INDIANAPOLIS – We all know Alexander Rossi isn’t, well, an (expletive), but seven years after the breadcrumbs for that misconception of one of IndyCar’s most unique stars was laid, Tony Kanaan feels the need to correct the record anyways.

On this May morning, Rossi, his three Arrow McLaren teammates, five reporters and a handful of team's PR staff are crammed into an office you couldn’t fit an Indy car in, peppering the drivers with questions ahead of six hours of Indianapolis 500 prep. It’s an intimate – perhaps too intimate – setting for this early in the morning, as the coffee flows, jokes roll and the interview session is almost off the rails a minute after the recorders are turned on.

“Is this all on the record?” one reporter asks, only mildly jokingly.

And in the middle of the table sits Rossi, legs crossed, munching on a green apple, stone-faced as can be, sitting next to IndyCar’s two most gregarious stars in Kanaan and Pato O'Ward. In normal interview settings, the 31-year-old IndyCar star will speak when spoken to and give you thoughtful answers (if you don’t ask a dumb question), but he and his fascinating career move are the early focus of this conversation, and you might he'd rather be just about anywhere else.

Until you start to pay attention and you realize that maybe, just maybe, this is his role.

Just because Alexander Rossi is almost the polar opposite of Kanaan and O’Ward in many ways – interestingly, Kanaan says he longs to be more like Rossi on the radio in his final IndyCar race this weekend – doesn’t mean he’s out of place. Maybe the driver who was once IndyCar’s most misunderstood newbie, turned into its Most Popular Driver (awarded after the 2020 season), has finally discovered who he is.

Or maybe, better put, we have.

And now, he seems to have found his home. One that feels as if it’s tailormade for him and his introverted, uber-competitive, at times obsessive personality that, in the IndyCar paddock, is one-of-one.

“I think he’s really embraced the way we all work together. I don’t have experience working in a Ganassi, Andretti or Penske team, but I think the way we work (at Arrow McLaren) is very different from the rest of the paddock,” O’Ward said that morning. “The way we do strategy, we do it together, and we help each other. Ultimately, if we have cars 1^st-4^th, that’s what we want; and for me, it’s no help if I have teammates that are 15^th or 20^th, and I’m leading – or vice versa.

“I do think (Rossi gives) an aura of being a bit of a tool, though, but I don’t agree. I think he’s a cool guy.”

One reporter asks for clarification on just what ‘tool’ means. “Are we talking nerd?”

Says O’Ward: “No, like an (expletive). But I hadn’t personally had time to spend with him, so I think he can come off like that.”

Through all of this, Rossi continues his work on his morning snack, waiting for his opening, until Kanaan references Rossi’s serenity on the radio (and the Brazilian driver’s jealousy of it) the previous weekend during the GMR Grand Prix. Tire degradation was front-and-center and the typically near-silent driver on the radio actually spoke up, saying, “Guys, I need help.”

“Imagine if you’d had that 30 years ago,” one reporter noted.

“I wish!” Kanaan exclaimed.

“No, 50,” muttered Rossi, referencing the ever-popular birth certificate joke that has followed the 48-year-old through his decades in the paddock.

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Why Alexander Rossi left Andretti

It’s not so much that Rossi has ‘finally’ found a home, because his seven-year tenure at Andretti Autosport was, quite frankly, all he could’ve asked for, even if he didn’t know it. At 31, Rossi has made what some might view as the first forward-focused career move of his IndyCar tenure. Joining Andretti Autosport was, at least intially, a move of convenience, as he briefly held out hope that the F1 world wouldn’t forget about him.

And then, when it did forget about him – and, frankly, to Rossi that past life became the ex-girlfriend whose phone number you finally muster up the strength to delete – and he was winning races, why would he ever leave? His house had become a home.

That was, until the warranty expired, the basement flooded, fuses blew and the HVAC system came sputtering to a halt.

There’s the car that wouldn’t start in Texas, which, in 2020, was quickly followed by the mechanical issues on the IMS road course. There were multiple crashes (of no fault of Rossi's) before the green flag. The questionable pitlane penalty in the 2020 500 and the terribly-timed yellow the next (2021).

The list goes on-and-on, and none of it includes the otherwise forgettable weekends when the team seemed simply unable to figure out how to account for the aeroscreen’s added weight – particularly for one of the paddock’s tallest full-time drivers.

