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NEWTON, Iowa — Scott Dixon’s No. 9 PNC Bank Honda sputtering to a stop on the pace laps of last weekend’s IndyCar race at Mid-Ohio, which left him 22 laps down once he finally was able to get rolling before he finished in last-place (27th), was caused by a team-controlled setting that Chip Ganassi Racing officials had tested multiple times in the lead-up to the hybrid system’s midseason debut.
IndyStar asked Dixon Friday evening after his strong practice at Iowa what he and the team had learned in the five days since his disappointing finish at the track he’s recorded six of his 59 career IndyCar wins. In layman’s terms, it sounds as if the Energy Recovery System was triggered for some reason — one that Dixon didn’t dive into — to dump all the energy built-up in the Energy Storage System (ERS), and once the 60 volts in those 20 supercapacitors had been completely drained, a safety function in the car automatically shutoff the internal combustion engine (ICE).
Once that occurred, there was no way to restart the car — even with the manual starter that the AMR safety team carries with them — until the ERS was charged back up. The ICE would need to be running in order to build up charge in the ERS while on-track, and the empty ERS wouldn’t allow the ICE to fire. Eventually, the safety team towed the No. 9 back to the garage, and shortly after the car’s ERS was plugged into power, it charged back up like normal, and the engine fired without issue. He rejoined the race 22 laps down, and once he was mathematically ensured to finish last, with too few laps left to make up ground on any cars that might have dropped out, the team retired the car, and Dixon finished 27th, 40 laps down from race-winner Pato O’Ward.
With the DNF — his first over his last 23 IndyCar starts – Dixon dropped from 3rd to 4th in the championship and now sits 71 points behind Ganassi teammate and championship leader Alex Palou.
How it happened:Hybrid system glitch derails Scott Dixon’s Mid-Ohio race during technology’s debut
Here’s what Dixon told reporters Friday:
“(The hybrid system) just got into a parameter it didn’t like, and it stopped the engine, which it needed to charge the capacitor — which the last thing you want it to do is turn off the only thing that can charge it. So I think there will be something down the road that can change that. It was kinda weird. We didn’t expect it, for the sheer fact that we tested a lot of that stuff in preseason testing and also even at Milwaukee (just weeks prior). But it was a parameter that (the hybrid system) hit and did a runaway, so there was no time to try and fix it.
“Some of the settings are open to the teams and manufacturers on how you want to do regen or deploy and things like that. I’d say we were maybe slightly different, but honestly, until it happened, I don’t think anyone knew it was a fault. I think it could’ve happened to a lot of cars. It would’ve happened to three of my teammates, had it been a second different as well. It’s interesting.”
