Marcus Armstrong is riding a hot streak at the right time of the season.
The New Zealander has four top 10 finishes in the last five races and a pair of top fives, including Sunday at Portland in the No. 11 Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, and has found the only thing he was missing—the consistency—needed to turn his natural speed and talent into results.
“IndyCar is extremely competitive, if you didn’t already know, and any circuit, to be inside the top five, you need to have a lot of things go right,” Armstrong told RACER. “You need to have the pace. You need to have some element of luck and just everything to go right. To be deep inside the top 10 for a couple of races, it just shows that we’re moving forward and making progress.”
Armstrong and new race engineer Angela Ashmore have clicked in their first year together, which has made life easier for the Kiwi as he completes his first complete season in the series.
“I feel like I jell with the car on road courses and street courses, really,” he said. “Oval racing, I still need to understand a few things, clearly, but when it comes to circuits like this, I feel very, very at one with the car, and I’m also building a lot of chemistry with my race engineer, Angela Ashmore, who’s doing a great job as well. I just want to thank her, because she’s doing an amazing job.”
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Ovals are the last key area for Armstrong to make strides, and based on his drive to eighth at World Wide Technology Raceway, the potential is there.
“I did feel confident at [WWTR],” he added. “In fact, when the oval races have quite a lot of action, side by side racing, trying to find clean air, it’s actually not too dissimilar to racing on a street course, or … even racing around Zandvoort, for example. In a high downforce car, it’s not totally dissimilar on a short oval. I felt like I made a lot of progress at [WWTR], even though I’d never been there before, so it’s cool.”
Armstrong’s rise in consistent competitiveness can only help in his quest to secure his future in IndyCar. With his Chip Ganassi Racing team expected to drop from five cars to three next season, the 24-year-old isn’t guaranteed to continue in the No. 11 Honda. Showing his strength in the twilight of the current season can only help when it’s time to return next year, wherever that might be.
“Mike [Hull, CGR managing director] and Chip [Ganassi] are the ones that call the shots, and I’m my own manager, so I want to be in the loop,” he said. “I just want to maximize my performance on track and trust that the situation will resolve itself.”