Over the four years since his standout rookie campaign with Chip Ganassi Racing, where he bagged six top-5s, a pole and a pair of runner-up finishes that left him 6th in points, Felix Rosenqvist feels as if he’s built a bit of a reputation.

And it’s not one you want.

The mild-mannered, soft-spoken Swede has crashed a lot of cars – 16, roughly, based on his log of DNFs since that rookie season in 2019. Credit some of those to mechanical gremlins, others’ mistakes or outright ‘racing incidents,’ but Rosenqvist will admit it: The 32-year-old hasn’t made the most of his supreme racing talent to this point in his IndyCar career.

Rosenqvist, at his new Meyer Shank Racing home, wants to get back to letting his potential – and not a smattering of rollercoaster-like results – tell his story. And it’s there where Rosenqvist and his new bosses Mike Shank and Jim Meyer align.

“Maximizing myself, the car, the team, the whole package over a season is something I want to accomplish. I think I didn’t do that last year, and there’s always obvious things to blame, but finishing races has always been a topic for me,” Rosenqvist said earlier this year of his preseason outlook with his new squad. “I think I’m probably one of the highest DNF scorers in the field, if you look back over the last two or three years, and that’s something I want to change.

“And that’s probably both down to driver and (car) reliability. If you can take 12^th, you take 12^th. You don’t have to risk everything to get one more spot. And there will be times where you have chances for big results, and you always have to go for it, but it’s more about not improving your peaks as much as improving your valleys. That’s my plan.”

Despite standing on the top step of the podium in one of the three most prestigious races in the U.S., with the champagne-soaked fire suits and Rolexes to prove it, 2023 was an abject disaster for MSR. A tire pressure manipulation controversy – and ensuing penalty – mired the team’s second consecutive Rolex 24 overall win. Its IndyCar campaign started as a trainwreck – with both its full-season entries turned into mangled messes of metal and carbon fiber mere seconds into the St. Pete season-opener.

Helio Castroneves finished 10th for the team at Texas – and MSR would log no other top-10s. After a pair of top-10s in the 500 a year ago, the team finished 15th and 25th. Just over a month later, a parts failure left Simon Pagenaud’s No. 60 chassis barrel-rolling through the air in a crash during practice at Mid-Ohio that the 2016 series champ and 2019 500 winner continues to recover from. Two months later, two years removed from a complete overhaul of its IndyCar lineup, Shank and Meyer found themselves hiring another brand-new pair of teammates, in hopes Rosenqvist and rookie Tom Blomqvist could help right the ship.

For good measure, MSR saw its championship-winning IMSA GTP program handed to its sister entry at WTR Andretti. For Meyer and Shank, along with minority owners Castroneves and Liberty Media, all of a sudden, an IndyCar program that finished 19th and 25th in entrant points was all it had.

And yet, outside of its wholesale driver lineup change, MSR did very little this offseason in out-of-the-box, big-swing changes to change the tides. Like Rosenqvist, Shank sees promise in trusting in the history that’s gotten them here. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that MSR was a one-car qualifying force and frequent top-10 finisher with Jack Harvey in 2020-21.

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“Our expectation levels are very muted. We’re keeping it very cool and trying to keep the pressure off everybody,” Shank told IndyStar at The Thermal Club last month. “We had such a poor year last year that we just needed to get our foundation under us. And we have, and it feels like it.

“We’ve just looked at all our weaknesses as a team and decided what to focus on and how to make it better. But most of our people are still in place. I don’t feel like we’ve really done anything, though. We didn’t let go of anyone and just have integrated (the IMSA personnel) into the team.”

It’s not so much that Shank, Meyer, Rosenqvist and company have lowered their collective expectations. Shank went so far as to say there’s more pressure than ever to perform. “I wouldn’t be doing my job right if there wasn’t,” he said. But it’s become less about hunting home runs and more about execution.

And in racing, consistent execution can quickly lead to relevancy.

MSR felt that, on the season-opening grid, their brand was the talk of the paddock. Not only had Rosenqvist snagged MSR’s first Fast Six appearance in what had felt like ages, but he finished a mere blink back of Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden for the St. Pete pole. On the sidepods of the No. 60 Honda to start the year was brand-new primary sponsor, Bon Jovi Radio, to augment the famous rocker’s role that weekend riding in the Fastest Seat in Sports.

