When you start with a new car, or with a new specification – like the manufacturer aerokits in 2015 or when we went back to a universal aerokit in 2018 – your focus is on driver comfort initially, and then you determine which are the areas for improving performance.
Obviously we’ve had this car for a while so, unloading at the Speedway, we already have a good idea of where to start in terms of set-up, where we might find extra pace, and also how to dial each car into a driver’s particular preferences. Last year at Indy, there wasn’t a ton of variance across our six cars, but there’s always three or four things that Scott Dixon likes different from Marcus Ericsson, and that Marcus likes different from Alex Palou.
And things change every year. We can’t go back to Indy with the same set-ups we ran last May. There have been aero changes to the cars via the regulations for 2023, ways to unlock more downforce – possibly more for race set-up than qualifying.
Wind and weather changes are notorious for having a big effect at Indy. Partly that’s because you have so much practice time compared with other races, you can get your car closer to the edge, and partly it’s because small changes make such a massive difference at those speeds. It’s important to use practice time to figure out all the details for making minor changes according to track conditions and still keep the car in the window in terms of handling and speed.
With the new pieces IndyCar has allowed us this year, based on the aero testing that we’ve seen, we think we have a pretty good idea how we want to run the car and where we think maximum performance will be, but on-track results can always be a little different from wind tunnel data. So as a team, we will divide the tasks among our four entries – one works on variables in this area, another works on variables in another area – and then we will debrief together at the end of first practice, revisit the things we’ve discovered, and move forward in what we hope will be a productive way the next day.
Source: Autosport