Photo Credit: Ashley McCubbin
When the Verizon IndyCar Series season started this year at the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, it was obvious that Chevrolet had the advantage with the new aero kits that the manufactures had developed for their entries. Obviously, that hasn’t set well with Honda and Graham Rahal says the manufactures is working really hard to get their program stronger to match Chevrolet.
“We’re going to work as hard as we can with Honda; we have worked as hard as we can with them to try to improve the aero kit and everything else moving forward to next year,” he commented.
Though whether they will make big strides and catch right up to Chevrolet is yet to be seen. Rahal says looking at the second half of the season, there will “probably not be a lot” of progress made as a result of how much is left in the 2015 Verizon IndyCar Series season. He did add, though, that Honda has some things in the works that could improve their performance.
“One of the things about the Honda kit is its extremely overweight compared to the Chevy, so we need to try and reduce some of the packaging weight, the parts weight to help us and stuff,” he commented. “I think because you’re not changing the aerodynamics, hopefully those kind of things can be implemented, but again, you’re talking about manufacturing and this takes time. It hasn’t happened too quickly.”
Despite having the “supposed” disadvantage, Rahal has found places that Honda is stronger, namely fuel mileage as he cited the Grand Prix of Indianapolis where he could’ve gone five more laps on fuel than Will Power did, but didn’t due to not wanting to get caught still on track if a caution came out.
“That’s a lot in this form of racing,” he said. “But there’s certain strengths that we have that have helped us this year, and certain things that haven’t, but that’s kind of the way it goes.”
There have been comments from fans that if certain drivers on the Honda squad were in Chevrolets, they would’ve won a race thus far this year, namely Rahal given the three podiums he has posted thus far this year. However, he said on Thursday that the statement isn’t necessarily true.
“We’ve put ourselves in a pretty good position with the package that we have,” he stated. “We’ve done a really good job as a team and put ourselves in a position to succeed with what we have, and that’s our focus from here on out. You can only control so much, and we just try to take control of what we’re given and make the most of it.”
