IndyCar Driver Says Hybrid Engine Makes Cars ”Boring“

• Two Indianapolis races, one on the road course and the ‘500’ on the iconic oval, will complete the month of May

• Alex Palou and Felix Rosenqvist see opportunities the hybrid could generate

• Long Beach winner Kyle Kirkwood pleasantly surprised by shakedown runs

Within two months, NTT IndyCar Series drivers will have raced with the hybrid engine at every venue on the circuit. But the daunting Indianapolis Motor Speedway—with this weekend’s Sonsio Grand Prix and the May 25 Indianapolis 500—is the ultimate challenge, even for Alex Palou, the points leader and winner at three of the season’s four completed races.

“It was interesting when we did the open test [in late April]. I think some people thought that it was making it tougher to overtake, and some other people thought that it was allowing more passes than we used to have, especially when you’re fourth or fifth in the pack.

“I think we need to wait to see what the conditions are going to be on race day. I expect it’s going to allow us to pass when you are more in the pack,” the Chip Ganassi Racing phenom said.

So, like colleagues Scott McLaughlin, Rinus VeeKay, Kyle Kirkwood, Pato O’Ward, and Felix Rosenqvist, Palou has his own spin on what to expect with the hybrid engine at the demanding Brickyard.

Palou hinted he’ll be focusing on the details: “It’s tougher to drive, just because you have more weight. And it’s not helping the car balance or tire deg. At the same time, it’s allowing or creating more mistakes from drivers—not big mistakes, but just small mistakes where you miss a little bit on the apex [and] suddenly somebody behind uses the hybrid and overtakes you or he can try to put you in different areas on the track. It’s going to be interesting. Hopefully, it’s going to be a great show for everybody.”

Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin has maintained all along that he’s having fun trying to sort out the nuances of the Chevrolet-Honda collaborative product that fuses electrification and the traditional internal-combustion power system.

“We’ve been used to, the last year or so, deploying and doing different strategies, how you use the battery, then regen that battery, how that affects your car balance, trying to figure out what works for you. Not every driver is the same. But you know there’s a quick way of doing it,” he said. “I’ve really enjoyed studying that and understanding that.”

For VeeKay, of small-team, smaller-budgeted Dale Coyne Racing, the momentum he built Sunday with an impressive fourth-place finish at Alabama’s Barber Motorsports Park will come in handy. He has said publicly that what works there at Birmingham should serve him well on at least the 2.439-mile, 14-turn Indianapolis road course, if not the grand 2.5 oval.

Kirkwood, somewhat surprised, he said, following the April test session, said he was “extremely happy” with what he and his Andretti Global team discovered. However, he also used the word “sketchy” to sum his experience with the hybrid.

“We feel like we actually missed on gears because it was faster than we anticipated, which is a positive thing. We were anticipating it being quite a bit slower because you can only use it once,” said Kirkwood.

“It was not the same qually performance we would have had in previous years. The weight is definitely playing a factor in that. I imagine people will be tempted to [adjust trim], because it will be more of a gain efficiency-wise. It’s more sketchy, for sure.”

O’Ward is no fan of the hybrid’s effect on performance. The Arrow McLaren racer said, “It’s less fun. The cars have gotten a lot more boring, to be honest.” He said Barber “is one of the tracks where you would really enjoy being able to throw it around. You can still kind of do it, but the windows narrow down a lot. You can piss it off a lot quicker.” And at any facility, he said, “you definitely feel the added weight. The tires feel the added weight. It’s definitely something you have to change quite a bit on the car in order to kind of get it back into the window, because it’s definitely shifted a lot of the balance.”

Rosenqvist didn’t disagree about the weight bogging down performance, but the Meyer Shank Racing driver concluded that “it’s a fun game.”

“Indy this year seems different somehow, with the hybrid and everything. It’s a harder car to drive. I don’t think that’s our car specifically—it’s just across the field. It’s a more unforgiving package that we go into May with.”

This time, though, the rookies might be ones with the advantage, he said: “Might be some drivers who struggle with knowing how good it has felt, and now you just got to get used to it. I think for some rookies, it might be a good thing because you don’t have to know how good it felt in the past.”

Passing could be problematic, according to Rosenqvist. How much difference boost will make is, he said, “what we all try to figure out…You just have a little bit less margin. You can’t flirt with the edge as much as you could do in the past, which I think leads to more mistakes, which makes the racing better.”

Then he sounded like Palou. Rosenqvist said when he was in the pack, “it was kind of hard to just pass someone on pace, but there was a lot of mistakes going on, like people pushing wide on the exits and stuff that you could capitalize on. With the actual usage of the hybrid, I think that’s actually a bigger thing. If you’re really smart, you can definitely have that play in your advantage, how you regen and deploy.

“It takes a long time to regen up. That was something that struck me,” he said. “You can’t charge your battery in an instant. It actually takes quite a long time. Especially the speed you’re traveling, you’re passing a lot of football fields before you go from zero-to-100 charge. That was something that I wasn’t really prepared for. But it’s a fun game.”