After several seasons with the HPD ARX, Honda Performance Development hope to be back next season with a new LMP1 for FIA World Endurance Championship. Stephen Eriksen, HPD Vice-President, talks to Endurance-Info about this new project :
The HPD LMP1 2014 is on a good way ?
“As the Racer.com article indicates, we are preparing new LMP1 power train optimized for the 2014 regulations to offer to privateer entrants in WEC. We plan to offer privateers the option to chose from a variety of power train options based on their budget and efficiency targets. The base option, which does not include energy recovery, will be based on our 2014 IndyCar engine but with the necessary changes to optimize it for the different fuel and operating conditions required for endurance racing. This means that many of the development improvements we achieve on our IndyCar works program can be applied to the benefit of our Sports Car customers and any durability and efficiency improvements we achieve on the Sports Car engine can then benefit our IndyCar program, thus making for a very symbiotic relationship between the two products. For those teams that are interested to compete in the energy recovery categories, we will offer options that provide differing levels of energy recovery at different price points. The bespoke HPD energy recovery systems provide privateers the opportunity to compete in the non-hybrid categories that manufacturer programs will operate in. We are also exploring the opportunity to continue supplying a superior chassis to customers in LMP1 as well but as you can imagine this is dependent on securing customers prior to committing to manufacturing.”
As OAK Racing is building too a new car for next year, could the Nicolet car be powered by a HPD unit?
“We would welcome the opportunity to again power Mr. Nicolet’s dreams! We very much enjoyed working with the team last season.”
Could Honda race in the new unified championship, the USCR, in another class than the LMP2?
“We are awaiting technical details of the USCR 2014 regulations in order to understand if there are additional opportunities to support customers in the new unified championship.”