Urrutia impressed with first taste of IndyCar

The Uruguayan, who will soon head two hours southwest to try and wrap up the Indy Lights championship at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca this weekend, tested Mikhail Aleshin’s SPM-Honda at Sonoma this morning and was left impressed with the cornering speeds of the current breed of IndyCar.

He told Motorsport.com: “For sure I never drove a car like this before – big downforce! It was great.

“At the beginning it was quite difficult to get the feeling for the brakes and how to run the speed through the corners. But lap by lap I got better. It was only a morning test and for sure if I had the afternoon I would improve a lot more.”

Urrutia, whose Lights teammate Andre Negrao tested James Hinchcliffe’s SPM car, said he discovered Dallara’s IL15 Lights car handling-wise, showed similar character traits to its bigger brother.

“Indy Lights car is great preparation,” he said. “And the power, I don’t feel the big difference. The big differences are brakes and downforce. If the Indy Lights car had a little bit more downforce it should be even more similar.

“But yes it does the right job for young drivers. I was only 1.3sec slower than Helio Castroneves [morning pacesetter] in just a morning session.”

Urrutia said: “I was still adapting my style to the car. I was driving pretty much the same position as Mikhail [Aleshin], and was not very comfortable, so if we had longer we would have changed some things. For only 50 laps, the team can’t change that. But I’m pretty sure I will have more opportunities.

Should he win the Indy Lights title, the Mazda Scholarship will include three guaranteed race entries in the 2017 Verizon IndyCar Series, one of which will be the Indianapolis 500.

Asked which other two races he would pick in an ideal world, Urrutia responded: “I want to do the whole season…and I want to be with Schmidt Peterson. For me, it is the best Indy Lights team and I know pretty much all the people and they have a strong IndyCar team too.

“But now I have to focus on Laguna Seca and try to win the championship and give myself the best chance of being in IndyCar next year.”

Hinchcliffe impressed by youth

An observing James Hinchcliffe, who took over the #5 SPM car from Negrao in the afternoon, told Motorsport.com: “I think both guys did a really stout job. It’s a big ask to go to a track they’re not familiar with – especially this place, with all the elevation changes and the surface not being what it used to be grip-level wise. It’s daunting.

“But both guys kept their wheels clean except for a little spin first thing in the morning [Urrutia at Turn 7] and I’d say they were super-impressive.”

Hinchcliffe said that despite he and Aleshin not taking turns at the wheel, it had been a “productive morning” for the team.

“We had a bunch of stuff we needed to get through in the engineering plan,” he said, “and they were able to do it for us. So it’s good sign of their talent level when we can still stick to the engineering test plan even though they’re rookies.”