IndyCar aero kits: The early verdict

Experiment, gamble, natural progression, waste of money: IndyCar's manufacturer-designed aero kits have been viewed through a lot of different lenses since the idea was first mooted in 2012.

Scroll back through AUTOSPORT's web and magazine archive from the past three years, and you'll find all of these views well-documented. The manufacturers eager for another opportunity to flex their muscle. The series looking to recapture headline-grabbing speeds of an earlier era. Team owners who think that it's a pointless waste of money, and team owners who support anything that makes IndyCar a conversation point. Drivers who don't care what the car looks like as long as it's fast and safe.

But up until now, nobody has asked Dave from Kansas City what he thinks. Dave is a typical IndyCar fan. He owns a locally successful contracting business, enjoys BBQ and fantasy baseball, watches a lot of the races on TV (cheering for Marco Andretti, because he always cheers for an Andretti), and every couple of years he piles his kids into the pick-up and makes the eight-hour trip to Indianapolis to watch the 500 from Turn 4, just like he used to do with his Dad.

Technically, he's also fictional - I made him up two minutes ago - but for our purposes, that's beside the point.

The aero kit era is now four races old ahead of this weekend's contest at the IMS road course. That's not enough time to draw a lot of steadfast conclusions, but it's enough racing laps to get an early bead on how a change that was three years in the making is playing out in the real world.

And for all of the disparate opinions about the bodykits, the view that matters above all others is that of the fan. So with that in mind, we've recruited fictional Dave from Kansas City to score the bodykits out of five on a handful of basic criteria.

VISUAL DIFFERENTIATION

Dave from Kansas City's score: 2/5

Visual differentiation was pitched as one of the cornerstones of the aero kits when IndyCar held the first press conference about its plans in Detroit in 2012.

Having the cars look different would make it easier for fans to know whether the driver blasting past them was powered by Chevrolet or Honda without having to spot a logo on the nosecone, and it would also serve as a marketing device for the manufacturers themselves.

The latter idea has a recent precedent in the US: the current-spec NASCAR allows manufacturers some scope to visually ape their production counterparts. The difference is that there is some visual overlap between NASCAR and a road car to use as a starting point. No amount of design ingenuity will ever make a DW12 look like a Honda Civic, or vice-versa.

At any rate, the manufacturer view of visual differentiation seems to be of a natural by-product of independent designs rather than an objective in itself.

The core concept from which aero kits grew was first revealed five years ago © LAT

"If it was about styling, I wouldn't have hired aerodynamicists," Chris Berube, Chevrolet's IndyCar programme manager, told AUTOSPORT recently. "I'd have hired stylists".

The first real hint that the visual differentiation element of the aero kits might not be a huge selling point came from IndyCar itself, via a Q&A with series director of aerodynamic development Tino Belli that it released in January.

"Someone who is interested in technology [will] see many differences between the cars," he said. "At speed and with different color schemes, it might be more difficult to see the differences."

This was clearly going to be a problem, considering that most fans - like 'Dave' - only ever see the cars at speed and with different colour schemes. Compounding that is the fact that they're probably viewing that combination on TV rather than trackside, which makes the differences even harder to detect.

As it turns out, Belli was absolutely correct. If you're standing in pitlane and you see a Honda and a Chevrolet kit sitting side-by-side, even a casual fan can easily spot the differences.

That's bad news for the casual fans who are not standing in pitlane looking at stationary cars. Dave from Kansas City can differentiate the manufacturers on TV if he squints a bit. His bowling team buddy Leroy, who is watching IndyCar for the first time, doesn't have a chance.

IMPLEMENTATION

Dave from Kansas City's score: 4/5

Dave's score probably diverges a bit from one that would be given by somebody in the paddock. The rollout of the kits has been a little more painful for those involved than most fans probably realise, and yet that in itself is a kind of credit to IndyCar and its stakeholders. Evidence, of sorts, that the post-Randy Bernard era vows to avoid publicly airing dirty laundry are being honoured.

The manufacturers were forced to incorporate a number of changes to the regulations deep into the aero kit design process. In fact, the biggest change came when the kits were already being track-tested.

One of the concerns about the kits had been over the ability of the standard Dallara suspension parts to withstand the expected hike in downforce. IndyCar pre-empted that when it added holes to the underfloor - a standard part across all cars - and removed an estimated 300 pounds of downforce.

But when the numbers started to flow in from testing it became clear that even this wouldn't be enough to counter the extra forces being generated, prompting IndyCar to order the manufacturers to remove the diffuser strakes and sidewalls from the revised floor.

This did the job of cutting downforce, but it also completely changed the aero map of the cars, and forced Chevy and Honda to make substantial 11th-hour revisions to their designs.

"We go through our range of emotions," said Berube. "But in the end we realise that we're all partners in the series, and are trying to put on some great racing, so we try to elevate to that level and then talk through things.

A messy St Pete race led to changes © LAT

"At some point you have to comply in some cases, and in other cases compliance is given to you. It's part of dealing with something that's new."

Steve Eriksen, HPD vice-president and COO, agrees that there was an element of absorbing some pain for the greater good.

"Probably the biggest challenge were the last-minute changes that were made to the base car that we had to work from to design the aero kit around," he said.

"The holes that were cut out of the floor kind of reset things. But for good reason - safety - and we support it."

