Jun 18, 2021 5 min read

Alexander Rossi has tried to stop dwelling on his bad days, a necessary self-improvement chore when the last great day was two years ago.

Rossi races Sunday at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, site of his last victory in 2019. He went winless last year and this season has led just two laps. He is 14th in the standings.

“As the weeks go by, it’s getting easier to swallow the pain of it, I’m getting accustomed to it,” Rossi told the Associated Press. “The motivation is still there, and I would say it’s as high or higher than anyone on the grid. I’m just able to get over it much quicker than maybe before. Instead of feeling sorry for myself through Monday afternoon, I’m up and at the gym at 7 o’clock.”

Andretti Autosport is an enigma: Ryan Hunter-Reay and James Hinchcliffe are having terrible years and Rossi is again underperforming expectations. But Colton Herta has a victory, has contended in other races and at ninth in the standings is the highest-ranked driver on the four-car team.

Hunter-Reay, who is in a contract year and hasn’t won a race since the 2018 season finale, said Herta’s performance indicates that Andretti as a whole is not a mess. Both he and Rossi believe the best tracks for Andretti are coming up, starting with Road America.

“We’re struggling to keep cars in the top 10 at the moment. It’s not coming easy,” said Hunter-Reay. “But the second half of the schedule I think suits Andretti’s strong suits.”

Rossi has noticed a trend among the Andretti cars: They are competitive when they start up front. Hunter-Reay’s last win was from the pole, three of Herta’s four career victories are from pole and four of Rossi’s seven victories are from pole. Rossi started second or third in two of his other wins.

“It is the harsh reality but we need to understand why the races that we win are when we are so superiorly dominant,” Rossi said. “You’re not going to win a championship if you can only win when you start first or second with a car that’s two or three tenths (of a second) clear.

“You’ve got to be able to win in other ways. You’ve got to be able to make it happen because you’re not always going to have the best car every weekend, and you’re not going to be the best driver. Every weekend is too damn competitive.”

IndyCar this season has had seven winners through eight races with points leader Pato O’Ward the only repeat winner. Rossi’s best finish is seventh, even though he’s started second twice.

Rossi is not calling for any changes among his No. 27 Honda team. He considers Road America “one of the best permanent road courses in the world” and believes a breakthrough is near.

Trackhouse aims to be Nashville’s team: Trackhouse Racing introduced itself to Nashville outside of Tootsie’s, the famed honkytonk located in the shadow of the Ryman Auditorium. In two years, it hopes to be NASCAR’s newest professional sports team.

Trackhouse is in its first season of existence and based in North Carolina, the hub for almost every NASCAR team. But team owner Justin Marks is a Nashville resident and by 2023 wants Trackhouse operating in Music City in the heart of the downtown entertainment district.

“We really want to be Nashville’s racing team,” said Marks, who secured sponsorship from Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge for the No. 99 Chevrolet driven by Daniel Suarez.

The Chevy this week has been wrapped in purple and adorned with a pair of large orchids to match Tootsie’s iconic building located on Lower Broadway. It will race Sunday when NASCAR’s Cup Series returns to Nashville for the first time in 37 years.

Nashville Superspeedway re-opened after a decade of dormancy and the track will cap a three-day weekend with its first ever Cup race. It’s an important race for Marks, who has an unconventional, long-term vision for this new NASCAR team.

He has partnered with Pitbull and the entertainer will be at the track Saturday and Sunday for his fourth race of the season. Suarez, the 2016 Xfinity Series champion and only full-time Mexican driver in NASCAR, is in his fifth Cup season but happier with Trackhouse than his previous three teams. The pairing with Suarez and Pitbull fits Marks’ goal to reach a demographic largely untouched in NASCAR.

“A lot of what we’re doing with the 99 car is trying to tap into the United States’ Latin market, which has a spending power of $1.3 trillion a year,” Marks said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s a large group of people, passionate sports fans, and they are American consumers. There’s not really another team in NASCAR that has infiltrated that market.”

And he wants to do it from Nashville, but in the entertainment district and not the industrial park-type setup many NASCAR teams have built.

“We don’t want to build something the way they exist in Charlotte, we want something in downtown Nashville that is a public business open to the public every day that is a racing-themed attraction,” Marks said. “We want to incorporate entertainment, music, everything that is synonymous with Nashville but with that Americana-racing theme.”