Veteran race engineer and engineering leader Eric Cowdin has joined Arrow McLaren.
Cowdin arrives at the team led by Tony Kanaan from Ed Carpenter Racing, where he served as competition director for the last two seasons and helped ECR make a welcome return to victory lane in August with Christian Rasmussen at Milwaukee.
He will work alongside Arrow McLaren’s longstanding technical director Nick Snyder as its director of engineering and focus on trackside support while Snyder continues to spearhead the team’s engineering R&D programs.
Cowdin and Kanaan have decades of experience working together across multiple teams and for both, their greatest achievement in the sport was shared in winning the 2013 Indianapolis 500 with KVSH Racing. With Cowdin’s acquisition, Kanaan has stacked Arrow McLaren with many of the biggest contributors to his success.
On June 30, former Team Penske team manager Kyle Moyer, who was a central figure during Kanaan’s championship-winning days at Andretti Global, joined the team as its director of competition, and late last year, Kanaan recruited former Chip Ganassi Racing team manager Scott Harner to serve as Arrow McLaren’s director of race operations.
Together, either Moyer, Harner, or Cowdin were part of Kanaan’s 17 IndyCar victories, and as their services became available, Arrow McLaren’s team principal made swift work of bringing them into the three-car operation which placed second in the championship with Pato O’Ward, fifth with Christian Lundgaard – career bests for both, and the team – and 22nd with Nolan Siegel.
“I’m sorry I have badass friends… so I had to hire all of them!” Kanaan told RACER with a laugh. “But seriously, capability-wise, Eric Cowdin is as good if not better than anybody in this paddock. We would hire him even if I never knew him. His reputation is something that everybody knows. I’m just fortunate to know him, and the number one thing for us is to be successful, so we’re wanting to work with the best people who can make that happen, and that’s what makes him perfect to work with us.”
Having won plenty of times with Cowdin over the years along with Moyer and Harner, Kanaan points to the other key benefit of introducing known characters into Arrow McLaren’s organization.
“Of course you want to have the people with a lot of success in their careers; they happen to be extremely capable and talented individuals, and that part is obvious,” Kanaan added. “But I would not say that was the first reason I hired any of them. I’m looking for the culture and the tribe and the obsession that these people have to win. You know what I mean?
“You can hire some winning people who have championships as engineers or whatever, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to win with you if they don’t have the right mentality or don’t really fit the culture you have at the team. I cannot explain how important this really is. So these guys, they are the right fit for us. They fit the culture of what we’re trying to become here, but they also bring a lot to the culture and make us even better. This is why they work now for Arrow McLaren.”