SALINAS, Calif — Alexander Rossi had a learning year in his first season away from Andretti Autosport. A year after finishing 9th in the NTT INDYCAR SERIES points, he finishes…9th again.

This time though, you can feel the promise. Last year just felt like he and Andretti Autosport have stalled out.

At one point, Rossi had six wins, 16 podiums and 22 top five finishes in a span of 33 races. 

Over the last 54 races with them though, he had 1 win, has just 11 podiums and only 16 top fives.

In Year 1 with Arrow McLaren Racing, he just scored his 11th top 10 finish in Sunday’s Firestone Grand Prix of Monterey. It was a trying one too. He, like teammate Pato O’Ward, was on the wrong tire strategy. The plan was to start on the primaries and on the first two stops, run them again. The final stint would be on reds.

So, they stuck to the plan. But, with carnage late, he could have went the duration on the right tire left. However, he had to pit no matter what despite running in fourth, for the alternate sidewall tires.

Even so, he rebounded to finish sixth and that’s with two problems on pit road late.

“I think we learned a lot this year,” Rossi said. “There were a lot of very positive things to draw upon. It was just a year of a lot of weird things. Today’s race was a perfect example. We had to manually jack the car up for the last two pit stops. It’s the little things like that that we need to work on, but ultimately the team grew massively.

“On the No. 7 side, I feel like we improved tremendously throughout the year and have a lot of things to learn from when we see all these tracks again for the second time together next year. We’ll focus on the positives, try to improve on the negatives and go into the offseason.”

Rossi’s thing was that he qualified between 7th-13th on 11 of 17 occasions. If he could just improve the starting spot, watch out.

Race pace, he had it. Rossi had 6 top five finishes and one podium in 17 races. It was just that he had to start further back than he wanted to.

If they can improve qualifying in 2024, he could be a contender for more wins again.