An interview with:

ART ST. CYR

T.E. McHALE: Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us at the Honda hospitality motor coach. Our guest this morning is Honda Performance Development president Art St. Cyr.
Art, thanks for making time for us this morning.
ART ST. CYR: Good morning, everybody.
T.E. McHALE: I think we want to start just by speaking about the accident that happened here Monday that affected Honda driver James Hinchcliffe. I know you’ve been to see him twice in the hospital. Obviously he’s in all of our thoughts at this point.
Just give us an update on your personal impressions of his condition at this point.
ART ST. CYR: It’s actually a little hard for me to talk about it honestly, because in my time here at HPD, it’s the first real serious accident that we’ve been involved in.

I want to thank the Holmatro safety crew for the wonderful work they did to get him stabilized and get him to the hospital.
I saw him right after the accident in the ICU. I saw him again two days ago when he got transferred to his regular room. It’s amazing the difference in his condition. Of course, when I saw him in the ICU, he’s a little groggy at that point. When they transferred him to his regular room, he’s doing amazing. He’s joking, cracking jokes, which is pretty amazing considering the seriousness of the situation.
We’re looking forward to getting him back. That’s all he can talk about, is he can’t wait to get back in the car. So sometimes you wonder what these racecar drivers are thinking, right?
Anyway, our thoughts and prayers are with him. We’re just happy that he’s doing all right.
T.E. McHALE: I think next we want to talk about the way the month has evolved, specifically referencing decisions that were made here last Sunday that affected the qualifying process.
I know that we haven’t really had the opportunity to take credit for the work we’ve done by demonstrating it on the racetrack, but I know that you have some numbers and some figures that you want to share with the folks this morning related to all the prep work we did before we put our superspeedway kit on the track. So let’s talk a little bit about that.
ART ST. CYR: That’s kind of the elephant in the kitchen, talking about the issues we had in qualifying last week.
As TE mentioned, I think the biggest unfortunate thing is we spent a lot of time working on those aero kits, especially the speedway aero kits. We feel that we were affected more than we expected to be affected by the rules change that happened.
We put a lot of effort into making sure that our cars were as safe as possible. I mean, obviously we’re in a sport where we’re pushing the edge of our technical capabilities. There’s never a hundred percent guarantee. I asked our partners to put together a list of some of the things we did to ensure the stability of our car and that they’re as safe as humanly possible.
If you look at the designs of our car, a lot of our designs were brewed from our vast experience in sports car racing where they have a lot of stability requirements. So things like the big fin on our engine cover, the endplates on our rear wings, the design of the side pods. All of those were designed with stability in mind.
Actually, if you give me a second here, we have some numbers of how much work we did on stability.
Prior to homologation, we did 1,144 individual CFD runs that focused specifically on stability. Again, this is using our knowledge of sports cars and the stability requirements there, that’s how we based it. That’s why you see a lot of the design cues are similar. Each of those 1100 runs takes three hours to mesh and six hours to run those simulations. So when you add all that up, it’s 3,852 hours of meshing and about 10,746 hours of computer time. If you break that down into CPU hours, that’s 2,059,200 CPU hours. That’s just analyzing stability cases.
We think as much as technologically possible, we developed a vehicle that was better in just about every aspect from a stability standpoint than the DW12 that it replaced.
In some cases the issues that we had last week, we didn’t think, from our perspective, that we needed to go to the extremes that were imposed on us. However, for the good of IndyCar, we didn’t want to park the cars or do anything like that.
This is the old cliché: it doesn’t matter where you start, it’s where you finish. So we agreed to go ahead with qualifying under those situations where we were forced to put parts on the car that were designed specifically for race conditions, that were not appropriate for qualifying situations, things like our winglets that we had on there that necessarily add drag in a situation where you don’t need that.
Again, we think we have a very good racecar. We expect to challenge for the win on Sunday. As TE said, we’re just really disappointed that we weren’t able to take credit for the work that we did based on the situations that we had.
T.E. McHALE: So look ahead a little bit further to Sunday. What kind of a race are you expecting? We have 17 entries. Just kind of wondering from an HPD standpoint how you’re expecting the day to play out.
ART ST. CYR: About the only thing that I’ve learned in my time here in racing is no matter what your plan is, by the time lap one is over, your plans are pretty much out the window.
But we do expect, you know, hopefully common sense prevails in the early part of the race, which happens in the last few years. The first half of the race has been pretty tame. Hopefully that will be the same this year.
We do expect tire wear to be a really key influence on this race. We expect fuel economy to be a big influence on this race. So a lot of the characteristics that we’ve designed into our car, things like better fuel economy on our cars, we have the ability to put a lot of downforce in our car so hopefully we can manage tire wear.
We expect it to be a very strategic race as typical. We expect it to be fairly fast. We just want to make sure that we’re there at the end when the final sprint to the finish is.
T.E. McHALE: I think most of you know this, but I have to put my motorsports PR hat on and just inform those of you who may not, that Honda is chasing its 11th win in 12 Indianapolis 500s come Sunday.
the road course, the Indy road course, that our fuel economy was actually pretty good.
Of course, just in terms of drag, right, the aero kits are going to have a direct impact on how good or how poor I shouldn’t say ‘poor’. How good or how better the fuel economy is on that.
Depending on how much downforce you run, it will affect your fuel economy. Our aero kit has the flexibility designed in it to have lots of downforce. So obviously if we go in a max downforce situation, we’ll get much worse fuel economy than the end of the race when we’re trying to trim out. I expect you’ll see a range of fuel economies on the track depending on how much downforce the teams are running.

