INDIANAPOLIS – In a battle between manufacturers both Honda and Chevrolet love to finish first on the race track. During Verizon IndyCar Series Media Day at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on February 17 Chevrolet was the first to unveil its Aero Kit that Chevy teams will be using in the 2015 Verizon IndyCar Series season.

Chevrolet officials took a far different approach to unveiling its Aero Kit than Honda Performance Development. HPD officials would rather wait until March 15 at Barber Motorsports Park to publicly show its kit. This will be two days after teams are allowed to test the kit for the first time. Chevrolet’s approach was to get it out there, let the fans and media have a look at it and allow its teams to start preparing for when the parts and pieces start to arrive on March 1.

“We’ve been working on the Aero Kits for some time,” said Jim Campbell, General Motors U.S. Vice President, Performance Vehicles and Motorsports. “The key is when the Aero Kit was approved by INDYCAR – what we call homologated – that was done January 18. At that point our kit and Honda’s kit was locked down. By revealing a rendering there is no competitive advantage or disadvantage. The kits are locked down.

“We are going to do this in phases. We did the rendering at Media Day. Told the development story and as we get to Barber all of our teams will have the cars with the new Aero Kits and will have a chance to do a walk around with more detail. Plus, now the teams are free to work with their marketing partners, which was really important, to get delivery setup and all the materials ready.

“The cars are approved; they are locked down. So there is no reason to not show our fans what the kits look like so now we want to get our fans and supporters excited about the season ahead. Then, we can show the car and its hardware at the Barber Open Test.”

Chevrolet unveiled its short oval and road and street course Aero Kits at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The superspeedway Aero Kit will be unveiled later.

“We’ve been working on this for quite a while and we’ve used a lot of computer tools so we can do very fast cycles of development from CAD designs to finite analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics to assess the benefits of each particular design,” Campbell explained. “We do a lot of that inside of the computer so we aren’t building as hard pieces as we used to. That is a benefit of using the technology.

“We use the same technology as we do cars and trucks for the showroom.”

When the Chevy IndyCar Aero Kit was unveiled, drivers from both Chevrolet and Honda studied it carefully. The Honda drivers are curious to see what the competition has developed.

Campbell and Chevrolet promise to do the same when Honda makes its kit public.

“We’ll see when they come out and assess them,” Campbell said. “We do that in any series. We always look at what the competition is doing. We will study it, evaluate it and compare and contrast it.

“Clearly we spent a lot of time on the development of the engine to deliver the right level of performance, durability and fuel efficiency. Now it’s that in combination with the Aero Kits. And the Aero Kits is about delivering the right combination of downforce and drag along with engine performance. That is a new dynamic. The way we design our kit we want to optimize the balance of those two along with the engine performance. We’re going to have an approach the way we do it and competitors will have a different approach. We’ll see how lap times compare and see who gets to the winners circle.”

When Chevrolet agreed to return to the series in November 2010 and hit the track for the 2012 season there were several items on their agenda.

“When we made the assessment to come back to IndyCar there were three key factors,” Campbell said. “We really liked the engine formula – the small displacement, direct injected, boosted or turbocharged engines because that is what is happening in the powertrains for the showrooms. Secondly, we wanted to bring the Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix back and the series worked with us on that. We are entering our fourth year on that.

“And the third thing we wanted was the ability and opportunity to build our own Aero Kit. So this was exactly part of the plan when we made our decision to return to IndyCar.”