Rossi confirmed to Autosport his new contract could not be disclosed at this stage for legal reasons, leaving questions open about whether he is continuing with Andretti Autosport or making a switch to Arrow McLaren SP.
Asked what was his priority when weighing up options for a new deal, the 2016 Indy 500 winner said: “I want to win the championship.
“It’s all about the championship for me. The Indy 500 is awesome, it’s great, but the biggest motivation for me on Sunday is the chance to gain double points.”
When quizzed as to how many IndyCar teams he believes are capable of winning the championship, he responded with “three,” and asked if one of those was Andretti Autosport, he replied: “We haven’t been for a long time. Just look at the stats: there was 2012 with Ryan [Hunter-Reay] and nothing since.
“Now, that said, I do believe Colton [Herta] could have won the championship last year, but some circumstances he had hurt him badly.
“He was leading Gateway but had car failure, and Nashville… yeah, he ultimately made a mistake but he was super-quick and kept getting put back in the pack.
“If he had won there and Gateway, instead of DNFs, that would have been more than enough to win a championship.
“He’d have almost 80 more points, and the others would have had less. And I came pretty close in 2018. In 2019 we were strong up until the middle of the year, and then we lost it. So yeah, there’s that to consider.
“But for the last decade there have been two teams dominating the title [Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske] and now I think there’s three teams capable.
“Our cars are fast enough to win it – I keep telling people our cars are potential championship-winning race cars, fast almost everywhere we go.”
Alexander Rossi, Andretti Autosport Honda
Photo by: Geoffrey M. Miller / Motorsport Images
Taking a drive at Arrow McLaren SP would involve Rossi switching manufacturers, from Honda to Chevrolet.
HPD paid a substantial sweetener to help keep him under the Honda umbrella when he inked a three-year deal with Michael Andretti in the middle of 2019 and spurned a potential opportunity to join Team Penske.
However, management changes at HPD in recent years have seen the company’s priorities shift, says Rossi.
“My relationship with Honda is good, although everyone’s relationship with Honda is different from what it was,” he added.
“David Salters [HPD president], with his engineering background and what he came in to do, is very much focused on the numbers side of things, the performance, whereas I think Ted Klaus [predecessor] and Art St. Cyr [Klaus’s predecessor] were more of your kind of corporate guys and had more of a one-on-one relationship with the drivers.
“Dave’s great; if I want to call, he’s right there. But in terms of the driver/manufacturer relationship, it’s more a thing of the past – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“I think for a period of time, Chevy was kicking our ass, and there was a huge directive and push at HPD to rectify that. David’s a part of that, and he’s done a great job to get us to where we’re at now from a reliability and competition standpoint.”