Bon Jovi’s segment early in the race broadcast stole the show, in some ways, and though Rosenqvist would go on to finish 7th, Shank came away from the weekend almost feeling like a winner.

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“If you look at our exposure numbers from St. Pete and what we were able to do commercially and the amount of eyeballs we had on that project, that was a win for us,” Shank said. “Those were the most amount of eyeballs on our product, maybe ever – or at least since Helio won the 500.

“That took a lot of work from everybody to get that done, because along with performance (on-track), we’ve also got to figure out how to pay for all this. Commercially, I think we’ve done a really good job, and I think we’re top-5 in the paddock, and it’s this whole other side of the business that really matters, almost the most. But in order to get eyeballs on us, we also have to perform. We can stick whatever rockstar on the side of it, but ultimately, we have to perform.”

Knowing the potential – and the pressure – that rides on MSR’s on-track performance in 2024, Shank sees Rosenqvist as a fitting veteran lead-driver to carry the team’s mantle forward. After all, there may be no other driver in the paddock, save true championship contenders, who over the last three years have shouldered more weight and have had to answer more prying questions about their future of the sport than the 2019 Rookie of the Year.

Rosenqvist’s first season with Arrow McLaren in 2021 saw the Swede take a precipitous fall from the list of IndyCar’s fringe title-contenders to outside the top-20 in points with just three top-12 finishes and two missed races due to concussion-like symptoms. Arrow McLaren officials were forced to reassure its fans part-way through the year that Rosenqvist’s future was not in danger. But by the following May, the team had its sights set on reigning champ Alex Palou, with Rosenqvist mulling a switch back to his roots in Formula E to help calm his life on and off the track.

At some point that summer, Rosenqvist decided he wanted to stay in IndyCar, but had to wait anxiously until days after the end of the season – with Arrow McLaren holding his rights through the end of September on a team option – to learn he’d been granted one more year with the team. Within days, though, they had signed Palou to a three-year deal to begin in 2024. With two other drivers on long-term deals, Rosenqvist was a lame duck – whether he knew it or not. And by the time Palou turned his back on Zak Brown and company, Rosenqvist had long ago secured his future elsewhere.

“We’ve reassured (Felix), ‘Hey, you’ve got a job for a few years. Let’s not worry about that,’” Shank said, in reference to Rosenqvist’s rocky last couple years. “That’s a funky pressure that gets put on your shoulders. But he’s really low-key, and nothing really gets him upset. They’ve got something cooking over there. I don’t know ultimately what it’s going to be, but it feels like a good thing. You never know how combinations are going to work, but I think he’s a great fit for how Jim and I want to run this team.”

For Rosenqvist, this offseason and the next chapter he began to write during it came with firmly putting down roots in central Indiana, only further solidifying his desire to make IndyCar his home for the foreseeable future. Having bought a home last year, he proposed to his girlfriend Emille in the fall, with plans in place to tie the knot later this year. Of Rosenqvist’s other half, Shank sees “a great force in his life” for the better.

“She’s awesome. I think there’s a great balance there,” Shank said. “It feels like he maybe has put it all together.”

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So too does Rosenqvist.

“I feel like what’s expected out of me is pretty clear, and my own expectations are pretty clear. I feel like there’s a weight off my shoulders now,” he said. “Before, I was kind of ‘one foot in Europe, one foot here,’ and not really committed, or just half-committed everywhere. Most of us, we’re roadies, man. We just kind of go from one place to another, and we don’t really focus a lot on our personal lives.

“We put ourselves in second place, because our careers are such a big part of our lives. But when you look at good athletes – let’s say (Scott) Dixon – you don’t become that good if you don’t have a good life. They’re happy. You wake up, and you’re happy with life. I think that’s a very important thing to perform, and that’s what I feel more than anything that I am. I’ve kind of prioritized myself a little bit for once and taken a couple deep breaths and settled myself into my private life, which I think is going to reflect on-track.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Felix Rosenqvist wants to stop wrecking cars and live up to potential