Engineering change for Ericsson

The Andretti Global team is making an engineering change on Marcus Ericsson’s No. 28 Honda starting this weekend in Mid-Ohio. Mired in 21st place in the drivers’ championship, the Swede will work with Dave Seyffert over the last eight races on the calendar with the hope of salvaging the remainder of his season. Olivier Boisson, who engineered Ericsson in the No. 28 since his arrival in 2024, will move to an R&D role.

Seyffert has been an unsung engineering talent within Andretti for many years and worked with Felix Rosenqvist last season at Meyer Shank Racing via the technical alliance between the teams. He won the 2021 Indianapolis 500 as assistant race engineer with Helio Castroneves at MSR, and found victory lane in June while standing in as Kyle Kirkwood’s race engineer at WWTR when primary race engineer Jeremy Milless was briefly away from the program.

With Kirkwood holding second in the championship on the strength of three victories in the No. 27 Honda and Colton Herta sitting 10th in the No. 26 Honda, team COO Rob Edwards says the mid-season timing was right to try a different pairing with Ericsson and see if similar results can be achieved.

“My job is to get all three cars to where the 27 is and so we're constantly looking at what we need to do,” Edwards told RACER. “And so we are going to make a change to engineering the 28, and not because we don't have a capable driver and a super capable engineer, but sometimes, you need change. Sometimes you can meddle with things, and sometimes you need to change things to try and make them look different and work differently. We're super fortunate that Dave Seyffert stepped up for Jeremy (Milless), who has been hurt the last two races, on the 27. We have some projects for 2026 and Olivier is the ideal person to tackle those projects for us.”

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A sixth to open the year at St. Petersburg stands as the only positive result for the 34-year-old in 2025; a 12th at Long Beach is next on the list with the other seven finishes ranging from 13th to 31st. Ericsson was Andretti’s top performer at Indy where he finished second, but along with sixth-place Kirkwood, both drivers were sent to the back of the field after their cars failed post-race technical inspection when illegal modifications were found by the series.

Prior to the penalty, Ericsson held 10th place in the championship, but with the demotion and massive loss of points in falling from second to 30th, the trajectory of his season changed as he plummeted to 20th in the standings.

“With Jeremy's recovery, we’ve got him returning to the racetrack and we can shift Dave from the 27 to the 28,” Edwards said. “For us as an organization, it allows us to achieve two things: Get some projects done that were sitting there and we couldn’t get done because we didn’t have the right people available. So we can kick start those with Olivier, and also to change the chemistry on the 28 and see if that helps in terms of getting some more points on the board.”