Q. What has Honda done in trying to explore the causes of the incidents, accidents, and ensure the teams that that can’t happen again?
ART ST. CYR: So it’s a very interesting situation, because the cars right now are made up of the fundamental Dallara chassis and the Honda aero kit and the Honda engines. The parts that we’re talking about, the suspension is actually a Dallara part.
We have given our support to IndyCar and said we can help them with anything they want to do. Fundamentally they have been working with Dallara right now to look at the Dallara parts, how to improve those parts.
So far the only thing that we’ve done is help in communication with our teams. But Dallara has taken the lead on trying to clarify the fatigue limit of their parts on their chassis.

Q. (No microphone.)
ART ST. CYR: Like I said, we’ve been offering it since the beginning, so we’re waiting for a specific request from IndyCar, and we have not received that yet.

Q. How realistic are your simulations when they’re translated to actually putting the car on the racetrack?
ART ST. CYR: I’m going to answer that question in a couple parts.
In simulation, obviously everything is perfect, right? The tolerances are zero. There’s really no aero elastic impacts on that. So necessarily the CFD model is an ideal situation.
The next step is a much more controlled environment, which is the wind tunnel. What we found is that the actual wind tunnel results are very similar to our CFD and simulation results.
So as far as the correlation of that, it’s actually very good.
Now, when you get on to the actual racetrack, there’s a lot of other factors in there. There’s crosswinds, buffeting from other cars. There are some factors that you can only determine on the racetrack.
As far as answering your question, I think as far as we’re able to measure, the things we’re able to measure, it behaves very similar to what we expected. However, there’s always some unknown and some dynamic situations that you’ll get on a racetrack that can’t be modeled.

Q. Are you planning imminent changes to your road course kit because of what appears to be a competitive imbalance with Chevy?
ART ST. CYR: First off, you’re right, we designed our kit around the superspeedways. So the parts that can’t change, things like the engine cover, things like the side pods, those were designed first and foremost to be most effective here on the speedway. That was kind of our base platform for our road course.
Now, with our road course performance up till now, obviously we want to have better results, but we are working within the rules to make changes as quickly as possible. We do expect to have improvements this year on our road course kits.

Q. Are you satisfied with the amount of track testing you had before qualifying?
ART ST. CYR: The simple answer to that is the more track testing you do, the more you know the kit. It was even. Both manufacturers had the same number of test days, so we both had the same handicaps.
I think it’s safe to say, especially in light of what happened, we would have liked to have had more test days, but those were the rules we knew going in. So to say that we should have had more or not had more is kind of second guessing what we had planned from the beginning.

Q. Rahal Letterman is your best performing team. Are you surprised by that? If they were to move up, would that help your competitive balance?
ART ST. CYR: I mean, obviously we have some work to do with our kits. I think with the Rahal team, we’re able to show that we can be fast, right? But we have some work to do to try to improve our kits to make them more consistent for the way all of our teams want to run the cars. We’re working towards doing just that.

Q. How is your oval kit going to stack up against Chevy’s?
ART ST. CYR: Yeah, I’m very confident actually in the way that our car races. It’s hard to tell what teams are doing during the practice times. Like I say, we have a lot of adjustability, a lot of flexibility in our kits to try to adapt to the situation that’s on the course, that’s on the track, that I think is an advantage we have over our competitors.
I guess my answer is yes, I’m confident that we’ll be okay with this one. We think our engine power is there. We think our kit is designed properly to give us the tools we need to be competitive in this race.
T.E. McHALE: That seems like a good note to wrap up on. Thank you all very much for making the time to be with us this morning.
Art, thanks for your time.
ART ST. CYR: Thank you all.
T.E. McHALE: Let’s go out and win the 500.