Most fans were oblivious to all of this, but it was a different matter when the kits were sent into combat for the first time. Over the course of a debris-laden curtain-raiser in St Petersburg, both the Honda and Chevrolet kits proved to be easily susceptible to breaking in car-to-car contact.

The series was quick to mandate further changes: Honda had the relatively minor task of reinforcing its multi-element front wing; Chevrolet had to remove the distinctive 'rabbit ears' from its front wing.

The latter was not a difficult job in itself either, but it proved costly to Chevy in both outright downforce and in time required by the teams' engineers to rework the airflow off the front wing.

"We had some bandwidth in which we were able to rebalance the car, but there was still a net loss to performance," says Berube.

Both the series and the manufacturers are to be commended for acting upon the problems so quickly. Still unresolved, though, is the extent to which everyone should have anticipated these problems in the first place.

As an example, some midfield Formula 1 teams ran 'X-wings' similar to Chevy's rabbit ears in the late 1990s (although they were usually mounted to the sidepods or engine cover rather than the wing). They were eventually banned... because they were vulnerable to falling off.

PERFORMANCE IMPACT

Dave from Kansas City's score: 3/5

This is where the jury really is still out. At time of writing, the IndyCar season is four races old. As a spectacle, two of those races were disappointing, one was decent, and one was outstanding. Many series would be satisfied with that, but IndyCar fans have been spoiled for great races during the DW12 era, and a 50 per cent strike rate for excitement feels like a step back.

In fairness, one of those dud races was NOLA, which was badly affected by weather, and would have been awful regardless of the bodywork. But St Petersburg - a caution-plagued debris shower - had a real sense of anti-climax, particularly when you consider that it was the race that ended a seven-month off-season.

Changes were made to both manufacturers' aero packages as a direct result of the St Pete weekend, and debris was far less of a problem at Long Beach and Barber.

So that problem was ironed out relatively easily. Measuring - and addressing - any potential imbalance between the two manufacturers will be a lot harder.

Close competition has been a recent hallmark of IndyCar racing, and one of the great fears surrounding the arrival of the aero kits surrounded the potential for this to be undermined if one manufacturer did a better job than the other.

In road course spec, it appears on the surface that this fear was justified: more than once, Chevy has blocked out the top five or six places in both qualifying and the race, and Honda is yet to return the favour.

Rahal is among the single-car teams Honda is counting on © LAT

Perversely, Honda leads the manufacturers' points due to a raft of penalties issued to Chevrolet when it was forced to make widespread engine repairs after St Pete due to an iffy batch of valve springs, but based on on-track performance alone, it's the Bowtie that has made the strongest start.

Is this simply because it did a better job? Maybe not. Paddock rumblings suggest that Chevy's teams were given more baseline data by their supplier when they first took delivery of their kits, which helped fast-track preparations for the opening race.

There's also a popular belief that the Honda kit might actually have more overall potential, but that it requires more time and experimentation to unlock.

Which leads us to perhaps the greatest imbalance between the manufacturers of all, and one that has very little to do with the aero kits themselves: Chevy has Honda completely outgunned in terms of teams.

On the Honda side, Andretti has a lot of experience, resources and a winning pedigree, but it can't fly the banner all by itself (doubly so when it has a slightly wobbly start to the season, as has been the case in 2015).

Who else is there? Schmidt Peterson picked up a lottery win with James Hinchcliffe at NOLA, but is yet to look like a regular threat. Rahal Letterman Lanigan has taken significant strides after a frustrating couple of years, but Honda can't afford to be looking to a single-car team as a regular source of big points.

Especially when you look at who is staring them down from the Chevrolet side. Penske. Ganassi. CFH Racing. Even KV. That's a lot to overcome, both on race day and in resources for aero kit refinement.

Leading Honda team Andretti Autosport has had a tough start © LAT

Andretti's Ryan Hunter-Reay openly acknowledged that he believed Honda was behind the eight ball during the first couple of races, but an encouraging performance by the Japanese manufacturer at Barber has sown seeds of cautious optimism.

"I think we're making progress," he told AUTOSPORT. "We're moving in the right direction, although we still have a lot of work to do ahead of us to take it to the next level.

"But we're up to the challenge. We're still working to find that sweet spot, but we're narrowing in on it.

"It's a balance thing. It's getting the car to do what you want it to do in all three phases of a corner: entry, middle and exit. Tying those together has been the tricky part for us. We're getting closer to where we think we need to be, but time will tell."

One area in which the kits have delivered upon their early promise is in improved speed. This year's pole times have been 1.2s faster at St Pete, Long Beach and Barber than those of the corresponding races last year.

When the cars switch to their speedway kits next week, the frontrunners will be chasing speeds in the mid-230mph range. Ed Carpenter earned pole last year with a speed of 231.067mph.

DAVE FROM KANSAS CITY'S FINAL RATING: 9/15

So a passing score, if not resoundingly so, from Dave. On the face of it, it's tough to see whether the effort and expense justifies a relatively minor increase in awesomeness.

But perhaps it's still too early. Fans and insiders alike clamoured for more technical diversity in IndyCar, and this is certainly a move away from the identikit cars of the past few years.

This is a story that will unfold over years, rather than weeks. The road kits are only at the beginning of what will be a very long road, and the speedway kits are still awaiting their first taste of combat.

Are the kits interesting enough to hook new fans? Frankly, no, and that's still an area that almost all mature racing series still really need to address. But they offer just enough intrigue to keep fictional Dave from Kansas City - as well as those of us in the real world - talking for a while yet.