Hinchcliffe credits win to SPM consistency

Long Beach winner James Hinchcliffe is incredibly thankful his team chose to stand pat with its key personnel during the offseason. Schmidt Peterson Motorsports was one of very few Verizon IndyCar Series programs to keep its engineers and mechanics in place after an admittedly frustrating 2016 campaign.

As its rivals made high-profile staffing changes aimed at improving overall competitiveness, SPM went the opposite direction and built a new plan based on the two-car program sticking together and executing at a higher level.

"If you think of sports in general, continuity is a huge part of success and we made the decision pretty early to keep everything status quo," Hinchcliffe told RACER. "There was never really any question on whether we needed different people. For the first time in a few years, we didn't have any major technical changes thrown at us and so take that continuity, and the continuity within the team, and all of the hard work is paying off."

Hinchcliffe's team was enraptured by the win, and between his celebratory donuts in the No. 5 Honda to the pit crew joining in the Victory Lane revelry, the Long Beach result helped relieve all of the hard times dating back to his 2015's life-threatening Indianapolis crash.

"It's so tough to win races in this series, and when you do, the happiness comes out naturally," he said. "2016 was in a lot of ways a 'comeback' year for us and we did a lot of positive things, but we didn't win – even though we came close at Texas. But the big item on the top of our list was to get back to winning and we've done that in Race 2, and it is such a relief for the entire team.

"And to do it in the style we did: we ran up front, made passes, had fast stops – the last stop got us up to the front in the end – and it was a day where everybody had to do their jobs perfectly to win and that's what they did. I'm really proud of everyone."

Of Hinchcliffe's five career IndyCar wins, three have come in the first two races of the year. Four of the five were captured in the opening four rounds, and only his June 2013 win at Iowa was recorded in the second half of the season. The odd dynamic is something the 30-year-old will need to reverse if he wants to vie for an IndyCar title.

"It's not a terrible way to win [early in the season], but you will definitely want to add more later in the year to get there," said Hinchcliffe, who holds second in the championship standings behind Sebastien Bourdais.

"We're just going to keep trying doing what we're doing and can't get caught up in any distractions. We'll keep treating each race like it's the first one of the year with that same winning goal and see where we come out at the end of it all."