ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The first test of IndyCar’s new engine competition was no contest at all.
Will Power set a series track record Saturday in qualifying for the today’s seasonopening Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, where Chevrolet easily handled Honda in the first real test of the season.
Power covered a lap in 1 minute, 1.3721 seconds at an average speed of 105.585 mph over the winding 1.8-mile temporary course through the streets of St. Petersburg, beating Penske Racing teammate Ryan Briscoe, who qualified second at 1:01.5357. Chevrolet swept the top five qualifying spots.
The highest qualifying Honda? It wasn’t the heavyweights from Target Chip Ganassi Racing, but Simon Pagenaud, who qualified sixth in his IndyCar debut for tiny Schmidt-Hamilton Motorsports. He’ll have to drop 10 spots on the starting grid, though, because of an unapproved engine change Friday.
“Very happy for Chevy. With all the hard work they’ve done, I kind of expected the result with all the Chevys at the front,” Power said.
IndyCar has competing manufacturers for the first time since 2005, with Chevrolet and Lotus jumping into a series that Honda had controlled exclusively the past seven seasons. With Lotus admittedly far behind the competition, this season will likely be a showdown between Chevy and Honda.
And that means a showdown between Penske and Ganassi, the top two teams in the series.
Penske goes into today’s season opener with three cars in the first five as Helio Castroneves, who hit the wall in the second qualifying session, surprisingly got back on track in the Firestone Fast Six round. Crew members changed his suspension in roughly seven minutes, which gave Castroneves three minutes remaining in the session to turn the fifth-best qualifying lap.
But wedged in between the three Penske cars were Ryan Hunter-Reay and James Hinchcliffe, who qualified third and fourth for Andretti Autosport.
Ganassi wound up seventh with Scott Dixon and 10th with defending series champion and race winner Dario Franchitti. Neither driver advanced out of the second qualifying round.
“Our setup wasn’t where it needed to be, obviously,” Franchitti said. “We’ll keep our head up and get work done. We still have some tricks up our sleeve.”
Both Briscoe and Hinchcliffe praised the hard work Chevrolet has put into readying for the season — so much so, that Ganassi’s struggle was more surprising than the Chevy sweep.
“No surprise from Chevy, they’ve been doing such a great job,” Briscoe said. “Even this weekend we’ve been feeling improvements.”
Hinchcliffe said Chevrolet engineers have been on hand all weekend to handle every issue.
“They plug in after every session. They say, ‘This time we’re going to have this, this time we’re going to have this,’ ” Hinchcliffe said. “Just the improvement not only just testing, but this weekend has been phenomenal. It is certainly opening my eyes as to how this whole manufacturer war is going to play out.”
But teammate Hunter-Reay quickly reminded everyone that eight Hondas ranked in the top 10 after Saturday morning’s practice.
“I think it’s going to be back and forth a lot,” Hunter-Reay said. “I don’t think this is necessarily just the stamp that Chevy’s got it made.”
Sports, Pages 23 on 03/25/2012