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Eric Bretzman Expected To Take Championship Engineering To Andretti

By Brittany Frederick

The Andretti Autosport car of Marco Andretti navigates Sonoma Raceway. Andretti is expected to make a key engineering hire this week. Photo Credit: Joe Skibinski/Courtesy of IndyCar
The Andretti Autosport car of Marco Andretti navigates Sonoma Raceway. Andretti is expected to make a key engineering hire this week. Photo Credit: Joe Skibinski/Courtesy of IndyCar /
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Here’s a massive IndyCar move out of the cockpit: Andretti Autosport are expected to sign championship-winning engineer Eric Bretzman away from Ganassi.

Andretti Autosport needed to make a move to re-energize its IndyCar team, and that move may not be a driver. Racer is reporting that Andretti has reached an agreement with Eric Bretzman, who won three IndyCar championships with Chip Ganassi Racing.

Neither Andretti nor Bretzman have confirmed the signing, but Racer suggests that Bretzman – who is also the older brother of Ben Bretzman, engineer for newly minted champion Simon Pagenaud – will not work with a specific team and instead serve in an overall technical director capacity.

Bretzman was the race engineer for Scott Dixon‘s No. 9 Chip Ganassi Racing entry for more than a decade, including his first three IndyCar championships and Dixon’s 2008 Indianapolis 500 victory.

Starting in the 2015 season Ganassi reassigned him to its NASCAR Sprint Cup Series program, where both Kyle Larson and Jamie McMurray have made the postseason Chase for the Sprint Cup and Larson also captured his first NSCS win.

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If this signing is confirmed, it represents a major off-season pickup for Andretti as the team tries to hang on to its place in the Big Three.

Andretti’s four entries struggled mightily in the 2016 season, with particularly the No. 28 car of 2014 Indy 500 winner Ryan Hunter-Reay being beset with technical problems. Most notably Hunter-Reay suffered an engine issue at Pocono that thwarted his chances to win the race, and had to battle back to make the podium.

Bringing in a proven winner in Eric Bretzman will undoubtedly have a major impact on Andretti’s IndyCar program in 2017. Even out of his primary element in NASCAR, his impact has obviously been felt. And moving to Andretti presents him with a new challenge, as well as an opportunity to get back to open-wheel racing.

He will stabilize Andretti’s out of cockpit operations while some uncertainty still remains about next year’s driver lineup. Hunter-Reay signed an extension prior to the 2016 season finale that will keep him with Andretti through 2020, while Alexander Rossi is rumored to be finalizing a new three-year contract but nothing has been confirmed yet.

Marco Andretti signed a new co-primary sponsor earlier this season, yet the No. 26 still does not have a driver for 2017. Carlos Munoz’s contract is up and while both sides have expressed a desire to put the Colombian back in the car, Munoz has been open about troubles securing sponsorship.

But IndyCar fans know that signing a driver is not the end-all solution to a team’s problems. Those drivers also have to be surrounded by the right teams, and Bretzman is most definitely the class of the engineering field.

Next: How Do We Evaluate The 2016 IndyCar Season?

It will be interesting to see not only how quickly he can elevate Andretti’s engineering program, but if his departure will affect Ganassi’s NASCAR effort next year, and also the indirect brotherly competition as Andretti tries to take the title away from Penske.

While it’s exciting to watch the off-season craziness of drivers moving from one team to another, the expected move of Eric Bretzman from Ganassi to Andretti – and back into IndyCar – could be just as compelling as anything that gets done behind the wheel.