IndyCar: Is there any hope for Marco Andretti?

Marco Andretti hasn’t won an IndyCar race since 2011. Every year, the same question is asked, and every year, it is answered the same way. Is there any hope for Andretti that this will change?

A 24-year-old Marco Andretti held off a 36-year-old Tony Kanaan to earn his second career IndyCar victory at Iowa Speedway on Saturday, June 25, 2011. In doing so, he ended a 77-race win drought that he had been on since winning the August race at Sonoma Raceway in his rookie season back in 2006.

Since then, 143 IndyCar races have been contested, and 22 drivers have won at least one of these races. Kanaan has been limited to just two trips to victory lane, winning the 2013 Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the 2014 season finale at Auto Club Speedway.

But Andretti hasn’t been back to victory lane.

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Every year, the onslaught of “Will Marco Andretti finally win another race?” articles hits the web right around January or February, a few weeks prior to the season opener on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida.

After almost a decade of the same question, same answer, it’s really inevitable at this point: is there really any hope left for Marco?

From a purely results standpoint, Andretti had done enough over the years to justify retaining his seat even without winning a race. He was always competitive in the Indy 500, recording five top four finishes in his first nine starts, including a near-victory in his rookie year at the age of 19, and he placed lower than ninth in the championship standings only twice in his first 10 seasons. He finished in a career-high fifth in the 2013 season after a career-low 16th place effort in the 2012 season.

But the last few seasons have seen Andretti turn into somewhat of a backmarker among full-time drivers. In the last four seasons, his best finish in the championship standings is an eighth place tie in the 2018 season.

That said, even that result in itself is deceiving. He technically finished in ninth place since he lost the tiebreaker to Graham Rahal, and he finished just one point ahead of Robert Wickens, who missed the last three races of the season after he was paralyzed in a crash at Pocono Raceway. He also finished just one point ahead of James Hinchcliffe, who failed to qualify for the double points-paying Indy 500.

In a perfect world, he finishes in 11th place, which would still be his best in the last four years.

Andretti has twice finished in 16th place in the championship standings in the last four seasons, doing so in the 2016 season before replicating his subpar performance in the 2019 season.

His podium drought, which spans back to the June race at Auto Club Speedway in the 2015 season, is now up to 72 races, nearly as long as the win drought he ended in June of 2011. If this 72-race podium drought were a win drought, it would still be the second longest win drought in IndyCar among active full-time drivers, trailing only Kanaan’s 83-race win drought.

Twice in the last four seasons, he has gone without even recorded a top five finish. His top five finish drought is currently at 17 races, as he finished the 2018 season finale at Sonoma Raceway in fifth place.

Perhaps most alarming is his lack of success at tracks where he previously excelled. Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Iowa Speedway come to mind. After leading laps in seven of his first nine starts at the latter, he hasn’t led a lap there since the 2014 season, and he hasn’t finished in the top five there since his third place finish in 2014, either.

At the latter, he hasn’t finished in the top 13 since his seventh place finish in the 2015 season. In fact, this seventh place finish is his most recent lead-lap finish at the track. Going one step further, it is his most recent finish not at least two laps off the lead lap there.

Given his recent results as a whole and his struggles at tracks where he is supposedly a perennial “favorite” to win, it is hard to see Andretti putting together an effort that is good enough to beat the top dogs in the sport on any given day.

It almost seems like he needs to avoid a 10-lap crash on lap one, have mechanical failures happen to half the remaining drivers in the field, catch a break on a lucky caution, have rain start pouring while he’s leading — and then some — for him to finally get back to victory lane.

Andretti has been a partner in his entry, officially named the #98 Andretti Herta Autosport with Marco Andretti and Curb Agajanian Honda, since this past season, so if there has even been any doubt that Andretti’s heart isn’t still into racing, that doubt was cast aside when he took on the role as the effective part-owner of his car.

Fans have said for years that Andretti only has a ride because his father and former driver Michael owns Andretti Autosport, and after 14 seasons with just two wins to show for it, it’s hard to argue against the idea that an element of that is present with his name being on the entry list race after race, season after season.

Marco now being invested in his own entry helped to at least quiet that narrative, although this narrative has become one that will never truly be silenced even if he somehow manages to win 10 races in a single season.

But perhaps the reduced likelihood of losing his ride with him now being a partner and thus the reduced pressure was not what he needed. It certainly didn’t help his case during the 2019 season, in which his best finishes were sixth place results in the race at Circuit of the Americas and in the second of two races on the streets of Belle Isle in Detroit, Michigan.

And now with him being a partner in his entry, you just have to wonder how much longer he will want to continue running the way he does with him having a financial stake in his own car.

Of course, that question becomes irrelevant if he starts performing at a high level.

But as much as I along with thousands if not millions of other fans would like to be proven wrong if it means getting to see the Andretti name on the podium and in victory lane for the first time in what seems like centuries, based on his recent performances, that level doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to where he’s at right now.

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Is there still hope for Marco Andretti, perhaps even in the form of winning another race before he retires from IndyCar? A lot would need to go right for him to win a race, but even given how poorly things have recently gone, he really couldn’t ask to be in a better position to finally break through.

Then again, we may very well find ourselves reflecting on the 2020 season with the same question and the same answer, yet again.