Honda, Honda Performance Development, HPD, Roger Griffiths, Santa Clarita, California
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DAY OF THE DYNO
In the off-season, HPD gets a lot of bench time to prepare for the challenges of the season ahead
Words by Richard S. James Photos courtesy Honda
t would be easy to assume that, as the sole
engine supplier in the IndyCar Series and
with a proven, reliable package, Honda
Performance Development would look at the
time between the checkered flag at
Chicagoland in September and the green
at Homestead in March as a nice long
vacation. However, engines are never
perfect, and with new technological
developments on tap for the coming season,
there’s a lot of work to be done.
Roger Griffiths, race team technical leader
for HPD, says that in this off-season they’ve
been working on three key areas: further
enriching the ethanol engine package,
reducing the noise volume of the engine, and
34 IndyCarSeries 2007 winterspecial
implementing the new semi-automatic
shifting system with paddle shifters.
“One of the things that came up is the way
ethanol works with this engine,” says Griffiths.
“We had a lot of experience with methanol,
but not much with ethanol. Part way through
the season we came up with some issues and
had to step back from allowing the teams to
use their own mixtures. We’ve been on the
dyno to come up with what the mixture
specifications were. Then we had some teams
testing at Homestead, running the mixtures
and getting feedback.”
Griffiths explains that at the start of the
season, the teams had eight fuel/air mixtures,
all programmed by Honda, from which to
choose. The differences were fairly small to
begin with, and all in a narrow window, so he
says they will likely end up with five mixtures
in the end.
“We need to make sure that when the driver
changes the fuel mixture, it doesn’t hurt
engine performance,” he says.
Noise is another issue HPD engineers are
tackling. “We’d like to have the opportunity to
take the series to some venues that have more
stringent sound requirements,” Griffiths notes.
One key in limiting noise, as IndyCar Series
SeniorTechnical Director Les Mactaggart has
pointed out, is to not give teams another area
of development at which to throw money
looking for a performance advantage.
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