Yahoo Autos Power tops IndyCar hybrid test at Milwaukee Mile
Team Penske’s Will Power was fastest in the two-hour morning session held by IndyCar at the Milwaukee Mile to give its new hybrid powertrains a proper run (161.521mph), and in the one-hour early afternoon outing, his teammate Josef Newgarden went to the top (160.759mph) to lead a Penske 1-2-3.
“It’s actually quite a hard compound tire, so not that much grip, so a little difficult to pass right now, hard to get the car balance right,” Power told RACER. “But yeah, it feels like Milwaukee. It hasn’t changed much, to be honest. Hasn’t changed much at all.”
Teams and drivers spent a decent amount of time in the free morning sessions working on chassis setup and, to a lesser degree, manipulating the energy recovery systems. But some, like Graham Rahal, found the experience of having to harvest and deploy power on a 22-second lap to be a busy affair.
“I didn’t grow up playing video games, so all this is new to me,” he said. “You can do regenning manually, automatically, have it come in on partial throttle, and then you’re working all the buttons and the dash has a purple bar that tells you how much energy you have stored and can use, so it’s a lot to keep on top of on such a quick lap. I bet Iowa is going to be even harder like that.”
The pleasant surprise among the 20 drivers in attendance was the returning David Malukas who pushed his new No. 66 Meyer Shank Racing Honda to fifth overall in the morning and seventh in the afternoon.
The hybrid field completed 3563 laps without incident. The only car that didn’t complete the full test was Alexander Rossi’s No. 7 Arrow McLaren Chevy, which is believed to have experienced a water pump failure.
IndyCar used the rest of the afternoon to conduct mock race starts, short races, caution periods, and all of the competition-based scenarios the energy recovery systems will face. The process was going well until rain started to fall around 3:45pm local.