Honda unlikely to power the IndyCar champion

The top four Honda drivers in the championship at the moment – Carlos Munoz, Graham Rahal, Alexander Rossi and Ryan Hunter-Reay – lie between seventh and eleventh, covered by just six points. And the best of these, Munoz, is 113 off championship leader Simon Pagenaud.

Thanks to the Texas race’s postponement until the end of August, there are 400 points on offer still (excluding each event’s one point for leading a lap, two points for leading the most laps, and one point for pole position). However, with a 22-car field, the 22^nd place driver still picks up eight points, so the most the winner can gain on the biggest loser is reduced.

So can these HPD drivers reel in the championship leader? Math says yes; logic and reality suggest not.

On the driving side, Munoz, Rahal, Rossi and Hunter-Reay have the chops to compete for the title. 2012 champion Hunter-Reay has proven it already, of course, and for the same reason, you’ve got to have faith in Andretti Autosport, that runs three of these drivers. So a team like Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing which has often outpaced the Andretti team must also be able to contend for the crown.

The question mark is Honda, because in order to regain lost ground, you can’t merely match your rival but need instead to be superior. Honda’s late but major engine progress was the talk of Gasoline Alley in May, and when Munoz backed up James Hinchcliffe’s Indy pole with another P1 effort for the as-yet-unresolved Texas race, HPD’s leap forward was confirmed.

However, the boost level used on superspeedways (1.3-bar) and the engine characteristics required for these flat-out blasts don’t necessarily have much bearing on how the engines will perform at 1.5-bar boost and on tracks that comprise the majority of the Verizon IndyCar Series, namely, road and street courses.

Following Rossi’s triumph at Indianapolis, Honda-powered cars may well complete a superspeedway sweep in August, and power the winners at Pocono and Texas Motor Speedway. But how about the mean streets of Toronto or the undulating sweeps of Mid-Ohio, Watkins Glen and Sonoma?

What we’ve seen since Indy suggests Chevrolet has a small but decisive edge. For Detroit’s Race 2, Ryan Hunter-Reay started on the front row by being fastest in Group 2 in that unique qualifying session. But his top time was 0.7sec off Will Power’s best, and RHR ain’t three-quarters of a second slower than anybody, so he was losing something in the equipment. Part of that gap will be AA’s struggles with street course setups this year (memories of Long Beach can still reduce Andretti personnel to tears) and Penske’s excellence on these temporary tracks for the past couple of seasons. Maybe powerplants made little difference on that occasion.

But skip ahead to Road America last weekend and there were more folk saying there was a definite disparity between Chevy and Honda. Where that came from depended who you asked.

Andretti Autosport team manager Rob Edwards, for example, believes the HPD’s engine’s leap forward in performance at Indy is applicable at all boost levels. He told Motorsport.com: “Given that we’ve got a pretty good idea from Indy and Texas where the engines are at, I think the [performance disparity] is more an efficiency thing with the aero kit.

“This is a low-drag type of track and I think Chevy can produce more downforce on a lower drag level than we can. [In qualifying] we feel we trimmed all our cars as much as we could to the point where we were starting to give up in the corners.”

Graham Rahal, as fastest Honda driver was clearly still thinking in terms of a power deficit.

After qualifying he commented: “Every time I’ve followed one of the [Chevrolet] competitors, they seem to pull a little harder through the mid-range and here with the long straights, that loses you time. If you look at GP of Indy, our top speeds were down considerably on our competition so maybe that hurts us a little bit.”

The following day, he commented that in qualifying he had been “three tenths off and every single tenth was on the straightaways,” and describing his raceday battle with the Ganassi-Chevrolet of Tony Kanaan, he said, “I got next to him and when I pulled out, he left us.”

Yet a few days later, Rahal too would agree with Edwards’ opinion that Honda has an aero kit disadvantage.

Honda, it seems is in the ballpark engine-wise but superior it is not. As can be seen in these unofficial times, Rahal was fast in Wednesday’s Iowa Speedway test, producing his qualifying simulation run in the heat of the day, when qualifying proper will take place in eight days’ time. But the Iowa track is unique and the races there are as much about a car’s ability to deal with bumps and its driver’s ability to deal with traffic. It’s no indicator of performance at any other type of circuit.

That being the case, it looks unlikely that the 2016 IndyCar champion will be Honda powered. More race wins are entirely feasible HPD is close enough to Ilmor’s Chevrolet that it’s not unthinkable that Honda could win all the remaining races.

But the odds of luck falling that way for just one of the runners, which is what it would take to overhaul Penske-Chevrolet’s Pagenaud, are surely too long.