Every day Mike Shank walks into his year-old, pristine race shop, he’s reminded of just how meteoric a rise Meyer Shank Racing has been on. On shelves near the entrance sit the team’s trophies for its three IMSA season championships in four years, its victory in the Rolex 24 and triumph in the Indianapolis 500.

Of the five full-time IndyCar teams who’ve also dabbled in North American sportscar racing, the only one close to matching Shank’s accomplishments is Team Penske.

But as he gazes, the MSR co-owner notices the gaps, too. After what he called “perfecting” IMSA’s GTD class with Acura, leading to championships in 2019 and 2020, MSR’s move to DPi in 2021 caught the team off-guard. As its IndyCar arm was on Cloud Nine off its Indy 500 win with Helio Castroneves, the sportscar side that had logged 11 podiums in 21 starts the previous two seasons, saw just two such finishes in ’21.

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Of course, starting with the life-changing win in January at Daytona and continuing with seven total podiums and a title-clinching win in the 2022 season finale, Shank knows there can be life after struggle.

“We didn’t have the right structure in the team, and we were learning a lot as we were doing it," Shank said of moving to DPi. "Those first eight months of that program were pretty rough on us, and it took a toll. It had some guys wondering, ‘What the hell is going on with these guys? Are they capable or not?’

“And when we got our (expletive) together over the last third of 2021, we got back on track and knew we could do this – and we executed on that plan.”

Shank, Simon Pagenaud, Castroneves and company assure a similar turnaround is coming on the IndyCar side, too. Because after ex-MSR driver Jack Harvey finished 13^th in points in ’21 – and then left – the team seemingly upgraded with the signing of 2016 title-winner Simon Pagenaud to go alongside Castroneves’s expanded program. And yet, the pair could only manage 15^th and 18^th, respectively, in 2022.

To compound things, the campaign started relatively strong – with Pagenaud sitting 8^th in points six races in and he and Castroneves finishing in the top-10 at the 500. That struggles existed in his introductory year at MSR didn’t surprise Pagenaud. Frankly, the early successes did – and it made the late-season free-fall, with five finishes of 20^th or worse in his last seven starts, a bit tougher to stomach.

“I expected (2022) to be tough, but the one thing that surprised me was our potential performance, which has been there all year. We just haven’t put the weekends together (often enough),” the 2016 IndyCar champ said. “We haven’t executed when we had our chances, and that’s what IndyCar is about nowadays. When you have a good car, and you’re looking at a good weekend, you’ve got to finish the job."

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For better or worse, Shank said there isn’t a throughline for his team’s shortcomings in 2020 – beyond a series of blunders, be it bad luck, aggressive calls or unanswerable mistakes. The team’s sometimes hapless performance on pit road and strategy calls over the radio in 2021 derailed what could’ve been a top-10 points finish for Harvey and made it easier for the British driver to take an offer from Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing to join in its expansion.

Those errors continued into 2022 – running Pagenaud out of fuel in-race (twice, no less) to go with a damper failure, a radio failure, a steering wheel failure and other mistakes that left Shank’s frustration palpable through the phone, even a month removed from the season.

“It’s all real simple, and I don’t hide from this. That’s all like throwing points on fire, and that’s on me and us, man. (Expletive), it’s just on us,” Shank said. “There’s a ton of runway for us to clean up our act, and that’s what we’re going to do.

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“Nobody’s gotten fired. There hasn’t been a moment of whipping. You just can’t expect to have better seasons until we clean up this low-hanging stuff.”

That offseason program of focusing on the little things began in earnest Wednesday with MSR’s sportscar ace Tom Blomqvist taking his maiden IndyCar test with the team – something Shank assures is more than just a reward for the IMSA team’s championship. In June, Shank told IndyStar the move was only a matter of time once his team’s respective seasons had finished. The move to test a brand-new driver is similar to the look it gave recent Alpha Tauri F1 signee Nyck de Vries last year – though not presently in a need for IndyCar talent, Shank doesn’t want to be caught unprepared when the need comes.

“(Tom’s) raw speed is very impressive, and in this day and age, you’re looking for a driver with a kick and a little extra,” Shank said. “There’s many, many good drivers, but the truly elite ones are smart and can think while they’re doing it.”

Given Pagenaud’s current multi-year deal, compared to Castroneves’s need to re-sign on a year-to-year basis, it’s only natural to assume MSR’s test candidates have an eye on just one ride. Unless Pagenaud has a change of heart and develops a desire to bolt from the opportunity to build a program from the ground up, he’s found an IndyCar home for years to come. Eventually, his 47-year-old teammate’s time will be up.

But those conversations haven’t been had yet, Shank said. Results aside, Castroneves continues to be everything major sponsors AutoNation and SiriusXM could want – to a level that on-track results haven’t been the be-all-end-all. That time will come in 2023, though. If Castroneves continues to run a full-time IndyCar schedule with MSR in 2024 – a year in which he’ll turn 49 – he will have rightfully earned it.

“I think this (season) was eye-opening for him. There’s no one area you can relax in at all, and certainly our hope is that after another year in all the races again, we can give him a little better car, and he’ll better know what’s expected of him to be successful here,” Shank said of his elder driver. “All of us – not just him – we’ve got to have better results. For him to stay in the car, he knows this."

And if he doesn’t, Shank says he still wants the four-time Indy 500 winner is his black and pink machine in a different role.

“We want to make sure MSR is running (Helio) when he wins his 5^th Indy 500, because we value that above all else. Everything. That one thing is a life-changer for him and would be life-changing for MSR also,” Shank said. “He’s capable of doing well at every track we go to, but specifically at Indy, he’s a rock star, so we rate that as our No. 1 priority.

“So if things don’t go as well as we want in ’23, we’d still be interested in running him as a third car at Indy. We reckon he’s good to at least 50 years old there.”

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The pieces, Shank and Pagenaud believe, are there to build this team’s short and long-term success. The Frenchman compared the team’s potential pace and performance, at times, this year to that of Chip Ganassi Racing – the four-car behemoth that’s won three of the last four championships, as well as this year’s 500.

And 2023 needs to be where that comes. As we’ve often seen in IndyCar, Year 1 of major projects have rarely gone as planned – just ask Harvey, Felix Rosenqvist and Romain Grosjean in their latest jumps to greener pastures. Whether or not you can make it in Year 2 is what counts the most. Before the late-season falloff, Pagenaud said he had his sights set on a top-8 points finish – top-6, if things went perfectly.

He’ll accept nothing less in 2023.

“You know you’re going to have tough times, and you have to look at the bigger picture, and that’s how you keep the motivation going. You’ve got to be looking at the next two, three, four years,” Pagenaud said. “If you don’t think that way, that’s when things spiral down.

“I came in here and knew I wasn’t going to win the championship my first year, but next year, our expectations should be different, and if not, there’s a problem that we need to figure out this winter. I’ll tell you though, what was reassuring this year was this: my pace and performance this year I felt was more competitive than I felt a lot of times (with Team Penske) in 2021.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar: Meyer Shank Racing with high expectations after IMSA title