Indy 500 video: Hinchcliffe hits trouble on Day 2

Persistent electrical problems kept 2016 Indy 500 polesitter James Hinchcliffe parked in his Schmidt Peterson Motorsports for almost half of Tuesday's six-hour practice session. The problem, reportedly due to a faulty component in the engine bay, kept the Canadian's mechanics busy as they tore through the No. 5 Honda's wiring looms and related systems to try and find the culprit.

Other than a brief appearance when the track went green at noon, Hinchcliffe and the SPM crew made up for the short day by logging 60 laps in the final hours of practice.

"It's never great to lose track time, certainly with the threat of weather coming in later in the week," Hinchcliffe told RACER. "The program, when we first started, was to try and heavy load the front end, and we haven't really been able to do that."

Hinchcliffe first encountered the electrical problems late Monday and when the issues resurfaced, the practice laps turned by teammates Mikhail Aleshin and Jay Howard filled the information void.

"It kind of crept up near the last hour of the day yesterday and carried through the first couple of today," he said. "Definitely lost a lot of valuable running, but luckily Mikhail was out there running, Jay was out there running, so some of the things as a team we needed to get through, we still did."

The biggest casualty from the unexpected downtime came with the limited race-day running for the No. 5.

"We haven't had as much running in traffic," he said. "These nice hot days, it's when you want to work on the racecar, and that was really our first chance to run in and kind of traffic at all these last two days."

With a long list of items to test throughout the six-hour session, Hinchcliffe says he and his race engineer Allen McDonald had to pick the high-priority items to try during the three hours they had on Tuesday.

"Today, especially being able to finally get out in some traffic, we now have a direction of what we want to do specifically for that," he said. "Now we've been in traffic, we know what the car's doing; we know what to fix. So hopefully the lost time doesn't hurt us too much moving forward."