Can Ganassi turn the IndyCar tide for Honda in 2017?

Everyone knows the 2016 Verizon IndyCar Series was a difficult one for Honda, except for – and this is a big exception – scoring a 1-2 in the 100^th Indianapolis 500. Honda folks can point to how close they came to usurping Chevrolet at other races this year – Barber Motorsports Park and Pocono Raceway spring to mind, for example. They can also justifiably point out that Simon Pagenaud’s #22 Penske-Chevrolet frequently kicked the asses of all fellow Chevy entrants as well as HPD runners, in the first half of the season.

However, the fact is that Honda’s win tally in IndyCar’s 2015-’16 aerokit era has been poor, winning just eight races compared with Chevrolet’s 24, and the trend hasn’t even been going the right way: there were six wins for the Japanese marque last year, just two this year. That’s despite HPD being given a helping hand for the road/street/short-oval aero package in the last season, allowing the company to develop within more boxes than Pratt & Miller could for Chevrolet's kit. Ironically, this season past, Honda was at its best in superspeedway trim – using the package that could only be tweaked in the same areas as the Chevy kit – hence the victories at Indy and Texas and the near-miss at Pocono.

Not all the blame can be laid at the big glass doors of the Honda Performance Development office in Santa Clarita, Calif. The sheer number of proven winners has gone against them the past couple of years, as Chevy has been heavy with IndyCar’s big hitters, Penske and Ganassi. Sure, Michael Andretti ditched his bowtie for a hachimaki in 2014, but his once dominant team hasn’t even been at the top of Honda’s cast list these past three seasons, and instead has slipped into the role of occasional threat for race victory, alongside Schmidt Peterson Motorsports. Instead, Honda’s star turn has been Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, with Graham Rahal finishing fourth and fifth in the points table over the past two years, respectively.

However, the spotlight may be about to swing in a different direction. Chip Ganassi Racing, the powerhouse that has outscored even Team Penske for IndyCar championships in this millennium (7-5) is switching from Chevy to Honda for 2017, after just three years of running the Ilmor-built V6 turbos. Yet the pair come together at the end of a surprisingly undistinguished year for Chip’s chargers. Like HPD, Ganassi scored just two wins in 2016, both of them courtesy of four-time champion Scott Dixon who finished outside the Top 3 in the championship for the first time in 10 years. (Yes, there were plenty of extenuating circumstances, but usually Dixie has enough points in the bag to at least take the title battle down to the wire.)

We have all seen Ganassi and Honda Performance Development pull off extraordinary feats in Indy car racing, both together and apart. But what can we expect from them next year? Can two groups that suffered difficult 2016 seasons immediately galvanize each other when reunified?

There are few in better position to judge than Chris Simmons who, since joining CGR in 2003, has race engineered both Dario Franchitti and Dixon to IndyCar titles. And while Ganassi has fairly recent experience of switching engine manufacturers, this time around there is the additional complication of having a different aerokit to learn.

“Yeah, that definitely adds to the complexity,” Simmons tells Motorsport.com. “From the practical standpoint, you’re making a different bodywork fit the car, and from the engineering standpoint, you’re learning how the whole aero package works. And even the practicalities aren’t straightforward. There are fastening points in different locations from Chevy to Honda, just as there were from Dallara’s original DW12 switching to Chevy. It’s not earth-shattering stuff, but it adds to the workload because we have eight sets of bodywork to do – speedway kits and road/street/short-oval kits for four cars.

“And 12 months from now, we’ve got it all to do again when everyone switches to a universal aerokit for 2018… Trying not to think about that right now, to be honest! At least we should be the most prepared team in the series when it comes to making switchovers…”

Simmons says that although the team’s 2012-’13 experience with Honda has eased the engine transition, there is still much to be done in that area, too.

“Changing the engine over is a case of changing a few studs and flipping a few bushings over, but then there’s also a different engine harness, different exhausts, different plumbing – and most of the electronics on the left side of the car are different, too. The interfaces are all the same but Honda run a different injector driver box, so that alters the layout on that side of the car.

“So again it’s not radically different, but it’s not a small task; they’re all little projects that take time to get done, because there are knock-on effects; you’re trying to still optimize things so that our cars are at their most efficient. You don’t want to overheat the electrics, but you also don’t want to use too much air to cool them that could be better channeled elsewhere.

“I’d say a bigger part has been re-learning Honda as a company; they’ve had a lot of personnel changes since we were last with them, so we’re still finding out who to talk to about what. A lot more of that will come into focus when we get to complete our first group test.”

That should have occurred earlier this month at Sebring. Instead, rain stopped play, and so Ganassi’s only recent on-track experience with Honda has been a solitary car on a solitary day at Gateway in mid-October. With the team’s switch in powerplant being announced less than a week earlier, it meant a busy time for the team to get even that one car – Tony Kanaan’s #10 – ready for a run on the 1.25-mile short oval.