And once they did, Andretti’s No. 27 Honda program with Rossi still never could quite find its footing again. Depending on who you talk to – Michael Andretti and Rossi have slightly different recollections -- Rossi had his mind made up (or nearly-made up) about closing the Andretti Autosport chapter early in the summer of 2021 with well over a year left on his deal.

Rossi’s time with the team, where he’d found a genuine love for IndyCar, experienced the greatest joy in the series (winning the 100th Indinapolis 500 in 2016) and struck lifelong friendships from engineers and mechanics to the team’s owner (Andretti) and its COO (Rob Edwards).

“It was pretty simple, really. It all came down to the point, ‘Do I want to continue in the current place or take another opportunity now when my contract’s up?’” explains Rossi in a matter-of-fact way. It’s the emotionless – or rather, the way he’s been trained to remove emotion from the equation – view of the world when the situation requires it. It’s not that he’s the robot some perceived him to be in his early IndyCar years, but instead how he's learned through back-stabbing after back-stabbing on the European ladder system, that there’s no room in this business to do something that’s not of your own best interest.

Because no one else will return you the favor.

“I found myself wanting to be involved in (Arrow McLaren’s) growth and what they’ve accomplished from 2020-22 – in beating Andretti in a lot of ways," Rossi said. "It was a team that was on an upward trajectory with a seemingly infinite runway and opportunity ahead of them. It’s an amazing organization that anyone would be lucky to be a part of.

“When we did this (three-year) extension (with Andretti in 2019), we were coming off two championship-contending years. The momentum was massive, and there were a lot of high expectations and high aspirations from myself, the team, the series, Honda … and none of those expectations were met. So I don’t think it was a shock to anyone when the time came to start having those conversations about renewals or extensions that it wasn’t an instant yes.”

But in this way, Rossi’s story is unique in this latest era of IndyCar. Stars are born. Stars retire, fade away or hang on for dear life. But stars of this sport never, in the last 15 years, jump from one title-contending ride to another. Dario Franchitti was the last – and even he required a year toiling away in NASCAR to foster his move from Andretti to Ganassi.

Think of the 500 and title winners since:

>>Scott Dixon (still with Ganassi)

>>Helio Castroneves (still around, but not in the same way as his Penske days)

>>Dan Wheldon (tragically passed away)

>>Tony Kanaan (500 win gave his career a second wind, but only after three years in the mid-pack)

>>Ryan Hunter-Reay (down to 500 one-offs after leaving Andretti)

>>Juan Pablo Montoya (down to 500 one-offs after leaving Penske)

>>Takuma Sato (left Andretti after his 2017 500 win for mid-pack RLL, won again, but was rarely relevant)

>>Will Power (still with Penske)

>>Simon Pagenaud (with MSR after his Penske contract ran out)

>>Marcus Ericsson (still with Ganassi)

>>Josef Newgarden (still with Penske)

>>Alex Palou (still with Ganassi … for now)

None left their cushy seats atop the sport or found another when either they or their bosses felt it was time to part ways.

Not until Rossi.

“You look at the longevity for a Scott (Dixon) or a (Will) Power, there’s championships that went along with that,” Rossi said.

Rossi can be the first of that group to choose to walk from one title-contending seat to another without any guilt or second thought to the ride and people that finally gave him a stable home. And, perhaps, that’s precisely because of those unstable seven years spent in Europe on the cusp of childhood F1 dreams he wouldn't reach.

Why Alexander Rossi didn't make it in F1

Having won the Formula BMW Americas title and the Formula BMW World Final in 2008, Rossi found himself on a plane to Europe at 17. His teenage life was packed in bags with an F1 test, super license and F1 test driver role with BMW Sauber. He moved in with his trainer for more than six months in Italy, speaking hardly a word of the language before finding his way to England for the better part of his final six years there.

For an American, in a country dealing with financial crisis at the time, finding backing was incredibly hard, and he bopped around numerous teams between Formula Renault 3.5 and what are now known as Formula 3 and Formula 2. But he kept on winning. Fourth in GP3 (2010). Third in Formula Renault (2011). Second in GP2 (2015). It was enough to catch the eyes of the likes of Ferrari.

