Honda fights on through aero kit freeze

The challenges facing Honda and its five Verizon IndyCar Series teams are well known. Coming off a season where Chevy took 14 of 16 wins and dominated every short oval and road/street course, the series' decision to freeze development on the aero kits produced by both brands has ensured the Bowtie will retain an advantage. But that doesn't mean Honda Performance Development has given up before the first wheel has turned in anger this weekend at St. Petersburg.

Significant improvements and acquisitions made by most of its teams during the offseason should improve Honda's fortunes, and with the acquisition of a prized team like Chip Ganassi Racing, HPD's stable has also grown in size and strength.

Honda advancements notwithstanding, only the brave would bet against Chevy winning its sixth consecutive Manufacturers' championship and a Team Penske driver securing the Drivers' title. The same can't be said for predicting how many wins Chevy and Honda will earn throughout the 17-race schedule.

As HPD vice president Steve Eriksen views the season ahead, with Andretti Autosport, Dale Coyne Racing, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, Schmidt Peterson Motorsports and CGR on its side, Honda's results are all but guaranteed to improve.

"My expectation is that 2017 is going to be an even better season than 2016 was," Eriksen (pictured) told RACER. "If I stand back and I look at the year 2016 from a Honda/Acura Motorsports perspective, it was actually a pretty spectacular year. We won the Indy 500, we won Pikes Peak, we won the 24 Hours of Daytona overall. We won Sebring overall, we won Petit Le Mans overall. We had a bunch of grassroots successes.

"And we also headwinds with the Acura TLX in the World Challenge category, so it was actually a pretty good year. The IndyCar wins were not as many as we had hoped for and I believe it will be better this year for number of reasons. Even though the number of open areas on the engine side are much more limited than they were last year, we've kept our heads down and kept working on engine performance and we will have some more good news."

It won't be long before official qualifying times and race results tell whether Eriksen's assessment is accurate.

"The other part of it is, of course, we have strength in driver and team line-up," he continued. "We know it's a big factor in competitiveness. I'm pretty excited about the year, to be honest."

Optimism aside, Eriksen recognizes the limitations Honda will face during the aero kit freeze, but offered an interesting perspective on how HPD's teams could benefit by working with the same aerodynamics.

"This is our first time to have a second year with the same aero configuration of our kit," he said. "So unlike previously, where we had to completely change the kit and everybody had to learn it, we are now in the second year with a kit. We are now able to take advantage of continuing to explore settings and configurations that will get more performance out of the kit. It's a little bit of a luxury in some ways in that we are now able to have some stability and focus on refining how we run the kit."

The Andretti team typified Honda's overall IndyCar experience in 2016. It won the biggest race of the year with at the Indy 500, endured hit-or-miss outcomes at most road and street courses, and looked to the superspeedways that followed Indy as the only tracks where Honda's aero kit could topple the Chevys.

Andretti team manager Rob Edwards shares in Eriksen's hope that the entire Honda camp will be more competitive in 2017, but he isn't expecting miracles to take place.

"Obviously, we are hoping that things will be better than last year," he said. "But fundamentally, aerodynamically, nothing has changed. I think it is well documented that the one kit has a significant advantage over the other. The series has chosen to maintain the latest status quo, so I think you're going to see close to the status quo. I would certainly hope that we would make some gains over last year, but I don't think it's going to be vastly different."

Edwards' pragmatism was repeated by almost every Honda team during the recent open test at Phoenix. Chevy has also made strides with its engine and understanding of its aero kit since 2016, which has allowed Team Penske and Ed Carpenter Racing to demonstrate championship-caliber speed while preparing for the new season.

Despite all of the expectations that Chevy will maintain its dominance, Eriksen's team continues to invest in R&D to find aero kit gains for its teams.

"We continue to go into the wind tunnel and spend time on what we can get out of the kit that we designed," he said. "We certainly have made gains on the engine side, so that is great. And we're not done. We don't give up and stop. We carry on with trying to make more and more performance. Last year winning the Indy 500 was pretty spectacular, so I expect to win it again this year."

Even with the lame duck season for aero kits in mind, Eriksen says HPD will still find ways to improve as an organization by working with its custom bodywork.

"Absolutely, and the answer would be the same if you were to ask, how does the motorsports R&D effort help the bigger picture?" he said. "The biggest benefit you get is through developing your techniques, your approach to engineering. Whether that is software you use and how you use it or the other tools, your testing techniques, all that infrastructure development benefits from doing R&D activities.

"You look at the aero kit, there's no difference there. Having a chance to continue to evolve our tools and techniques and developing our people internally through projects like that, it's an investment in the future."

HPD heads into 2017 in the awkward position of trying to catch a moving target with its hands tied behind its back. The freeze limits its opportunity to improve the weakest part of its package, and any gains it finds elsewhere will be offset to some degree by the progress that Chevy has made.

At the same time, its success at Indy and Texas, and second places at some of its "weaker" tracks – Barber, Detroit, Sonoma – gives it plenty to shoot for. This might be a bridging season from a technical standpoint, but for HPD, it's also a chance to reset ahead of 2018.