Alexander Rossi evaluated his test in the Dallara IR-28 on its first oval run at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway today.

“It does everything that INDYCAR SERIES machinery should do around here,” Rossi said. “We got through some basic mechanical and aero changes to kind of understand the offsets that they’re going to present to us in a couple of years, and there was no surprise. It was really pretty standard.”

The 2016 Indianapolis 500 winner and Mike O’Gara, INDYCAR’s vice president of Competition and Race Engineering, both emphasized that Wednesday’s objective was to gather information, not to look for speed or performance.

Rossi ran sets of five laps or fewer as engineers collected data. I’m not sure Rossi turned a lap much above 210 mph.

Today’s test was cut about an hour short by a brief rain just after 4 pm.

Tomorrow IndyCar series champion Alex Palou will have turn in the new machine with the same goals in mind as today’s session.

tomorrow’s test is scheduled to run from 9 am until 5 pm Eastern time. Turn 2 viewing mounds are open.

Some more photos of the new car: