INDYCAR: Honda Working Through Development Issues

IndyCar

INDYCAR: Honda Working Through Development Issues

Honda Performance Development Technical Director Roger Griffiths sheds some light on the development problems it experienced at Sebring.

Marshall Pruett | Posted February 02, 2012

After years of enjoying a near-perfect reliability record during Honda’s run as IndyCar’s sole engine supplier, teams got a taste of reality during three days of testing earlier this week when Honda experienced multiple engine failures in a somewhat public fashion.

Honda wasn’t alone though as its rivals at Chevrolet, which declined to comment, also suffered similar problems, albeit in a less demonstrative manner. With just one engine in play, Lotus escaped major dramas at Sebring, but the accelerated development pace the three marques are facing has meant that playing it safe isn’t always an option.

INDYCAR has given the “Indy 3” a finite amount of time—30 days before the first race on March 25th at St. Petersburg—to develop its engines before each must submit its final homologation specification, leading to some of what was encountered at Sebring.

With the homologation deadline drawing closer, the Indy 3 have routinely deployed engines with slightly different internal configurations to its teams to evaluate various components, and the outcome hasn’t always been positive. In some cases, even the proven components can be problematic.

“The bottom line is that we did have some engine failures,” Honda Performance Development Technical Director Roger Griffiths explained to SPEED.com. “They were completely unexpected. Of course, you never go to the track expecting an engine failure…and it was of a hardware specification we’d run many times before. So we’re a little perplexed as to why things went wrong like they did.”

In addition to his teammate Charlie Kimball in the No. 83, Ganassi's Graham Rahal was also forced to curtail his testing activities at Sebring. (Photo: Phil Abbott/LAT)

With its anchor team Ganassi Racing and partner teams A.J. Foyt Racing and Dale Coyne Racing present for the test, Honda had to heavily curtail the activities of most of its cars once the failures began.

Ganassi’s Graham Rahal and Charlie Kimball, Foyt’s Mike Conway and Coyne’s Justin Wilson turned very few laps before their cars were parked for good. Only Ganassi’s Dario Franchitti continued uninterrupted, while his teammate, Scott Dixon, was only scheduled to test on Tuesday.

“We had to make the decision to stop running immediately before we did further damage,” Griffiths continued. “It’s unfortunate for all our teams who lost track time, but the knock-on effect down the road is that had we kept running, we’d likely of had more failures which would impact your ability to recover from it. In that situation, it was the only choice to make.”

Griffiths’ team at the California-based HPD outfit will now begin to investigate the roots of the failures and what sort of remedies will be required to prevent them from reoccurring.

“Whilst it was pretty obvious what had happened to the engines, and what part broke, certainly, why it broke was not clear,” he said. “So that was the challenge and that’s what we’re focused on—what caused the failure and making sure it won’t happen again.”

With a relatively fixed number of engines in its pool, Griffiths also confirmed that the broken engines were not beyond repair.

“They’re not total write-offs,” he said. “Yes, parts have been damaged. Even a pretty minor failure at 11,000 or 12,000 RPMs isn’t going to be pretty, and especially if things come to a screeching halt rather quickly. We’ll get those engines torn down and rebuilt. They’ll be back out running.”

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