Is Ganassi the solution to Honda's problems?

At the end of IndyCar's Mid-Ohio race last July, the yellow #28 Andretti Autosport Dallara-Honda came to an abrupt halt in the pitlane. Ryan Hunter-Reay popped his belts, tore away his drinks tube, erupted from the cockpit and stalked away, shaking his head in disgust. Wisely, he kept his helmet on. Any interview at that moment would have had the censor bleepers hard at work.

The 2012 champion's frustration was understandable. A typically almighty effort in qualifying had put him fourth on the grid while his Andretti team-mates were scrabbling around in the bottom half of the field, and on race day, he appeared set for a podium finish behind the unstoppable Penske Dallara-Chevrolets of Simon Pagenaud and Will Power.

Then it transpired that a refuelling error had left Hunter-Reay disastrously short of fuel and over the remaining laps he throttled back, fell back, and a probable top-three finish became a wheezing 18th.

It wasn't the most frustrating moment of the season for Hunter-Reay - that came in the Indianapolis 500, where the 2014 winner got taken out of strong victory contention in a pitlane fracas. The other race where he appeared to be the leading candidate for the win was Pocono, when his car suffered a temporary electrical glitch that forced him to drive down the pitlane recycling the system before charging back to finish third.

For Hunter-Reay, Mid-Ohio was another wasted Sunday in a summer seemingly full of them, as he fought to bridge the gap between his Honda machine and the best of the Chevrolet-powered cars.

Yes, the Andretti Autosport quartet's regular set-up troubles went above and beyond Honda's issues - they ended the year 10th, 11th, 12th and 16th in the points, while Graham Rahal, in the solo Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda entry, finished in the top five for a second straight season.

But among HPD-supplied teams, no one was kidding anyone that they were on par with their manufacturer rivals. At season's end, Chevrolet-powered cars had visited Victory Lane 14 times, Honda cars just twice.

The problem was the disparity between the manufacturer aerokits, introduced two years ago and due to become obsolete at the end of the 2017 season. Wirth Research's aerokit for Honda in 2015 had been an ambitious CFD-crafted disappointment, although, owing a little to good fortune, it produced six wins.

Last year's kit, which involved rather less input from Wirth and far more from HPD and Honda Japan, even benefited from IndyCar granting Honda two extra "development boxes" for the road/street/short-oval aero package, to allow the company to catch up with Chevy. Yet those were precisely the tracks where Chevrolet's Pratt & Miller-designed kit retained a notable edge, as the HPD's drag/downforce sweetspot proved far smaller.

As Rahal explained: "We can make our Honda as fast as a Chevy on straights by removing drag, but then we don't have downforce for the corners, which kills our speed onto the straights. If we give ourselves more aero grip for the corners, we're dragging badly from about mid-point on the longer straights."

By contrast, Honda's superspeedway kit updates for 2016 were just fine, as were its engines, especially by the Month of May. Honda-powered cars nailed five spots on the first three rows of the Indy 500 grid and led 129 laps on race day.

Art St Cyr, president of Honda Performance Development, recalls: "Our Indy performance last year was a result of the aerokit, the teams learning about the aerokits, the engines, and our drivers really laying it on the line... But yes, it's safe to say our engine at Indy last year was better than at the beginning of the season."

Of course, what works at 1.3-bar boost (1.4 for qualifying at IMS) at the relatively constant speed of a superspeedway won't necessarily shine at 1.5-bar boost for road and street courses, where first-gear corners can be followed by 170mph straights. Could it be that HPD's latest engine lacks torque and that the aerokit is fine? Hunter-Reay's race engineer, Ray Gosselin, kills off that speculation, and his implication is clear.

"From our analysis of sector times, I don't see any indication that Honda's engine is deficient on any track," he states firmly.

