Photo: Pato O’Ward leads the group during testing at IMS Friday. -Joe Skibinski, Indycar

Jay Frye declared it a good day. It gave Indycar a direction although there is still work to do.

“When we came into this, we thought really at the end of the day that this would precipitate more questions than answers. That’s probably what happened, right. Which is fine. That’s what we expected,” the Indycar president told the media after the four var test at Indianapolis Motor Speedway Friday.

“We did learn a lot. But it did also create a lot of other questions,” Frye concluded.

The test, with drivers Scott Dixon, and Alexander Rossi representing Honda, and Josef Newgarden and Pato O’Ward driving Chevrolets, involved various versions of push to pass in an attempt to simulate what the hybrid component might look like in 2023.

Frye explained what Indycar was looking for.

I think today we’ve got a lot of data off the car in a direction on what approach to go with,” he said. “In the way that we have push to pass, with the hybrid system that would kind of be obsolete. You’ll have a bank of energy that you have with the hybrid system that once it will go away, that you will be able to recharge it so it will be on all the time basically. With push to pass there’s an amount of time or there’s an amount of pushes. That’s what we looked at today. We just gave the drivers for every 200 seconds, you’re going to go do a 20 lap run. Use it as you want it. Most used about half, so 100 seconds. It was interesting to see how it played out.”

“We thought they would have liked that for a longer time. This is new. We’ve never done this on an oval. We’ve tested it at Pocono, Texas and Phoenix before but that was with the old package. For this new one, it definitely is much better than it was before which is cool,” Frye concluded. He also noted that trap speeds which are normally around 230 mile an hour, were 236 miles an hour Friday.

The new, larger 2.4 liter 2023 engine, and the hybrid energy recovery system should give the cars 200 more horsepower in 2023. Frye said the series will not allow that much all at once, but adjust the and work up to 900 horsepower.

The Pit Window spoke with three of the drivers after the early end to the test day.

Scott Dixonliked some of the changes and noticed the increase in speed.

“Obviously there’s a lot of power and some of the durations are quite long,” Dixon said. “10 seconds at 70-80 horsepower, especially in a car that’s trimmed out. Your average lap speed could jump by several mph. There’s some good changes to see how you can apply that and to what effect or not effect on the tire and in regards to running in traffic.”

Dixon’s concern with the push to pass is how long a driver would be locked out of the system after using it. He prefers a shorter lock out time.

Alexander Rossi doesn’t think the push to pass would change anything on an oval.

“Yes it’s a pretty big horsepower boost with the push to pass,” said the Andretti Autosport driver. “We’re going to have to look at it to see if it changed anything for the better or worse. It’s definitely different. We got that test accomplished and have some hard data to look at for the future.”

Josef Newgarden was happy to help Indycar gather data and glad that he learned some tings.

“I thought it went well. When you learn something in testing you’re happy about it. I thought we learned some stuff today on our cars on how things works and how they could potentially work in use scenario.

“The horsepower bump was tunable. You could definitely raise the horsepower increase up or down so that jump in the performance off the corner could be bigger or smaller. The length of it is all adjustable. We ran through a couple of scenarios and a couple of configurations. It’s definitely noticeable. A couple of configurations were noticeable. If you want to run a system like that, it’s really what’s the right configuration to give to the field. I think that’s the type of info we were trying to arm INDYCAR with and now it’s on to them to see what we do in the future.”

Frye said that testing of the hybrid system would likely be in January and February of 2022.

Notes

It was wonderful to watch cars on the IMS oval again. It has been more than a year since I have seen the oval used.

Improvements made by Roger Penske are obvious. Most noticeable is the new video board on the back of the Pagoda. it spans the entire width of the building and the high resolution screen is fantastic.

The main thing is how clean the plaza and Victory Circle are. I was so used to how the areas appeared, but I now realize that they were long overdue for sprucing up.

Testing for the Indianapolis 500 is schedule for April 8 and 9, between the mass vaccination clinics at the Speedway. I assume the turn 2 mounds will be open as they were yesterday.