The first round of the 2024 IndyCar season took place over the weekend, giving the paddock a chance to evaluate what the competition has been working on over the offseason.
For Chevrolet, that offseason work appeared to be a substantial upgrade to the drivability and performance of their 2.2-liter power plants.
Talk in the paddock began circulating as early as Friday that all the Chevy-powered cars appeared to have made significant gains since the last race.
The improvements were not necessarily in raw horsepower – the current engine formula is quite mature and there is little left to extract in that area – but more intricate things such as smooth power application and throttle response times appeared to have been noticeably better.
Those improvement resulted in an impressive showing on Sunday, which saw Josef Newgarden take the win comfortably and Chevrolet-powered drivers finishing 1-2-3-4.
“I’ve got to say, Chevrolet, they work hard every off-season,” said Newgarden after his victory. “But they worked really hard this off-season.
“We were hard on ourselves. It’s not just them. We had to really improve our [Team Penske] side and the chassis, and we were hard on them, too. We said, ‘We’ve got to make all of these things better,’ and they delivered in spades.
“You rarely give someone – you ask for the menu, and you don’t get the whole menu, and they somehow I feel like gave us the whole menu. It’s pretty cool. They did a great job, and it makes me very encouraged for 2024.”
Newgarden was not the only one to sing the praises of the upgraded engine, and most up front were quick to point out the gains they felt.
The details about what exactly was changed is a closely guarded secret, but some insight into how much effort and coordination went into the upgrades was described by Pato O’Ward following his second-place run.
“We all met at the MTC in London,” said O’Ward, describing how Chevy and McLaren put their resources together to find every last opportunity.
“It was like 25, 20 of us at a massive table, and we just hammered down on everything that we wanted to see improvements on, everything that we thought that we did well, and just having an honest, open conversation of what’s going on.
“Whenever you’re at the end of basically life of an engine like this, a lot of the massive gains have been gained. When you gain little bits and pieces here and there, they’re usually pretty substantial.
“I was super, super happy to see just how receptive they were of it and how they were just — yeah, we’re going to get to work, and they brought us a very strong package, and super happy with that.”
Chevrolet has won IndyCar’s manufacturer championship eight times since the current engine was introduced in 2012, including the most recent two seasons.
Its rival Honda generally produces engines that are equally competitive, although they do have slight characteristic differences that can sometimes suit one driver better than the other.
One race does not make the season, however, and there are still 16 more championship rounds to go. Time will tell if Chevrolet really does have a significant advantage on all the different types of circuits IndyCar visits.
