INDYCAR: Lotus Turns Its First Laps At Palm Beach Shakedown

IndyCar

INDYCAR: Lotus Turns Its First Laps At Palm Beach Shakedown

NASCAR's first test day at Daytona got most of the attention on Thursday, but 200 miles south, a bigger milestone was reached as Lotus' engine turned its first laps.

Marshall Pruett | Posted January 12, 2012

Simona de Silvestro prepares to pull away for the first time in the new Dallara DW12-Lotus. (HVM Racing)

NASCAR fans turned their attention towards Daytona Beach today as the first day of Sprint Cup testing got under way at the famed Daytona International Speedway, but approximately 200 miles south at the Palm Beach International Raceway complex, a bigger milestone was reached when the Lotus IndyCar engine turned its first laps.

With the first design work beginning last year in mid-February by John Judd’s Engine Developments Limited on behalf of Lotus, the 2.2-liter, twin-turbo V6 engine completed almost a dozen laps in the hands of HVM Racing’s Simona de Silvestro.

With members of Lotus and the EDL team looking on, the Lotus-powered Dallara DW12 met all of its objectives during the shakedown.

“I’d say, overall, things have gone very well,” Judd told SPEED.com. “The car fires up, goes round and round, changes gear…it brakes. In terms of all the major boxes we had to tick, we accomplished it today. For our first shakedown day, it has all gone very well, so far.”

The Lotus team will continue its maiden test on Friday, and Judd says he plans to keep the run plan relatively conservative for now.

“We’re being very cautious right now—slowly, one step at a time. We’re not running full revs or full boost right now. Everything is new, and not just the engine. The car is new, all the systems are new, the McLaren ECU is new to us, so we’re deliberately being conservative on the engine side.”

Turning Lotus’ new IndyCar engine from concept to reality in under 11 months required an aggressive approach by Judd’s EDL team, and with the intensive build program finally reach the test track, he had a laugh when recounting the anxious moments when de Silvestro pulled away from the pits for the first time.

“I have to say I was quite apprehensive…” he said. “I had a reasonable amount of confidence, having spent a lot of time on the dyno, but you never really know until the car drives off for the first time… There’s no complacency there. I was cautiously optimistic, but not overconfident. It’s all very, very new, so you want to manage expectations.”

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