Simona De Silvestro: 'I don't think we're too far off' after first practice at Road America in IndyCar return
ELKHART LAKE, Wisc. – Simona De Silvestro got out of her No. 16 Chevy on Friday afternoon, having not run an Indy car on a road or street course in more than seven years, and she didn’t feel entirely comfortable. That was to be expected. But the satisfying part was, as she left the media center and headed back for engineering debrief meetings with her Ed Carpenter Racing and Paretta Autosport teams, De Silvestro felt like she had a roadmap in her head on where she wanted to go.
Though she finished the initial 75-minute practice of IndyCar’s Sonsio Grand Prix weekend at Road America last in a 27-car field, more than 3 seconds back of session leader Alexander Rossi, the Swiss-Italian driver came away satisfied in not feeling completely listless as she begins a three-race stretch this season she hopes turns into a full-season opportunity for 2023.
“I feel like, once I kinda got up to speed, I started to feel what I wanted out of the car, and that was positive,” De Silvestro said. “It’s actually more rewarding to me to feel I needed the car a little bit different. To be where I wanted to be, I need to find a little more confidence in the car, and hopefully I’ll find that in the morning.”
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The 33-year-old got a head-start on studying up for Saturday morning’s Practice No. 2 when her car underwent an early-session brake fire that her crew, made of both ECR and PA team members, got under control without too much missed time. Because of the abnormally-long session – 75 minutes rather than IndyCar’s typical hour-long practice window where 45 minutes of running time can take place – De Silvestro said she didn’t miss much. In fact, that break allowed her to catch her breath a bit and digest what she’d experienced over the first few laps back in an Indy car not on the 2.5-mile oval at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Because since her 4th-place finish at NOLA Motorsports Park in mid-April of 2015, that’s all she’s run in America’s highest level of open-wheel racing: two 500s (2015 and 2021). She’d hoped that three-race comeback campaign with Andretti Autosport in 2015 would turn into more, particularly after her best season to date in IndyCar in 2013 (12th in points, nine top-10s, one podium), but the sponsorship funding never came. It’s been a seven-year fight back, while running sportscars and the Supercars series in the meantime.
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Early last year, Paretta linked up with Team Penske as part of Penske Entertainment Corp.’s Race for Equality and Change program and landed a technical alliance for the 500 to try and spark change in a series where, at least in the high-profile driving roles, diversity had been fairly lacking for several years. Though she and her team showed some solid pace in early practices, De Silvestro only barely qualified for the race (33rd) and spun mid-race on pitlane, damaging her car past the point of finishing the race (31st).
Without enough momentum to make a 500 return, Paretta refocused her team’s goals for 2022 and homed in on a partial-season program she eventually lined up with Carpenter, who in running all four ovals this year, had the equipment and crew available to make something happen. After Road America, the No. 16 Chevy will also run the next round at Mid-Ohio on July 3 before what may very well be their final appearance of the year in Nashville (Aug. 7). Because they have nowhere near the amount of time to prep and jell together as they might over a Month of May at IMS, De Silvestro said the goals coming into this first race with many new faces is very different. Of course she doesn’t want to be last, but the focus, more than anything else, will be showing progress over the pace of a traditional IndyCar weekend and taking whatever those results might offer.
In doing so, the hope is that by this fall and winter, enough sponsors have noticed that progress that they might be able to return a full-time female driver to the IndyCar grid for the first time since 2013.
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“For me, being in an Indy car has always been my happy place,” De Silvestro said. “It’s where I’ve had the most success in my career. I felt right at home (Friday), and I’m really excited. The competition is amazing, and it just makes you want to be really good and perform really well.”
Overnight, De Silvestro said she’ll be hyper-focused looking over her data when it comes to the several high-speed straights around ‘America’s National Park of Speed.’ Because it’s been so long since she’s been in a high-downforce car on a road course, she said the high-speed, high-commitment corners were where she was losing the most time. And when you consider how different the 4.014-mile permanent road course is compared to most places IndyCar runs that are far closer to 2-2.5 miles in length, she’s not that far off.
We typically marvel at the number of entries that run within a second of each other in a given practice; over a much longer track, 21 cars were within 2 seconds of each other Friday. De Silvestro was just a hair more than one second back from that. She’s almost exactly within a second of new teammate Rinus VeeKay, who finished 22nd Friday. Conor Daly paced the team's trio in 17th, so it wasn’t as if the rest of her team, preparing for their eighth race of the year and third in as many weekends, was soaring.
As they all three hope to improve upon things Friday night into Saturday morning, De Silvestro said, “Now I know how it feels (in the car), they’re going to get really annoyed by me quite a lot tonight.
“The slow stuff seems pretty good. I just need to have the confidence in the car to send it. Going out today, everything was new. When you turn it, it really turns, and at the beginning, that kinda surprises you with how agile the car is. I felt like when I went out at the start of the session, the car was driving me. I don’t want to be last, but I don’t think we’re too far off.”
Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Simona De Silvestro 'not too far off' after Road America Practice 1