For a moment, his father, Pieter Rossi, told IndyStar, Rossi was earmarked for the young driver academy of F1’s most famous, historic – and at the time, successful – team. As an American driver with Italian roots and deep childhood F1 dreams, what could be better?

“If you go there and pound a big drum, they’ll spit you out like you’re cocky or have a chip on your shoulder. I think he played the game the right way,” the elder Rossi said. “But they don’t play fair. They play fair here. They don’t play fair there, but life’s not fair.

“We were ‘thisclose’ to having him in the Ferrari Academy, but there’re drivers that are still around that are the reason he’s not. We got the phone call, and they wanted to sign him, and it got pulled out for political reasons – money, lot of influence. There were a lot of other opportunities that came forward (with various now defunct F1 teams) and he was the one that built those. But his one clean shot with a works team was with Ferrari, and there was a glimmer of hope, until two other sources that wanted the seat came in.”

Other offers came, including test or reserve driver roles with Caterham and Marussia (and later Manor Marussia), but because these were independently-owned teams run by wealthy owners heavily focused on trying to make a buck, if they were going to run at the back of the grid, they were almost always going to prioritize funding over talent.

“There’s a long list of guys that brought $10 (million), $20 (million), even $30 million a year for those rides,” Pieter Rossi said, noting Alexander was earmarked to land one of Caterham’s F1 seats in 2014. “And at the last minute, it was swept out from underneath us, and he’s doing (practice sessions) as the reserve driver while someone else is bringing a sack of money.

“Did that shape who he is? He realized at that point that he is who he is. He’d do FP1s, and he’d be quicker than the race drivers, and then had to come in, put a headset on and watch it.”

Finally, Rossi got to run five F1 races in 2015, becoming the first American driver in the sport since Scott Speed (2006-07) while finishing 2^nd in F2 that season. He was supposed to get a full-time seat in 2016, and then the team went bankrupt. The elder Rossi took the calls from Michael and Mario Andretti far more seriously.

And as Rossi's car gently coasted across the Yard of Bricks, miraculously taking the checkered flag of the 100^th running of the Indianapolis 500 in one of the all-time strategy thrillers, he finally stopped looking in his rearview mirrors. But the 25-year-old was thrust into Victory Lane with a dumbstruck look and a level of emotions that didn’t quite match the historic moment. Rossi has since explained all of that away, putting to bed rumors he was unappreciative or dismissive of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, while admitting that, in the moment, he didn’t quite know how to feel.

He hadn’t grown up dreaming of being an Indy 500 winner, quite frankly, and not until he reached the north short chute on the final lap could he have really though he and Bryan Herta were going to pull off the miracle.

“I think (Europe) shaped who he was a little, to have a bit of a thick skin,” his father said. “What you see on the outside isn’t a chip on his shoulder. It’s a bit of, over there, he built a lot of relationships but also learned you can’t really trust anybody.

“You can trust the people here. You can let your guard down a little and enjoy life. Working in F1 and being in that paddock is very hard. There’s not a lot of happy people in that paddock.”

'The best pool guy in central Indiana'

Seven years later, Rossi is happy, in his own way. The way in which he’s molded the high-class persona of someone who, famously “has never been to Old Navy” with that of a middle-aged midwestern dad who roams his driveway for 45 minutes plucking weeds from the crevices is uniquely Rossi.

He took a 48-hour crash course on pool maintenance when his pool guy messed things up “to become the best pool guy in central Indiana, and I believe he’s probably done it,” says good friend and former teammate James Hinchcliffe. Rossi finds trimming rose bushes “soothing” and considers himself “an expert.” He loves Tom Brady strictly for his greatness. A couple years ago, he went to a friend’s barbecue, tasted homemade brisket, bought a smoker the next day and soon was inviting friends over for a dinner ... then freaked out last-minute and bought all the fixings for burgers, just in case.

And while we were all baking bread and binging Tiger King during the pandemic, Rossi was teaching himself to fly. “I wanted to play a musical instrument, and I tried watching some YouTube videos on that, but to be honest with you, flying a plane is much easier,” Rossi said a couple years back on his weekly podcast with Hinchcliffe and mutual friend Tim Durham, ‘Off Track with Hinch and Rossi.’

