NTT INDYCAR SERIES: 109TH RUNNING OF THE INDIANAPOLIS 500

May 25, 2025

Marcus Ericsson

Press Conference

THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon, everyone. Wrapping up the 109th running of the Indianapolis 500, David Malukas, third-place finishing driver will join us, as well the championship team.

Joined now by the second-place finishing driver in Marcus Ericsson, who led 17 of the 200 laps, driver of the No. 28 Allegra Honda for Andretti Global, second runner-up finish in the Indy 500, first podium of this 2025 NTT INDYCAR Series season.

This whole month seemed to be improved. This was a good showing for you, but I sense a lot of disappointment, though, in all this.

MARCUS ERICSSON: Yeah, for sure. This race is a winner-takes-it-all all kind of race, and I had that race covered. It's pretty painful. Yeah. It is.

Q. When you got passed going into 1, what happened there?

MARCUS ERICSSON: I mean, I had those lap cars ahead, and I was struggling a little bit in the dirty air. Alex got kind of a run on me, but I thought he wasn't going to go for it. And that's the thing that's going to keep me up at night for a while, that moment and what I did and didn't do.

To look back at that -- like I said, that's going to keep me up at night for a while.

Q. Obviously flat out the last few laps and then a bit of a bobble coming out of 3 --

MARCUS ERICSSON: I tried to stay flat. The last three or four laps was about trying to give everything I've got to get a run and try to keep my foot down, had some moments, but not enough today.

Q. A bit of an open-ended question. What do you plan on doing next?

MARCUS ERICSSON: I don't know, eat some food. Then go to Detroit next weekend.

Yeah, right now I'm just disappointed. This race means everything to me. I know how much it means to win this race. So to finish second again, it's pretty painful, yeah.

Q. At the end it was just 0.68 seconds, I think, very close, but just speculation, just two or three laps longer, do you think you could have overtaken him?

MARCUS ERICSSON: I think the tough thing was those two lap cars or whatever they were, backmarkers, and they were sort of creating this dirty air that made it really hard to sort of overtake there in the end.

But that's the frustrating thing was that I had position on Alex and I sort of lost that, and that is -- when that happened, he was definitely in an advantage.

Yeah, that's what I need to sort of look back at and try and see what I could have done differently.

Q. Following up on that, do you feel like you either made a mistake or you could have done something differently, or it's just a matter of the way lap traffic and the way you have to get around them works here?

MARCUS ERICSSON: Yeah, it's just a few things. When they came out, I had sort of a half chance to get by one of them, and that would have put a buffer between me and Alex. And when he overtakes me, he kind of had a run, but not a super run, and I sort of opened the door.

Just those things that you play it in your head a million times already after the finish line what you could have done differently there.

It was tough with those lap cars to play it, but I had the best seat in the house there to lead the last 15 laps, and I -- yeah. Again, I need to look at it again, but yeah, it's pretty painful.

Q. Can you take me through the positives? Nobody likes to finish second here, but it's a good result for the team, good momentum going into Detroit next week?

MARCUS ERICSSON: Yeah, I'm really proud of the Allegra team. We've really had a good month, a good solid month, good qualifying weekend.

This race was a bit strange. We started out fairly strong. I felt really comfortable the first part of the race, and then my car went really oversteery, I was really hanging on and sort of struggling to keep up with anybody, I felt like, and we had to make a ton of changes. And then we had a bad pit stop that dropped us right to the back field lead. At one point we were last in the lead lap.

So it was really looking like a bad day, but that's the cool thing with us and with the 28 crew, we keep fighting. We keep never giving up, and we keep fighting through. And that's what we did today. I had some really good stints there in the second half of the race where I felt the car came more to me and put us back in contention, and then the last stop was really good, good call on the strategy, as well. I'm really proud of that fight-back.

It stinks. Second is a good result, but here it's not a good result. Here you've got to win.

Q. Marcus, this looked like a track position race outside of the restarts. What was your experience in the cockpit? Was it the lap traffic that was causing the problem, or was it the nature of following another car in these conditions in general?

MARCUS ERICSSON: I think both, yeah. It was tough in traffic, and my car, like I said, was a bit tricky to drive in that sort of traffic. But yeah, it was difficult. It's difficult when you sort of fight for the win and you have two other cars there that are sort of in front of you, and it's a bit tricky for sure.

Q. We talked about the lap traffic at the GP earlier this month. When you're running in second behind the leader with those lap cars ahead creating that disturbance, how hard is it to keep focused and keep calm knowing what's on the line here?

MARCUS ERICSSON: Yeah, I mean, I don't know, it's not hard. I was fully locked in and doing everything to win that race. Yeah, it's a bit frustrating, but it's part of the game. It's just part of the game. That's the way it works.

Q. Is it any more or less frustrating to lose to Alex, the guy who's -- I don't know whether it's he's dominating the series, so at least I lost to probably the guy that's running the best, or gosh, this guy nobody can seem to beat?

MARCUS ERICSSON: It doesn't really matter to me. Of course I'm happy for Alex and Chip Ganassi. I was there for a long time, and Alex is a good friend of mine. But right now I'm just mostly disappointed for us that we were so close.

Q. Marcus, could you have passed one or two of those lap cars at the end, and if you could have, why did you decide not to?

MARCUS ERICSSON: That's the thing that I'm going to play in my head quite a lot to try and figure out what I could have done differently because one of the cars in between us, that would have been a huge buffer to Alex. It's things like that that I'm going to have to -- I don't know, it's going to keep me up at night thinking about that, what I could have done differently, how I should have played that differently the last stint.

Q. Was there much, if any, consideration around fuel saving --

MARCUS ERICSSON: No.

Q. Knowing Alex had slightly older tires, too?

MARCUS ERICSSON: No, it was full attack the last stint.

Q. I want to ask, there were a lot of issues with guys coming to pit road, guys getting off pit road today. What was the communication for you from pit road in terms of, hey, being careful getting in, be careful getting out, just with -- and was that sort of a product, do you think, of just how cold it was and guys not being able to heat their brakes up?

MARCUS ERICSSON: I think so, yeah. It was tricky in and out of the pits, really tricky with the cold brakes, cold tires. I had that in mind, had some margins there. But there was quite a lot of people that didn't. It was definitely tricky conditions. It was tricky also on the restarts with the cold tires. They cooled down really a lot. I think that was definitely a lot harder than usual just because of the temperatures today.