'We're here to make our story.' After rocky IndyCar start, Prema eyeing progress at Long Beach
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LONG BEACH, Calif. – For all the disadvantages they’ve been up against — not having a race shop where the entire team could work out of until mid-December, parting ways with its head of engineering weeks into the relationship and not turning a wheel until they were a month from the season-opening practice at St. Pete — there is but one strength that IndyCar’s newest team principal believes his Prema Racing squad has above the rest of the paddock.
And no, it’s not the finest coffee machines in racing.
“The Italian spirit is quite strong at getting out of (expletive) sometimes and trying to survive and find ways in very difficult moments,” Rene Rosin, Prema Racing’s team principal told IndyStar the week leading up to its IndyCar debut at St. Pete. “It will be important to put a bit of ‘Italian mentality’ into everything.
“Even if you need to smash your head, it’s better to do that as early as possible and start learning, progressing and understanding.”
Two races into the team’s IndyCar debut with its full-time two-car program, one that has included debilitating radio glitches and an in-car fire (both on Robert Shwartzman’s No. 83 car, the latter leading to a $25,000 fine from IndyCar for safety violations) that left the rookie with virtually no practice through two weeks, as well as teammates running into each other on Lap 1 at Thermal, consider heads “smashed.”
Though the leaders of IndyCar’s newest team and the most recent program to make its debut since fellow junior formula stalwart Carlin (2018) had no realistic expectations of immediate top-line results in IndyCar, its recent history in joining series and immediately rocketing toward the top is unmistakable. In joining the European sportscar ranks in 2022, Prema won each of its first two ELMS races in the LMP2 class and four of the season’s six events, leading to a runaway title victory. That same year in WEC, Prema’s LMP2 entry finished 2nd-in-class at Le Mans.
And in 2016, Prema took hold of equipment to embark upon its first season in what is now Formula 2 just two months before the opener and went on to capture nine wins in 22 races — good enough for a 1-2 championship finish.
So even up against a rushed timeline that saw the team’s new Fishers race shop only begin its internal redesign in August and where it was a near-celebration to be fully moved in before Christmas, there was a belief among Rosin and Prema’s IndyCar boss Piers Phillips outside expectations the team would be constantly at the back of the field were well wide of the mark.
In reality, two races in and on the eve of race No. 3, headaches unrelated to pace and car performance have largely been the team’s Achilles' heel.
“We need to keep our feet on the ground, because the competition is very high, but on the other hand, we’re here to make our story,” Rosin said ahead of St. Pete.
By Long Beach, his tone had changed little, the team principal still emoting a confidence backed in pride rather than ego, but Rosin now had a reality of just what the unpredictable speedbumps for a new team in IndyCar can look like.
“It’s not been the easiest two races for us, but we’ve had a few good points — one being that we’ve been able to end both races with both cars, and we were showing some very good pace in Thermal,” Rosin said this week, noting that though Callum Ilott crossed the finish line 26th three weeks ago in Thermal — his race largely over before it began due to a damaged wing suffered from contact with Shwartzman — he was often running top-6 lap times that showed the car’s peak race pace. “But on the other hand, we’ve been affected by certain issues that I would say are the fact of being a new team that we need to take as a lesson.
“We knew the championship was one of the toughest with the way it’s organized and the way the calendar is so condensed. These two race weekends were tough for us, but we learned a lot, and I think we need to use the experience of the last two events to make sure we move forward.”
Though he provided few details on the No. 83 team’s two major issues through two rounds, Rosin did note Shwartzman’s glitchy radio at St. Pete “had multiple aspects” and “was not the team’s fault” but one they had to work on with their supplier, as well as IndyCar, to remedy.
Regarding the fire that erupted in Shwartzman’s car near the start of Practice No. 1 at Thermal – one made worse by the team’s use of an unapproved part in the pull cable that activates the “onboard fire suppression system” that failed to activate – Rosin said, “It was a mistake of the team. I don’t want to get into more details, but it’s a mistake of the team. We take the penalty and appreciate that for safety reasons, IndyCar wants to protect the work of the mechanics and drivers, and we need to move forward and learn from the lesson.”
Though they start further back for Sunday’s Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach – with Ilott 22nd and Shwartzman 24th after finishing 11th and 12th, respectively, in Group 2’s Round 1 qualifying action Saturday – the team for one hasn’t appeared to have hampered by any out-of-the-ordinary roadblocks. For better or worse, the weekend’s focus has been on managing tire wear, dissecting potential in-race strategy calls and getting the car in the window to try and extract the level of pace Ilott managed to find three weeks ago at Thermal.
Combined with the other glimpses of pace the team has shown across its first three IndyCar race weekends – Ilott was 13th and 11th fastest, respectively, in the first two practices at Thermal and 5th in warmup, with Shwartzman 15th in Thermal warmup after zero practice time – there’s reason to think that with a clean race and blemish-free pitstops that one or two top-15 finishes could be up for grabs come Sunday.
Extracting competitive single-lap pace on Firestone’s alternate tires remains an issue, with Ilott saying ahead of Long Beach that he’s set an immediate goal of consistently breaking into the top-20 on the grid and inching towards the Fast 12, but there’s something to say about a team that hasn’t been broken by two race weekends that couldn’t have been much bumpier.
“The whole mindset was, ‘Let’s go eat this elephant together from the start’,” Phillips said ahead of the start of the season. “We were never going to crutch this. We’re gonna go get on our feet and take this challenge on as Prema. I think you’ll see a lot of big steps early-on to fix low-hanging fruit. I’ve talked to the team about just getting to Detroit (on June 1). You get through (the Indy 500) and onto Detroit, where you’ve had your honeymoon period, and at that point, you can turn the page and stride on for the second half of the year.”
Rosin said he remains faithful that results for Prema closer to the decades of championship pedigree performance it brings from the European junior formula ranks, in part, because of the togetherness that he’s witnessed over the course of the team’s rocky first couple weekends in IndyCar. Ahead of St. Pete, the team principal noted his expectations that the two-car program operate as a single entity when not on pitlane – an M.O. exemplified no better than the thrashing the entire team performed to build an entirely new car for Shwartzman at Thermal, where team members stayed at the track until 4 a.m. and were then back less than three hours later to pick up where they’d left off.
“Sometimes, we’ll get a kick in our (expletive), but we need to learn,” he said. “I’m not scared of it. We need to get the maximum out of this opportunity, and we’ve got to learn from our mistakes.
“A problem-free weekend will be fundamental to try and execute everything in the best possible way, and with that, the results will be different. I’m very proud of the job the guys have done, if we consider once again that six months ago, we didn’t have a factory. I think we’re doing something quite extraordinary. I want to do better – don’t get me wrong. I’m not happy about the results, and I’m pushing very hard to make that change as quickly as possible, but we need to be realistic and look at the challenges of the championship as well.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Prema eyeing jump at Long Beach boost after rocky IndyCar start
