Rossi picks up Newgarden’s race engineer

Newgarden and Milless

Andretti Autosport has hired Jeremy Milless, Josef Newgarden's highly-regarded race engineer at Ed Carpenter Racing, to run Alexander Rossi's car, among a raft of senior tech staff changes at the team writes David Malsher of Motorsport.com.

Milless joined Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing along with Newgarden at the end of 2011, and was his race engineer through the team's various iterations — SFHR, CFH Racing (when it merged with Ed Carpenter Racing to form Carpenter Fisher Hartman) and finally back to Ed Carpenter Racing this season.

In 2015, Newgarden scored the first two wins of his IndyCar career at Barber Motorsports Park and Toronto, and this year dominated at the Iowa Speedway. However, with Newgarden moving to Team Penske, Milless has elected to join Andretti Autosport where he will engineer the #98 Andretti-Herta entry of Indy 500 winner Alexander Rossi. The former race engineer for this car, Tom German, has left the team.

Eric Bretzman, Scott Dixon's former race engineer at Chip Ganassi Racing, who has spent the last two years overseeing Ganassi's NASCAR team, has joined Andretti Autosport as technical director. Ray Gosselin will continue to engineer Ryan Hunter-Reay's #28 car, with Nathan O'Rourke continuing with Marco Andretti.

Rob Edwards, team manager at Michael Andretti's team, told Motorsport.com: "There had long been rumblings of Josef going to Team Penske, of course, and we weren't sure initially whether those plans would also include Jeremy. Once we learned they wouldn't, we saw there was an opportunity.

"We looked at the last two or three years, how Josef and Jeremy had grown together and saw some of those same opportunities with where Alexander is at now, with his first IndyCar season under his belt. We see a chance of Jeremy and Alexander to grow together over the next few years, so a great fit from that point of view."

Asked if Milless's apparently excellent handle on IndyCar setups with the Chevrolet aerokit would be transferable to the Honda aerokit, as used by Andretti Autosport, Edwards said: "From what I know of Jeremy, he's a good solid engineer and what impressed us was that with a relatively small amount of resource, he helped Ed's team become a constant contender at pretty much every racetrack we go to.

"So his ability to work from engineering principles and work with Josef on how to apply it, those things really attracted us. Given there are fundamental differences in the car he worked with last year and what he'll work with this year, that was less of a factor." David Malsher/Motorsport.com