Schmidt Peterson Motorsports has announced an extension to their collaboration with Honda through to the end of the 2020 Verizon IndyCar Series season, with an increased level of partnership between the two parties.
Honda have powered the Schmidt team since they arrived on the grid at the beginning of the 2011 season, and since they have secured six wins together as well as two Indianapolis 500 pole positions, but the new deal will take that partnership to the next level, according to SPM general manager Piers Philllips.
“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,” said Phillips.
“Our contract extension is the culmination of everyone’s hard work. One of the things that we’re extremely excited about is working closer technically with HPD for the benefit of not only our program, but for all Honda programs 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.”
Art St. Cyr, the President of Honda Performance Development (HPD), says Schmidt Peterson Motorsports are going to be one of their key teams in IndyCar going forward, especially with the introduction of the universal aero kit in 2018.
“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 analyze 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 programs 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 characterize the kits and make sure we can understand what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses and how we can maximize the ability of that kit to get the speed on track.”
