By alley - Dec 2, 2015, 3:29 PM ET

IndyCar season review: Ryan Hunter-Reay

What will you remember the 2015 IndyCar season for? Juan Pablo Montoya's teflon coating wearing off right at the time he needed it most? The introduction of the aero kits, several years after they were first mooted? Rocky Moran Jr.'s inspiring hour of track time at Long Beach?

To try to make sense of it all, RACER's Marshall Pruett, Robin Miller and Mark Glendenning asked each other some searching questions about all of 2015's regulars, which for the purpose of this review, includes anyone who started a minimum of half the races. Look for new installments every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

RYAN HUNTER-REAY
2015 starts: 16
2015 best finish: 1st (Iowa, Pocono)
2015 championship position: sixth; 435pts

Why did RHR go missing so often during the first half of the year?

ROBIN MILLER: It’s hard to imagine the guy Will Power called the "best all-around driver in the series" being lost in space, but that’s where RHR was for much of 2015. And he was blatantly honest about needing an instruction book to weed through his LEGO set – also known as Honda’s aero kit. Being Honda's aero kit test and development team seemed more of a detriment than an advantage, as Andretti Autosport struggled mightily until Justin Wilson came back. But the 2014 Indy 500 winner looked like his old self over the final four races with a pair of wins and a second, and praised JWill’s input for helping right the DHL ship.

RHR has the worst best luck in IndyCar, but also thrives when cast in an underdog role. How much of his late-season sprint to P6 in the championship was down to good luck, and how much of it was down to gritty drives?

MARSHALL PRUETT: Hunter-Reay has never had a good nickname, and I'm wondering if 'The Terminator' might stick. Shoot him, blow him up, run him over ... it doesn't matter, the guy just keeps marching forward until he reaches the target.

RHR was absolutely nowhere in the championship for the bulk of the season, yet fought through months of sheer misery to claim an improbable sixth in the championship. A lot of surprising things happened in 2015, and RHR's comeback must be near the top of the list.

How's this: He finished 13th or worse in eight of the first 12 races, was 14th in the standings after that 12th race, yet rallied to sixth over the final four rounds when he went into Terminator mode. I'm not sure he fully understands how it happend.

Luck played a part in that amazing leap from 14th to sixth, and RHR's wins at Iowa and Pocono carried a distinct feeling of divinity at play, but that shouldn't take away from what he accomplished. It's what RHR, and RHR alone is capable of. He's the one driver in IndyCar - or any other series I can think of - who's made a career of pulling off miracle performances when they're needed.

2015 was as bad as I've seen for RHR in at least a decade, yet he, the Andretti Autosport team, his engineer Ray Gosselin, and a revitalized Honda dug deep at a point in the year where continuing to fight seemed pointless.

The guy was pummeled through March, April, May, June, and the first half of July, then took two wins and three podiums from Iowa to Sonoma and, most importantly, delivered at the season finale with a second-place finish when so many others fell apart.

If RHR's 2016 gets off to a friendlier start, he might be able to skip the Terminator routine, rely on fewer miracles, and chase his second championship without the normal level of drama associated with his championship efforts.

How much of the blame for Andretti's slow start can you place on its lead driver?

MARK GLENDENNING: It's hard to answer that without having a spy camera in the Andretti transporter during some of those early-season debriefs. As the spearhead of Andretti's attack - and a guy with a series title and Indy 500 win on his CV - you'd think that Hunter-Reay would have thumped the table a few times between the Spring Training test at Barber and Indy.

That said, when a team is as collectively lost as Andretti Autosport clearly was during the first few months of the season, it's a bit much to expect Hunter-Reay to lead them out of the woods by himself. His great run over the back end of the season to sixth in the championship was a great salvage job on what was looking like a write-off season, but the sustained performance that Rahal Letterman Lanigan was able to shake out of the Honda package reinforces just how costly Hunter-Reay's weeks in the wilderness were. Had Andretti unlocked the aero kit as quickly as RLL did, the entire complexion of the championship fight would have looked completely different.