“He’s definitely the most competitive person I’ve ever met," Durham said. "We have a joke with my mom and stepdad, that we have to get a tape measurer out when we’re playing bocce and Alex is coming over. He will argue about every point, and I respect the hell out of that. Why get into something if you’re not going to try and be the best?

“I don’t think it’s an arrogance thing. It’s, ‘If I’m going to commit my time to this, I’m going to be the best I can be at it.’”

Later this year, Rossi is scheduled to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, which his good friend believes he’s doing, in the spirit of the famous JFK quote, “Because it’s there.” Rossi began his training in February with the first hike of his life.

His choice? Hiking rim-to-rim-to-rim at the Grand Canyon, that 43-mile walk-in-the-park with well over 10,000 feet of vertical elevation gain.

“I’m an only-child who’s incredibly competitive with everything I do, so I try to make sure that if there was ever someone who thought they could have a better pool or yard than me, I make sure I beat them,” Rossi said. “That’s really all it boils down to.”

And it stands to wonder if that win-at-all-costs, borderline obsessive, quirky, analytical mindset might just be the perfect fit for a team on an upward trajectory like Arrow McLaren.

Ironically, his former home has largely upped its game, too, with a public sentiment from its drivers and, Andretti himself, that the vibe, chemistry and atmosphere is better than it was a year ago. Colton Herta said it’s simply because “the best remedy is to have fast race cars,” but given the tensions that had been simmering for months before boiling over at Mid-Ohio last July in an on-track demolition derby, it’s hard not to wonder if there’s some level of causality there.

'What you see is what you get with him'

Ask Rossi’s acquaintances up and down the paddock, and no one believes we’re in the midst of a ‘new Rossi’, even if something feels different. Maybe we’re just seeing more of him. Maybe he’s finally in the midst of a project he feels like has legs and a future and is somewhere he can reach his goals.

Maybe this isn’t so much a ‘new Rossi’, but a ‘real Rossi’ – a version of himself he’s finally found and resurrected, more than seven years removed from the grind of the ‘everyone for themselves’ mentality of the European circuit. He has a chance now to start fresh, in a way, with new people, new teammates, new bosses, new coworkers, a new social media plan and new team gear that makes him hard to miss.

And we’re looking for it, too, after a three-year period where he had been more than happy to blend into the background of this sport, while in the middle of a three-year deal he knew halfway through was a dead-end. Maybe the last three years of Alexander Rossi were ‘extra curmudgeon-y’ to those of us who largely only got chances to ask him questions in his darkest moments – or, in his few bright spots, ask him why they weren’t happening more often.

Maybe the driver who’s open in his pessimism has found a home where, though things aren’t always perfect, he feels like there’s a way in which those he’s teamed up with can help him find the answer. And unlike Europe, he knows they’re in all this together.

“I grew up in an environment where your teammate was your absolute worst enemy, and anything you could do on Earth to beat him was acceptable, and this series is very different than that,” he said. “My dislike for people probably comes from my time in Europe – not that European people are bad – but the F1 environment and who I was forced to collaborate with. At this point, more than half of my adult like was centered around people who never had your best interest at heart. They’d be very quick to say one thing to your face, and as soon as you turned around, do the exact opposite, and I dealt with that for a long period of time.

“And you combine that with being generally shy in the first place, you give this perception to people that I don’t really want to talk to them – and quite frankly, that’s probably true. But also, I think when we’re at the race track, people may forget that we’re doing our job, and if I showed up at your job, your accounting firm or law firm or doctor’s office and in the middle of your day pulled you aside, you probably wouldn’t want to talk to me either. I try to be very real with how I answer things, and I think there’s two groups of people: they either love that reality, or hate you because you’re not the bubbly, happy-go-lucky Helio (Castroneves) or James (Hinchcliffe).”

And yet, you have to remind Rossi that that either that pool of folks who hate what they perceive to be his “schtick” is shrinking – or, at least, he’s creating brand-new fans, as someone who was voted (or at least named by the series) as it’s ‘most popular driver’ after the 2020 campaign. The presentation on IndyCar’s end-of-year streamed program featured a takeout pizza as a prize and, to this day, lives on as a frequent inside joke across his various group texts.

