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'Give me one T-shirt': Marcus Ericsson answers a decade of doubts with Indy 500 win

NATHAN BROWN | Indianapolis Star

INDIANAPOLIS – With Kumla, Sweden’s budding IndyCar star fresh off a two-win season, 12 top-10s and a 6th-place finish in the title chase, one of the town’s sportswriters thought it pertinent to trek to the Indianapolis 500. Just in case.

Sure, Marcus Ericsson had a chance to win what he calls “the biggest race in the world,” but so did most of the 33-car field. And Ericsson detractors will tell you he backed into both of those wins last year – taking advantage of Detroit GP race leader Will Power’s ECU not firing after a red flag, and winning a wacky, out-of-control Nashville street race after his car nearly went airborne. The ex-Formula 1 driver’s previous win had come in GP2 in 2013. Ericsson went on to spend five listless years in the world’s premier racing series with back-marker teams where he finished no better than 17th in the points – which came in 2018, the year Sauber cut him loose.

Still, the reporter wanted to get a glimpse for himself how the former Swedish and Nordic karting champ, backed since he was 15 by Swedish billionaire Finn Rausing, was faring in the latest chapter of his racing career. So all weekend, in between occasional sightings of Swedish racing fans decked out in blue and gold, the reporter roamed the IndyCar and IMS gift shops across the track’s 300 acres. And he began to realize why all of Ericsson’s fans were decked out in the country’s colors, instead of anything featuring his primary sponsor Huski Chocolate and its trademark bright, firetruck red logos.

“He didn’t find a single T-shirt, cap, anything,” Ericsson told reporters Monday, followed swiftly by an exasperated sigh accompanied by a wry smile. “Pretty much every other driver in the field, but not a single Ericsson thing, and he was a bit shocked. ‘You’re starting 5th in the race, you took 6th last year, and not a single thing?’

“Things like that are a bit annoying, like, give me one T-shirt. That would be nice. I’ve been speaking to IndyCar … and maybe after (Sunday), that’ll change a bit.”

One of the most reserved drivers in the paddock – “I’m the opposite of Pato (O'Ward),” he said of the ebullient runner-up – likes to hold onto his own frustrations of how he’s viewed in the global motorsports landscape and dish them out like breadcrumbs when the moment’s right. There were tweets last year at mid-season, when he was on a run of nine consecutive top-10s, about how some media members didn’t consider him a top-10 talent.

There was his public plea to team owner Chip Ganassi, with whom he was in contract negotiations with when some of the funds behind him appeared to have dried up, after Ericsson grabbed his second win over five starts: “Hopefully Chip took notice today.”

And then Sunday, when asked how he’d reinvented himself after stepping away from his childhood F1 dreams, he delivered a couple of biting, sarcastic lines with the bravado of a driver who’d just won the biggest race in the world.

“I did five years in Formula 1, almost 100 grand prixes, running for small teams, towards the back most of it. You don’t get a lot of credit running in the back in Formula 1. People think you are not very good,” he said. “And I came over here, and people probably didn’t think much of that. I had to work my way here, learning American racing. Moved here, put my whole life into trying to become an IndyCar and Indianapolis 500 champion.

“It’s been tough. It’s not easy, but I’ve been working extremely hard, and it feels good to show that hard work pays off. Yeah, winning the Indy 500, not bad for a ‘pay driver.’”

In the F1 world, and to a lesser-extent IndyCar, the term ‘pay driver’ is seen by some as a cardinal sin. Granted, it’s only used when a driver isn’t performing well, and more often than not in F1, it’s a low-performing driver on a low-performing team, where who should shoulder the blame isn’t clear. In F1, a driver like Ericsson can come from what he describes as relatively humble beginnings and, with an investor group headed by a billionaire, stick around for several years until a team convinces itself its in need of a new bucket of cash from a new young prodigy who might be able to turn things around.

In 2018, many American racing fans were introduced to Ericsson in Season 1, Episode 8 of F1's Driver to Survive, where the then-28-year-old’s up-and-down final season was pitted against that of then-21-year-old Charles Leclerc’s. That year, Ericsson achieved six top-10s, to Leclerc’s 10. In the episode’s final minutes, the team’s younger driver received a once-in-a-career promotion to Ferrari, while Ericsson exited stage left via a black screen with a few lines of text that stated the team had declined to sign him for the future.

What it didn’t say was this: He sincerely believed he was headed for something better.

“I came here, and I don’t think there were too many people excited to see me in IndyCar,” said Ericsson, who made his full-season debut with what is now Arrow McLaren SP in 2019. “When you’re on the back of the grid in F1, it’s so hard to show what you can do. That’s frustrating, because I felt like I developed a lot as a driver, but it’s just so tough to show that. I think you’re always living in the hope that your car is going to be good the next year or that the team is going to find a development, or bigger teams will see you.

