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Schmidt Peterson IndyCar team gets enhanced status with Honda

The Schmidt Peterson Motorsports IndyCar team has announced "an increased level of partnership" with Honda and a contract extension through 2020

SPM has been a Honda team since engine competition returned to the series in 2012, and ran Honda Performance Development's side of the '18 universal aerokit testing (pictured below).

Piers Phillips, the team's general manager said: "Our technical partners give us the increased engineering capability which, in turn, gives HPD the confidence in us as a team to take our partnership to the next level.

"Our contract extension is the culmination of everyone's hard work.

"One of the things we're extremely excited about is working closer technically with HPD for the benefit of not only our programme, but for all Honda programmes in the IndyCar Series.

"We're really excited for the next three years and hoping to win a lot of races, some Indy 500s and championships."

Honda also recently retained Andretti Autosport for its IndyCar line-up despite Michael Andretti's squad having considered returning to Chevrolet.

Ganassi also moved back to Honda at the start of this season.

HPD president Art St Cyr said Schmidt would play a vital role in Honda's IndyCar efforts and had earned its enhanced status with its progress this season.

"We've seen a significant increase in their capability, and our expectations are a lot higher," said St Cyr.

"Their engineering talent, their ability to analyse what's going on from one race to the next and really be able to up their game each session really impressed us.

"We are going to be relying on Schmidt Peterson Motorsports to help us gather base data that is going to be the source of our programmes like HPD Dynamic, our simulator, and those types of activities that we will be feeding across to all of our Honda teams to make sure that all of them raise their game.

"As we move forward with our manufacturer testing, SPM is going to be one of our key teams to really help us characterise the kits and make sure we can understand what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses and how we can maximise the ability of that kit to get the speed on track."

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