“I just don’t know how that’s possible, not necessarily because there shouldn’t be a reason people would like me, but it just didn’t make a lot of sense,” he said. “It seemed weird, and I still don’t know I believe the result, or maybe it was a weird COVID thing, and I get made fun of for it to this day.

“But, the little joy I got from it was that I beat Conor, and that really pissed him off, and that made me happy.”

And that right there, maybe that’s a window into who Rossi is. He’s unabashedly shy, perhaps not entirely understanding of just how much his real, raw, cutting personality has caught fire here over time, always down to turn something into a competition and always ready for a biting jab or joke.

He does admit, though he’s not a fan of it all, that he’s starting to grow more comfortable with the massive amounts of social media – in comparison to his Andretti days – that he now has to do as a member of the Papaya Club.

“I don’t have a choice,” he laughs. And you did at Andretti? “Sure did! That was a team built around Marco, so we all had a choice not to do things. Some of them, I actually don’t mind, and some of them are actually pretty funny. The tortilla slapping was pretty hilarious, and I love things with blindfolds. That’s always funny.”

Some around him wonder if there’s an inherent ‘competitive drive’ baked into how Rossi has tackled his willingness and buy-in to Arrow McLaren’s goofy social media video antics, as if now that he has to share a space with the gregarious O’Ward, if he has to step up his game so as not to fall too far behind. O’Ward, though, said this month he knows Rossi “would rather shoot himself in the foot” than do some of the things he’s put through – and the end goal is anything but trying to build those five-deep throngs of diehards that wait for and chant O’Ward’s name after any race, good or bad.

“I’m a very introverted person, and I mean that I don’t go out of my way to try and make new friends or put myself in situations in large social gatherings, unless there’s a greater purpose. I have no interest in being in large crowds of people. That’s just who I’ve been ever since I was a kid.”

But when those “greater purpose” moments come, those who get the chance to watch him from the sidelines say they feel he genuinely thrives. As someone incapable of hiding his emotions, he was said to have been the sport’s ideal ambassador as he spent hour after hour on the White House lawn introducing kids to the sport at the Easter Egg Roll earlier this spring. Durham says he could rattle off an untold number of memories he has of Rossi making a beeline from pitlane to his golf cart after a less-than-stellar day in the car, only for the driver’s friend to point out he just strode straight through a pack of 7 and 8-year-olds screaming his name and holding a Sharpie in their tiny outstretched arms.

It completely goes against his professed disdain for strangers, but Rossi says he generally has an exception. “Ultimately, that’s the future of our sport. Those kids haven’t done anything remotely I could think of to make me not like them,” he said. “I have unlimited time for kids and families here.”

Adults? That’s a different story. Hint: Don’t ask dumb questions to the unabashedly devoted intellectual.

“Alex is one of those people who doesn’t suffer fools. He’s open-minded with anyone the first time he meets them, but as soon as you give him a reason to doubt you, fair play,” Hinchcliffe said. “He’s massively intelligent, and I think he gravitates to people that are like-minded, and he doesn’t have time for (expletive).

“And what I love about Alex is, you get him away from the track, and it’s the same thing. What you see is what you get with him.”

And should he win on Sunday, Hinchliffe believes the racing world and society at-large will finally get a chance to see that. The almost emotionless 25-year-old who didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to smile or scream and didn’t know, in the moment, what to make about winning the Greatest Spectacle in Racing in his sixth IndyCar race, while still holding onto fading hopes of leaving and making his way back to Europe.

Now? He’s here to stay, whether you like him or not, still with an overflowing drive to win, but the knowledge now of how to let that ‘Real Rossi’ shine through. He wants to win, in part, because after a combination of six close calls and letdowns, he doesn’t know how many more times he’s going to have the car and the team built to win. He has that now, and Rossi doesn’t want to let that slip away.

For a change, Alexander Rossi wants to enjoy his moment in the spotlight.

“He’s been through a lot, if you look at his life and how he was shaped to be on his own and be a warrior. And it shaped how he is now,” Rossi’s dad said. “’I’m in my 30s, and I’m not changing.’ People think he has this edge to him, or a chip, or that he’s cocky, and that’s not what it is. He’s just confident.

“And when he wins (another 500), there’s unfinished business of feeling that satisfaction.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indy 500: Why Alexander Rossi made the rare move to jump to Arrow McLaren