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Honda believes Indy 500 safety changes held it back in qualifying

Honda believes it was disadvantaged by the precautionary changes made ahead of Indianapolis 500 qualifying following the airborne accidents involving Chevrolet cars during practice

Cars were forced to qualify with reduced boost, and were also made to run the same aero package that they plan to use in the race, which effectively forced the field to use the higher-drag race package.

The changes were made as a precaution in reaction to three airborne accidents involving cars using the Chevrolet aero, although IndyCar is yet to confirm whether it has found a conclusive link between the kit and the crashes.

Honda Performance Development president Art St Cyr said that the Honda speedway kit has been through extensive simulation work with a special focus on stability before being rolled out onto the track.

"The biggest unfortunate thing is we spent a lot of time working on those aero kits, especially the speedway aero kits," he said.

"We feel that we were affected more than we expected to be affected by the rules change that happened.

Analysis: The drama at Indianapolis

"We put a lot of effort into making sure that our cars were as safe as 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.

"Prior to homologation, we did 1,144 individual CFD runs that focused specifically on stability.

"Each of those 1100 runs takes three hours to mesh and six hours to run those simulations."

DECISION WASN'T CONTESTED

St Cyr added that HPD accepted the changes mandated by IndyCar for the good of the series.

"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," he said.

"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.

"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."

One common link between the Chevrolet accidents was that the cars did not launch into the air until the rear end had swung around.

St Cyr said that durings its simulations HPD had identified a specific angle that made the cars vulnerable to becoming airborne.

"We did a lot of testing in yaw stability," he said. "That is the main reason for the big engine cover that we have and also the end plates.

"What we found in our simulations is actually the 135‑degree case is the most likely takeoff scenario.

"Since Helio [Castroneves]'s incident last week, we have done an additional 60 runs, 60 CFD runs, and counting, which counts for about 110,000 CPU hours on that."

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