Ganassi ran five cars as recently as the 2022 Indianapolis 500, which hardly seemed to hamper its efforts given Marcus Ericsson won the race in its #8 Honda and Tony Kanaan finished third in Car #1.
However, the latter’s was an Indy-only entry whereas Dixon, Alex Palou, Marcus Armstrong, Linus Lundqvist, and rookie Kyffin Simpson will all be full-timers with the team this year.
Its IndyCar effort has fluctuated in size over the years, sometimes due to changes in other programmes such as IMSA, but it streamlined from four entries to two in 2017 for the stated reason of “running TWO championship caliber teams,” according to Ganassi himself in a statement explaining the decision.
Come 2020, it was back to three cars, then four from 2021 until now.
On the latest expansion, Dixon said, “I guess we have yet to see how that goes. It’s never easy.
“I think my biggest point of view on racing and having done it for a while at any level, it’s all about the people.
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“There sometimes can be a limit to how many of those people can find or how many people that are compatible.
“I think with different programmes and maybe the size of the team maybe not changing so much and having kind of the depth there I think really helps.
“But, you’re still adding a lot of moving parts to an already pretty big team.
“Hopefully, we can jump in and dive in, and it’s going to be no missteps. That’s obviously the biggest and best goal that we can have. But we’ll see how that plays out.
“Five cars is a lot of people, a lot of moving parts. Yeah, it’ll be interesting.”
Palou perhaps has the most to lose if there are any missteps, given he dominated the 2023 IndyCar Series.
The Spaniard, though, thinks Ganassi has the resources to absorb yet another entry, and cited extra data as a major benefit of the move.
“I would say that if you don’t really know how big the organisation is, you could say, ‘Oh, man, adding one car or two cars, it’s a big change,’” he said.
“But we have 180 people at the workshop. We have different series and different people that has expertise here and there.
“Getting five really good mechanics, it’s not tough, out of 180 people, and you can add five more.
“I don’t believe there’s disadvantages apart of headaches that Chip might have apart of putting one more trailer or I don’t know how he’s going to do it.
“But, in terms of the team performance, I don’t really see it. It might change. It might be a disadvantage. But I don’t think so.
“Then you just get more data. More data is crucial for the team.
“If we can have 20 more laps out of free practice, it just adds on. I remember Detroit having Armstrong and Ericsson and Dixon and myself, we only had like four laps, and if you add one more car, it might be five, and you get so much data for the next day, and you can get a little bit of an advantage.
“Yeah, I think even if Linus is half-rookie and Kyffin is completely rookie, they are always going to be able to give us some good data and some resources to try and improve the car performance and driving, as well.”
Meanwhile, Ganassi is on-song in this weekend’s IMSA season-opener, the 24 Hours of Daytona.
Ganassi set the pace in Practice 1 before Palou kept Car #01 on top in Practice 2 in the Cadillac Racing entry which they are sharing with Renger van der Zande and Sebastien Bourdais.
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