IZOD IndyCar Series: MAVTV 500 IndyCar World Championships

Topics:  MAVTV 500 IndyCar World Championships, Chevrolet

Jim Campbell
October 19, 2013

FONTANA, CALIFORNIA

THE MODERATOR: We're now pleased to be joined by Jim Campbell for our manufacturers champion Chevrolet.
Talk about the great accomplishment this season.
JIM CAMPBELL: Thank you. First of all, what an incredible race it was tonight, and actually all season long. Racing in IndyCar has been absolutely incredible. Congratulations to Will Power on the win and to Scott Dixon and to Chip Ganassi and Mike Hull on the championship on the drivers side.
For the manufacturers championship, we came into the race, had 11 of our teams on their fifth engine. We had one team, Helio Castroneves, on his sixth engine. Honda had four engines that were in the fifth category. They had eight that were in six or more. They had four opportunities to earn manufacturer points.
For us it was exciting to win it. It really came down to the wire there. Had Charlie Kimball and Hildebrand who could have earned some points for Honda, they went out. As it turned out, Will Power brought the win home. Manufacturers championship for the second year in a row came our way.
In the end you don't win those championships without great teams and drivers. So a big thank you to our Chevrolet teams and drivers. They did a great job all season long, also last year.
In the end you have to deliver power, fuel economy, reliability, and the Chevy team did it.
THE MODERATOR: We'll open it up for questions.

Q. Jim, one of the things that was particularly impressive about Chevy this year is while you had adequate horsepower with the Hondas on the street circuits, you dominated on the ovals. What was in the formula of that engine that makes it work so well?
JIM CAMPBELL: I would say it's a combination of our Chevy power train, Ilmor, Pratt & Miller team, doing all we could in terms of testing, the tremendous amount of testing we do in our driveline dyno setup in Detroit to hone those engines. We're involved in eight series. That's the combination, our quest every single race. It takes a lot of work to get there. You have to basically really develop the engine, the whole power train system, then you have to get the whole car integrated together, and that's what the team did.
I'm really pleased with how they performed all year long. The teams just did a great job, so proud of 'em. We didn't get the drivers championship with Chevy power this year. We thank Ryan Hunter-Reay for being a great champion last year, and our hat is off to Scott Dixon for being the champion this year.

Q. Looking ahead to defending this for next year, Honda is planning to build a twin-turbo engine, does that change your approach in any way?
JIM CAMPBELL: Just to be clear, the series made a decision that everybody is going to use twin turbo. We have been on a twin turbo for the last two years. We're going to go on the same spec, which is slightly different than we're running today.
We've been doing our testing, so our focus is to deliver that combination I mentioned, power, fuel economy, durability, integrate to the whole car. We'll spend a lot of time testing the whole system and integrating overall. That's going to be our focus.
We obviously keep a close eye on all our competition in every series. We have to prove it on the track. Chevy has had a great year.

Q. Earlier this week something came out that both you and Honda would like to see another engine manufacturer come in to ease the pain it's costing you. Are you pushing hard trying to encourage another manufacturer to join the series?
JIM CAMPBELL: To tell you the truth, I don't remember doing an interview on it, so I don't know where that reference came from. We are definitely supportive of having another manufacturer come in.
When we were in Houston, I think I mentioned through our IndyCar contract, when there's two manufacturers, each manufacturer has to handle up to 60% of the field. That's our contract obligation. When there's three, it drops to 40%. Clearly the more manufacturers in, you basically handle a smaller portion of the field.
In the end it's more about the competition. We do not like to run in spec series. We're not interested in it. We like to race against somebody because it's meaningful, it creates innovation, it pushes you to be better every week, every race, every year. So we love racing against competition. We do it here and every series we're in. If we get to a series where there's no competition, we're probably looking for the exit ramp. We have to race against competition.
We'd love to see competition come in. We have a few neighbors in our City of Detroit, surrounding area, that we would like to have them considered, but any manufacturer around the world, we'd love to see them come in.
THE MODERATOR: Congratulations.
JIM CAMPBELL: Thank you.