LEXINGTON, Ohio – When you catch glimpses of IndyCar drivers frantically moving their hands and contorting their fingers in ways in which the sport has never seen during Sunday’s race at Mid-Ohio, know it’s an effort to gain a tenth or two of a second per lap – at most.
Those hand, wrist and brain acrobatics are the result of nearly five years of ever-changing visions by company presidents and c-suite executives, cost tens of millions of dollars to imagine, develop, test, refine and mass produce and come with the racing world well over a decade into its hybrid era.
On the eve of its race day debut, drivers question just how much an impact the initial version of this one-of-a-kind Energy Recovery System developed by IndyCar, Honda Racing Corp. USA, Chevrolet and Ilmor will have on IndyCar racing over the final nine races of the year.
But the ERS is here to stay, with the spec technology in the hands of all 10 teams and their 27 drivers to use how they choose, and if you know anything about IndyCar team owners and engineers, they’ll sacrifice sleep, time and their own personal well-being for a tenth of a second or two.
“I think it’s going to make for an exciting finish to the year, based around who can combat the changes the most,” Team Penske title contender Scott McLaughlin told reporters at Content Days in January. “That’s what this championship is all about: combatting the change.”
Rahal: Early testing priority gave Penske, Ganassi unfair advantage
For some, though, that means taking advantage of a testing advantage that favored four of the series’ top teams – even more for the two that have won each of the last dozen IndyCar titles.
Romain Grosjean remembers sitting at 16 th and Georgetown one morning in December as the newly-named Juncos Hollinger Racing driver and listening to a dozen or so of his competitors chit-chat about intricacies of the hybrid system that was set to debut in just over three months at that point.
Drivers at Team Penske, Chip Ganassi Racing, Arrow McLaren and Andretti Global had combined to run 15,256 test miles at half-dozen different tracks across 16 days. Frustrated, Grosjean sat and stewed, not knowing even the basics of the how the system would function.
By the St. Pete season-opener three months later, those same four teams would log nearly 6,000 more miles over another half-dozen test days, on the heels of the announcement that IndyCar would bump back the hybrid system’s debut for a third time. And drivers at JHR, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, Ed Carpenter Racing and other midfield programs were still yet to get a taste.
“We definitely would have liked to have the opportunity to do a lot more,” Graham Rahal told reporters at the driver bullpen in St. Pete. “They can say what they want, but when we all show up in Mid-Ohio, I may have driven (the hybrid system) one day total. And many of those guys can say a very different story.
“Those that have been behind the wheel are going to have a much greater understanding and expectation of what the hybrid is going to do or not. For those of us who didn’t get to run it (yet), it’s a disadvantage. Period.”
In spite of Rahal’s frustration, IndyCar ensured that over the final three-plus months in the leadup to the hybrid system’s IndyCar debut, the driver of each entry (whether it be one or multiple during an ever-evolving Silly Season market) would get at least two test days with the hybrid equipment between late-March and early-July.
Drivers at the six teams who were not granted opportunities to run the hybrid system in the early stages of its development received an additional day in the car across a three-day test on the IMS road course this spring, along with full-field opportunities at the Milwaukee Mile at Iowa Speedway last month.
Rahal, along with three other drivers, was also afforded a test day last month at Nashville Superspeedway to help Firestone develop its tire compound for the season-finale, and two Chevy drivers (Alexander Rossi and Will Power) picked up a day this past week at World Wide Technology Raceway.
Chevy and HRC USA executives said this week that the discrepancy in testing came down to what they saw as teams’ readiness and capability to carry out the work loads and provide the proper feedback the engine needed.
“I think it comes down to resources, really. To be honest, it’s just about what teams have the most people, experience and resources to help support us,” said Wayne Gross, HRC USA’s manager of trackside engineering. “It’s a lot. It’s running around all day long every day. It’s a lot of extra work on people and building cars with limited parts and scheduling issues.
“And you have the opportunity to use (six-time Ganassi champ) Scott Dixon or (two-time Penske champ) Will Power, that’s the experience you want with this.”
In all, through the use of 31 drivers at 10 different tracks across the country, Chevy and HRC USA have logged 32,699 miles across their hybrid testing programs – more than 11,500 of those miles since the entire paddock has been brought into the fold.
IndyCar's hybrid system tough to master in the cockpit
Though personnel from multiple midfield teams told IndyStar last winter that what was supposed to be a regular information flow from the OEMs to every team was severely lacking, drivers for those teams active in the early stages of the process contend their engineers learned very little actionable information from those days at the track where parts snapped or frequently went up in smoke.
Interestingly, Rossi noted to IndyStar on Friday that the six teams ushered into the process last actually hold the most recent test days on a road course at IMS in late-March. The other four spent the bulk of late-2023 and early-2024 circulating around the abrasive track surfaces of Sebring and Homestead – tracks with very little similarities to IndyCar’s road course calendar. It’s left Rossi unclear just how much additional tire degradation the short 60 horsepower boosts caused on the rear tires during testing at those tracks.