“I wanted to come show what I could do and get a chance to develop and be a race-winner. People said, ‘We don’t want F1 rejects over here,’ and there’s always a lot of talk, but I wanted this opportunity.”

Surprisingly, given they typical attitude of European F1 drivers to IndyCar’s oval racing, Ericsson said it was races like that 500 that had him hooked from the get-go. In his formula car racing in Europe and Asia over the years, tracks like Suzuka, Silverstone and Spa – known for their highspeed straights and ultra-fast corners were where Ericsson excelled, and better yet, where he felt most comfortable.

Rather than some of his F1 contemporaries who range from being hesitant to giving ovals a shot to downright trashing them for what they see as life-or-death risks, Ericsson wanted buy into a the foreign form of racing because it meant giving his new home his all. Of the five oval races he ran as a rookie, Ericsson finished a best of 7th at Texas,took 11th at Iowa and 12th at Pocono with Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, leading to a 17th-place finish in points. That offseason, Chip Ganassi scooped Ericsson up as he expanded his IndyCar program to three full-time cars.

“What I looked at was there was no baggage, no baggage,” Ganassi said Sunday of Ericsson. “Liked to go fast. We just needed to get him a good car.”

But even as his results drastically shifted in in 2020 with a team with a far stronger pedigree, Ericsson said the scars from F1 remained. While he was quickly becoming one of IndyCar’s most reliable top-10 finishers (nine in 14 races in 2020, including three top-5s), Ericsson said he’d yet to shake a lingering self-doubt that stemmed from years of constantly finishing 14th, 16th, 18th without feeling like there was much of anything he could do. In a non-spec series like F1 where all the talent in the world can’t make the worst car competitive, he says he’d lost that inner drive that won him races and championships on the European and Asian ladder series a decade or more prior.

While CGR won the first four races of 2020, the best Ericsson could muster was 4th-place. As Scott Dixon and Alex Palou won early-season races a year ago, followed by Palou’s runner-up in the 500, Ericsson was hardly a figment in the background, overshadowed even by rookie NASCAR legend Jimmie Johnson, who’d finish no better than 17th in 2021.

Fast-forward past those first two wins, a runner-up at Mid-Ohio, that new contract and the 6th-place finish in the title chase, to the Texas Motor Speedway media center in March. Even with a 3rd-place finish to a pair of Penske cars, all anyone can talk about is Johnson carving through the field to 6th. Instantly, the IndyCar oval rookie is becoming a sexy pick to win the 500 – especially as he runs near the top of the practice timing chats and qualifies 12th. Meanwhile, Ericsson finishes in the top-10 of every on-track session and in the top-5 of six of the 10, and he’s a distant fifth topic of discussion to Dixon, Palou, Johnson and 2013 500 winner and local fan favorite Tony Kanaan.

“Swedes in general we’re not the most loud and noisy. Maybe it’s the Scandinavian way, but I just focus on my job, and that’s to drive racecars and win races,” Ericsson said. “My personality – I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be something else.”

But what is important, he adds, is he has that full personality back. Until that Detroit win, he didn’t feel like himself.

“I’d definitely lost confidence during F1 in the end, and I lost my joy of driving,” he said. “I was driving in F1, in the pinnacle of motorsports – my dream – but I’m struggling to enjoy it. That was a warning sign for me. ‘Hey, I’m driving in F1, and I’m not enjoying it. What’s going on here?’

“I wasn’t sad when it ended, but I was proud of what I did, but I felt like I needed a fresh start. I think it was slowly building, but for me, that Detroit win was a big boost, just such a big weight off my shoulders. I hadn’t won in eight years.”

Now, after Rausing spent countless millions – “I don’t want to talk too much numbers, but it’s a lot more than (a couple million)” – to try to carve out a legacy for Ericsson in F1, the 31-year-old is making his own, and hoping he won’t need outside support to keep his seat anymore. The first Swedish F1 driver in more than 20 years has traded “pay driver” for “Indy 500 winner”, and he says he might just have the King of Sweden in-tow in 2023 when he returns to defend his crown.

“I like they can call me that the rest of my life: Indy 500 winner,” he said. “It’s just one of those things I’ll always have with me. I won this race, the biggest race in the world, and no one can take that away from me.

“But it’s not like I’m sitting down, like I’m going to move back to Sweden and retire. I have a championship to win, and this has all got me even more fired up to do this again.”

Ik denk dat ik deze editie maar weer eens aanschaf. De afgelopen jaren waren er te weinig veranderingen om maar weer nieuwe edities te kopen.