So if Honda was struggling to match Chevy on most tracks last year and IndyCar has frozen aerokit development for 2017 before switching everyone back to a universal kit, is there any reason to suppose Honda can fight back? Certainly, it seems unlikely HPD can counteract a draggy aerokit with a blockbuster engine upgrade, as St Cyr (pictured below with Hunter-Reay) explains.

"For this year we've been pretty limited in terms of what we're allowed to change [in the engine]," he says. "Last year was quite a big development year - we could change the whole combustion chamber, for instance. This year we're back to things like pistons and valves, so you can't take as big a step.

"That said, we did do a lot of work on the engine in the off-season, and we believe we improved performance for all tracks."

Gosselin sounds less convinced, yet doesn't rule out a shot at the title for Hunter-Reay - assuming Andretti Autosport can get back to the cutting edge of the 'Honda division'.

"You've got to do the best with what you have," he says, "and that's what we as a team have to work on. We should have had a decent result in Phoenix a year ago, then unfortunately-timed yellows turned it into a dud. But if you accept that kind of bad luck will happen occasionally, you look at where else you can improve.

"Well, you can't be leading a race and have your engine shut off, or if you're at a double points race, you can't be taken out in pitlane. It's pretty clear where a Honda can be truly competitive - Indy and Pocono - and there are other tracks where there's no clear advantage for either manufacturer, so those are all places where you really have to take advantage and come away with a lot of points - hopefully, wins.

"Then you look at tracks where you did really badly - like for us, Watkins Glen. We can't turn qualifying 19th into a win or second place, but if we make the best of a bad situation maybe we can finish seventh or eighth.

"So performance-wise, whatever you perceive were our strengths and weaknesses in 2016, they'll remain pretty much the same in '17. But results-wise, we can do a lot better than what we showed last year.

"It's just that when you're trying to put a championship-winning season together, those moments where you're on the balance between things going well or going badly, they need to fall your way. And your season looks a lot better if you capitalise on good days and make the most of bad days."

Last year, the four-car teams of both Penske and Ganassi ran Chevrolet engines, and this imbalance of power in IndyCar's top tier was used by some to help explain Honda's dire win ratio - notwithstanding the fact that Ganassi contributed only two wins to Chevy's tally.

In 2017, Chip's team will be waving the flag for Tokyo (by way of Santa Clarita, California). Will that be enough to push Honda back to the front on a regular basis?

Ganassi folk prefer to let the results do the talking, so last December Chris Simmons, race engineer for four-time champion Scott Dixon, was keeping his ambition in check.

"[Honda's] weak points have been short ovals and street circuits," he said, "and that's where we as a team were at our best. So I think we can definitely help Honda fill in the blanks.

"Can we close the gap fully? I don't know... But I think we can at least reduce it to where we can make strategy calls and put ourselves in a position to win more than two races."

At the Phoenix test last month, another senior Ganassi team member who wished to remain anonymous explained the squad's primary challenges in the transition.

"Honda's engine is good and the torque delivery has been good for longer than people realise," he said. "But it is different, so we have to relearn there.

"Aero-wise, the things you adjust on the kit are the same from Chevrolet to Honda but the increments are different and the various parts have different efficiencies, so to find the right balance or compromise for any track - that's more learning we need to do."

But Rahal, who has finished as Honda's top IndyCar driver for the past two seasons, has no doubt that this very informal title will be threatened in 2017. At Phoenix he remarked: "[Ganassi] are going to be damn good. They're parked next to us in pitlane here, and we're seeing aero configurations on their cars that we've never seen on a Honda before.

"We were sitting there looking at it going, 'Jeez, what have they figured out that we haven't over the last couple years?'"

His sentiments were echoed in blunter form by a race engineer from a rival Honda team.

"It's going to be interesting to see if Chip's guys make us all look like wankers for not figuring out this aerokit," he mused. "Because if anyone can, they can."

Indeed. And so, somewhat ironically, in a year of technical status quo within IndyCar, we're about to gain what should be a significant technical insight.