Schmidt Peterson announces increased Honda involvement

SPM has been a Honda team since it morphed from Sam Schmidt Motorsports in 2011 – when everyone ran HPD units – into Schmidt Peterson in 2012.

That first year as SPM, the squad finished fifth in the championship as a one-car team with Simon Pagenaud as driver, and its most recent win came this year, with James Hinchcliffe driving to victory in Long Beach.

Piers Phillips, the team’s general manager said: “Our technical partners give us the increased engineering capability which, in turn, gives HPD the confidence in us as a team to take our partnership to the next level. Our contract extension is the culmination of everyone’s hard work.

“One of the things we’re extremely excited about is working closer technically with HPD for the benefit of not only our program, but for all Honda programs in the IndyCar Series.

"We’re really excited for the next three years and hoping to win a lot of races, some Indy 500s and championships.”

Art St. Cyr, HPD’s president added: “We’ve seen a significant increase in their capability, and our expectations are a lot higher.

"Their engineering talent, their ability to analyze what’s going on from one race to the next and really be able to up their game each session really impressed us.

“We are going to be relying on Schmidt Peterson Motorsports to help us gather base data that is going to be the source of our programs like HPD Dynamic, our simulator, and those types of activities that we will be feeding across to all of our Honda teams to make sure that all of them raise their game.

“As we move forward with our manufacturer testing, SPM is going to be one of our key teams to really help us characterize the kits and make sure we can understand what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses and how we can maximize the ability of that kit to get the speed on track.”