hour sportscar race] together, our first race, which was amazing and such an important race, personally. And it’s such a big race for the team. So that was cool.

“The IndyCar side, there’s so many details to these races these days, the talent, the competition level is so high that you can’t leave any stone unturned.

“But it takes time, takes a lot of time to gather the experience of what a perfect weekend looks like, quite frankly. So we are working.

“Even today, we’re working toward that, I got here this morning at 8am, and it’s 5pm. And we could still talk about it all day. It’s quite interesting.

“But the biggest thing to me is the atmosphere is fantastic. How open-minded everybody is to figure out how to become the best team they can be. It’s really enjoyable and the role that I’m having within the team, besides Helio, is really exciting for me and makes me feel very fulfilled as a driver.”

So what is that role that fulfils him as a driver and how does it impact performance?

“The role that the team wants me to have is exactly where I wanted to be at this point in my career,” he adds.

“So I feel very energised by the fact that I can input as much as I want. And information is being taken and dealt with and I’m fully involved in absolutely everything that they do. So that’s super cool.

“In other words I’m passionate about optimisation and performance, and I get to do a lot of that with this team. So it’s very different. I don’t think many drivers would want to be that involved, but I enjoy it.”

Of course, making Meyer Shank a more rounded championship threat is a big part of why Pagenaud has been drafted into the team, but winning an Indy 500 in 2019 had a profound effect on the driver in a way rarely seen to such an extent with others – and it clearly appears on his yearly target sheet.

Now at the team that won last year, it’s understandable that focus might switch to the biggest event on the calendar – and, some would argue, world motorsport. Especially given Penske’s horrendous struggles at the speedway since Pagenaud’s 2019 win.

While set-ups are different at Texas – where Pagenaud said his car was “phenomenal” – it does indicate how sorted an oval programme is and how a team works through problems, which will inevitably crop up over two weeks of Indy running.

“The Texas set-up is a little bit different, but it gives you a rough idea of how it’s going to feel and you can work with it,” Pagenaud says.

“And I can definitely work with what I have. I felt extremely confident in situations where I wasn’t confident before.

“I felt a lot of confidence from the racecar and the communication flowed really well. There were a lot of very positive things leading up to Indianapolis.

“So for oval racing, it was a very nice surprise, we were fastest in practice one.

“We didn’t have as much speed as we expected or wanted in qualifying. But in the race, I felt like, we went all the way to the top five, faded a bit at the end with the tyres. But we were there and fighting for it.

“So I feel extremely confident for Indianapolis. I think we should be in a good position. Now, it’s Indianapolis, but we should definitely be in a good position to give it a fair fight.”

One team that rarely turns up to the Indy 500 with stones unturned is Ed Carpenter Racing – an outfit that clearly works hard on all of its programmes but with it being a smaller team you get the idea that Indy is always the priority.

Its lead driver VeeKay had a rollercoaster season last year. He won at the Indy road course in the first half of the campaign but after returning from a mid-season shoulder injury following Road Atlanta, his form fell off a cliff.

You get the feeling a good start to 2022 was as important for driver and team morale as much as in the championship fight. But with a sixth at St Pete and a 10th at Texas, which could have been more if not for a risky last-stint strategy hoping for a caution, things have started well.

“I’m very happy to be back on pace to fight for podiums or top-fives or lead a race without being way off-sequence,” VeeKay tells The Race.

“I’m happy about that and it really shows that the hard work in the off-season pays off.

“For the team, just good results are what we need right now. I think if we can start off strong, it will definitely help us until the end.

“It’s going well so far and I think we can only do better if things come our way a little bit more on strategy.”

One of the key elements to VeeKay’s off-season was back-to-basics analysis with engineer Matt Barnes, where he stayed with Barnes at his residence and the two brainstormed how to come up with a more consistent set-up package – which was followed up with some trial and error in the simulator.

Asked if we’d already seen the impact of this work, VeeKay said: “I think it’s already working.

“In St Petersburg, we went a way we’ve never been actually, totally did something new. Just put a set-up on there that we made in the off-season, based on the simulator. It was the right way to go and we were very fast.

“I think it gave us a good car for the race and I think we can take that to many other tracks for the rest of the season. So I think we can stay way more consistent compared to last year.”

Consistency is going to be the key both to elevating ECR’s performance in the championship and for VeeKay’s future if moving to a bigger team is his ultimate aim.

Everyone knows how quick VeeKay can be – he proved that with a race win on merit last year – but following that through with regular delivery has been a problem.

In 2022, we’ve still seen some slightly risky strategy calls from the team, but VeeKay looks more consistent so far behind the wheel. Unfortunately, time will be the great judge of whether that continues, but things are looking good.

If the goal for Pagenaud was to steady the Meyer Shank ship and help turn it into a regular top 10 finisher, the start has been a success.

If the goal for VeeKay was to prove his off-season work was correct and that he could be more consistent, the start has been a success.

Perhaps the biggest threat for both is that there’s a host of out-of-position drivers who’ve had woeful starts to the year that will be looking to rebound and challenge the current top 10.

But as things stand, both of these drivers needing big 2022s have started brilliantly.