“Yeah, that was hectic,” agrees Simmons. “We had basically two days to get that car ready – and believe it or not, it went pretty smoothly. There were a lot of things we knew we’d have to re-do and make better, but we got a lot of laps in. That was the benefit of having four crews working on just one car.”

Kanaan has told Motorsport.com  that he already thinks Honda is better than Chevrolet in terms of torque and fuel consumption, and Max Chilton has since echoed those sentiments. But it’s one thing to have those assets in your favor, quite another to maximize them in order to rise above the Honda herd and reclaim the Ganassi team’s natural position fighting at the front of the field. To do that takes experience, as Simmons acknowledges.

“We still have a lot of learning to do on the aero side, and we know Honda's engine power curve is different from Chevy's, so there are all sorts of things to optimize. And I know Honda have been working hard on their side, throughout last season. For instance, I think they’ve taken a big step forward in terms of knowledge of their aerokit, and with the kits being frozen for this year, that can only help.”

Naturally, Simmons is confident that Ganassi can be part of HPD’s solution to its yearly results deficit.

“It wasn’t just the superspeedways where Honda were good last year,” he observes. “I think Watkins Glen and GP Indy road course were decent. Their weak points were short ovals – particularly qualifying – and street circuits. Well if you look at short ovals and street courses, that’s where we as a team were at our best, even if the results didn’t always show it, so I think we can definitely help Honda fill in the blanks, as it were.

“Can we close the gap fully? I don’t know – too early in the development cycle to be able to tell. We haven’t run the car on track at all, aside from Gateway, and we’re a bit too soon into the windtunnel program right now to draw conclusions. It’s all a bit theoretical at the moment. But yes, I think we can at least reduce the gap where we can make strategy calls and put ourselves in a position where we can win more than two races.”

Chilton’s recent remarks about HPD being more gung-ho and pushing-the-boundaries in its approach to IndyCar than Chevrolet, brought to mind Dixon’s manufacturer comparison three years ago as Ganassi was heading in the opposite direction. Whereas HPD had been more open to tailoring engine mapping to suit its drivers, the then three-time champ had been surprised by Chevrolet’s tendency to offer maybe just two different settings for its units… although he acknowledged that had paid off in terms of reliability. Simmons says that three years on there’s still a notable difference between the two manufacturers’ philosophies.

“Over our three years together, Chevy did open up a couple more options,” says Simmons, “and I think partly with our help, they made driveability gains. But Honda has a fair amount of options available and is also open to adapting them as we need. Honestly right now, we don’t know what those needs might be, so we can’t steer them just yet, because what the driver feels on track isn’t always what the engineers see on the dyno. We know what the dyno numbers are and what the torque curves say, but we don’t race computers; we race cars with drivers in them, so until we get out there, we don’t really know how much adapting we want them to do. Maybe we’ll just be in the happy position of picking something off the menu they provide, but either way, I’m sure they’ll work with us on that.”

Nonetheless, Ganassi is now relying entirely on HPD and its own engineering savvy. Unlike when the current engine specs were introduced in the fall of 2011, or when the aerokits hit the track three years later, there will be no inter-team pooling of information. Given the squad’s heritage and status, Ganassi’s rivals will be not be throwing any bones as they attempt to catch up…

But hang on. We are talking about one of the greatest open-wheel race teams of all time, anywhere in the world spearheaded on track by one of the most accomplished drivers Indy car racing has known. Could we be underestimating the team or overstating its task ahead? Simmons thinks not.

“Honestly, it is a bit daunting,” he says, “especially when you look at the Indy 500. Craig Hampson has gone from Andretti to Coyne, so now Coyne will have a reasonable idea what made the Andretti cars so fast at Indy this year. And Tom German has gone from Andretti to Rahal, so they’re going to be even stronger, too; and the Schmidt Peterson guys were already quick at Indy – [James] Hinchcliffe took pole. So we are a little bit behind the eight-ball, and we’ll have to do our homework to make sure those guys don’t blow our doors off at next year.

“And then Chevy are not going to be standing still on the engine front. I’m sure Roger Penske is putting the pressure on those guys to make sure they kick Honda’s butt at Indy next year, and it’s not like Penske is the only Chevy team capable of winning. It’s going to be tough to close the gap there, and on all tracks. We’ve definitely got our work cut out for us.”

Nevertheless, history has shown that the Ganassi guys are the masters of flipping their fortunes sunny-side up over a race, over a race weekend, over a racing season, and from season to season. And right now, even with the team having enjoyed just one day of short-oval testing with the HPD unit, it seems highly unlikely that CGR, Simmons, team manager Mike Hull and Dixon won’t be at the cutting edge of HPD’s IndyCar championship challenge come next year’s Sonoma finale.