Rossi looking for “huge improvements” in 2017

Rossi, who has renewed his contract with Andretti-Herta Autosport for 2017, told media: “It's been challenging. It's no secret that I haven't been very happy with it for quite a few reasons, but obviously the flagship event and the highlight race is the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500…

“Having said that, I think there are a lot of areas that we need to improve on this winter in preparation for next year, and we have a huge task ahead of us to make sure that we're at the front come St. Petersburg.

Rossi, who finished 11^th in the end-of-season points table, later added: “I’ve never finished outside the top 10 in a championship before, so it's not something I'm very happy about and it's something that we definitely don't want to have happen again next year. So there is a huge amount of motivation for everyone to be way more competitive than we were.”

However, the California native, who is Manor Formula 1 team’s reserve driver until the end of the season, and will be attending the U.S., Mexico and Abu Dhabi grands prix, said the lack of satisfying results outside of the Indy 500 were also one of the reasons he was committing to IndyCar.

He commented: “The fact that I wasn't able to get the results that I wanted straight off the bat, I felt like I had a point to prove in the championship, and I wanted to stay to show what I could be capable of. The desire for me is to win races. So when that doesn't happen, the first thing I want to do is keep coming back until that's something that's been accomplished.”  

Improvement needed in qualifying

Rossi said that although he felt better able to extract the most from the Andretti Autosport-Honda package in qualifying, he believes there is a lot more to come.

“I think I've made huge improvements from where I was in St. Pete,” he told Motorsport.com, “but it's a very challenging kind of thing to get your head around quickly, just because we only get the red tires for qualifying. I'm used to championships where you have option tires, but you have tests with them in the preseason so you have some idea of how they work and how to get the most out of them.

Rossi, whose best qualifying result outside of ovals was eighth in the Sonoma season finale, said: “I think that the last two or three road course qualifying sessions that we did, I think I was a lot closer to my teammates – and, in fact, ahead of them in a couple.

“So, yes, it's better. But I still think that's a big area we need to make sure we improve. It's not just necessarily red tire performance, but qualifying performance as well. I think that was an area where we seriously lacked this year.”  

Contributing to team progress

Andretti Autosport struggled for much of this past season to find pace on non-ovals, and in particular on street courses, and Rossi admitted that initially muddied his understanding of how much progress he was making as a driver.

“Separating my learning curve from the team was hard at times because sometimes I didn't know whether it was me that was causing the pace deficiency because I was new to a track or a situation… I was struggling to understand what was me and what was the car for the first couple of races.

“I think those questions kind of got erased from my mind in the sense that I knew I was able to extract the most out of the car and it was just about maximizing the situation we had. [So] that's not something I think about anymore.”

Consequently, Rossi says, he feels he has been making a meaningful contribution in terms of Andretti Autosport’s technical progress since the fifth round of the season, the Grand Prix of Indy, where by qualifying 12^th, he was fastest of the four drivers on the team.

“That was really the turning point for me in terms of understanding how to maximize and gain the performance out of an IndyCar,” he said. “I think for a couple of races we were leading the charge in terms of direction, and that's something that I think was key for the team and myself in looking at the options for the future.

“We were able to think outside the box a little bit and come up with some solutions that hadn't been thought of before that actually translated into a good performance. I think definitely I was able to add something to the team.”