“I can't have a year like that again”: Marcus Ericsson gives severe self-assessment as he looks forward to 2025 IndyCar season

IndyCar driver Marcus Ericsson reflected on his 2024 IndyCar season as he sat down for an interview. With a little over a month until the 2025 IndyCar season starts, the former F1 driver looked back at his subpar season and assessed his shortcomings while looking forward to the upcoming season.

Marcus Ericsson finished the 2024 season 15th in the championship in one of the top teams i.e. Andretti. The Swedish driver didn't win a single race as P2 was his best result, which came at the Detroit street circuit. Looking back at the season, the Andretti driver suggested that he cannot afford another mediocre season as he said:

“I can't have a year like that again, that's not the way I need to perform. On a personal side, one thing that was clear when we did analysis after the season is that we were by far the biggest sort of outlier if you look at championship position and average pace during the season."

“On average race pace, I had the eighth-best average race pace in the field, and I finished 15th in the championship. Everyone else on average race pace versus championship position was like one or two positions up or down, everyone is within one or two positions usually, whereas I was seven positions out of my sort of average pace,” he added. [via The Race]

Marcus Ericsson finished in the Top 5 just four times during 2024 and failed to finish the race on six occasions in the 17-race-long IndyCar season. The Swedish driver finished the last three championships before the 2024 season as the sixth-best driver with his points tally crossing the 400 mark each time.

His teammate Colton Herta on the other hand, finished the 2024 season as the runner-up, just 31 points shy of eventual champion Alex Palou.

Marcus Ericsson details key differences between F1 and IndyCar

Marcus Ericsson poses for a photo with his girlfriend Iris Tritsaris Jondahl on May 30, 2022, after winning the Indianapolis 500 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway - Source: Getty

Marcus Ericsson won the 2022 Indy 500 and followed up his prowess at the iconic superspeedway with a P2 finish the very next year in 2023. The Swedish driver is also a former F1 driver and raced in the pinnacle of motorsports from 2014- 2018. Ericsson came out and detailed the key racing differences between F1 and IndyCar in an interview with Track Limits as he said:

"On the racing side, the cool thing with IndyCar is obviously we all have the same opportunity, we all have the same car to work with, whereas Formula 1 is more a constructors' championship in a way than a drivers' championship. Obviously, the drivers still make a difference, but if you don't have a good car in F1, you're not going to win races." [4:58 onwards]

Ericsson joined the IndyCar series in 2019 as a full-time driver while still fulfilling the duties of the reserve driver for Alfa Romeo.