What he and others do recognize, though, is the benefit of those early days of turning those subtle hand movements on and around the steering wheel (and the knowledge of the effect of what the small adjustments can deliver) into second nature. What two-time Ganassi champ Alex Palou contended Friday should take his competitors 10 laps to get comfortable – “It’s not rocket science,” CGR teammate Marcus Armstrong added — left Rahal feeling frazzled after his second full day in the car at Milwaukee last month.
“It’s a major challenge (at the Mile) to utilize it because of the fact you’re so busy already with all the other things going on that it kind of becomes an afterthought,” Rahal said after his Milwaukee test day last month. “Until the team said, ‘hybrid, hybrid,’ you’re so focused on the driving aspect that it makes it difficult to maximize the effect of the hybrid.
“There’s so much you can change, and it’s the opposite in Formula 1, where it’s pre-programmed and the driver just drives. Here, the driver has to do the majority of the work and it actually does affect the way the car handles a lot. You’ve got to balance that, too. But as challenging as it is to remind yourself of it all the time, I think the net effect is going to be positive.”
How going hybrid changes IndyCar racing in 2024
IndyCar’s new, unique-to-racing ERS that weighs just over 100 pounds, is packaged into the rear of the car in a space the size of a milk crate and can deliver 4.5-second bursts of 60 horsepower multiple times per lap if properly charged. It will, in laymen’s terms, augment the long-existing push-to-pass overtake system. As drivers explain, the boost of the ERS will be utilized most effectively at similar spots on the track as push-to-pass – the exit of slow-speed corners, particularly ones that lead onto long straights – and can even be used in conjunction with the original overtake system.
As Colton Herta explained, it’s an amount of power and torque that can give drivers the extra edge they need to execute a pass on a leading car when they already have a run. It’s not enough of a boost, though, to deliver passing opportunities on its own.
Because of IndyCar’s limits of the amount of hybrid power that can be used per driver each lap – allowing for roughly two full charges and depletions of the 20-supercapacitor Energy Storage System – drivers say they’re likely to prioritize use of push-to-pass at a corner or time in the race when they’d like to use both. Though they start each race with 150 or 200 seconds of use, drivers can use push-to-pass overtake for more than 10 seconds at a time, as has been the case for years.
“This is another tool we’re bringing to the drivers to enable there to be a little bit better competition, a little more passing,” said Mark Stielow, the director of motorsports competition engineering for General Motors. “The fans at home like to see active racing, so we’re hoping this is another tool in the drivers’ tool bag to demonstrate the talent between the drivers.”
With four more months to improve the system’s reliability, drivers across the series don’t expect IndyCar’s new hybrid technology to have an outsized impact on how the second half of the race for the Astor Cup plays out. Rossi, who sits 7 th in points entering Mid-Ohio, 19 points out of 4 th , said the system’s biggest flaw he and others were unsettled with last winter has been rectified.
Though they wouldn’t be pressed on specifics, title-contending drivers like Power, Palou, Herta, Josef Newgarden and others have noted that the variability in how to use the ERS – and which ways are most effective in deriving peak results lap after lap – is limited enough that teams may very well have already arrived at Mid-Ohio with similar conclusions.
And if they haven’t by now, each team has enough uber-smart engineers to digest their shortcomings this weekend and rebound rather quickly.
“We think we have an idea from simulations and a couple tests (on how maximize the ERS), but things always change from what the simulations say,” Palou told reporters Friday. “I don’t think anyone quite knows yet how to get absolutely everything out of it in qualifying or the race, and there’s still so many adjustments we can do that we just haven’t tried yet because we didn’t really have time.”
The biggest focus drivers have in maximizing performance is walking the inevitable tightrope of proper balance in the setup of a car that weighs 105 pounds more than it did two weeks ago and at tracks like Mid-Ohio and Iowa that were repaved since IndyCar last visited a year ago.
But now, add a car that’s been programmed to increasingly slow at certain throttle levels and which is going to be even tougher to effectively fuel save with, and you’ve got a project that could prove painstakingly hard to truly master – all for 0.2 seconds a lap.
“Ideally, you’ll use it every lap, and it’ll be a time gain in a perfect world,” Herta said Friday. “But if you get too busy (in the cockpit), you’re going to find more time driving-wise in yourself than in what (the hybrid system) can give you.”
Added Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward: “(The impact) isn’t as big as I think people are thinking in lap time, and I think the system is capable of so much more. I’d like to see it evolve into really pushing it and see how much it can actually give us – four, five or six tenths over a lap. I think that’s when we’ll really see it getting optimized by all the teams.
“Car balance is still a priority, but you can’t just ignore (the hybrid) because it’s to the point where the series is so competitive in qualifying where I’ve been left out of the Fast Six for half-a-tenth a couple times this year. If someone uses it for that half-a-tenth better than you do, they’ll transfer and you won’t. You’ve got to get it right if you really want to be one of the top-performing cars.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: 'Combatting the change': How introduction of hybrid will (and won't) change IndyCar in 2024
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