Kent disagrees with Penske on IndyCar aero kits

Chevy motorsport boss Mark Kent disagrees with Penske

Roger Penske told motorsport.com he was skeptical of the aero kits from the cost effectiveness point of view.

"Ask Honda and Chevrolet how much they have had to spend on the aero kits, and ask the average fans if they notice the difference between them," he said. "Bring 30 people from the grandstands and ask them which is the Chevrolet and which is the Honda, and I don't think they could tell you."

Mark Kent, Chevy's director of motorsports, says he's satisfied the brand has achieved its aims since the introduction of aero kits for the start of the 2015 IndyCar season.

Kent also insisted that Chevrolet derives marketing and technological benefits from its involvement with the Verizon IndyCar Series.

He told Motorsport.com: "We got everything out of aero kits that we hoped to, so from our perspective, they were a very worthwhile proposition.

"There were two reasons we did it: 1) visual differentiation and 2) the opportunity to out-engineer and outperform our competition. And if you look back at last year, the [Chevrolet and Honda] cars looked truly different from each other, and we definitely had a package that did outperform our competition."

Rival designs to converge

Kent admitted that he expected the Chevrolet and Honda designs to converge – although he did not wish to directly address IndyCar's controversial Rule 9.3 that allowed HPD more areas of development to catch up with the superior Chevrolet kit during this last off-season.

"Moving forward, the cars are going to look a bit closer in terms of design and therefore likely to perform closer," said Kent, "so is there as much benefit as before? No. But there is still an opportunity to beat our competition and we hope that we can maintain that performance advantage.

"It's up to the individual manufacturer to choose when to introduce the new parts in the three boxes allowed under Rule 9.2. You've seen at St. Petersburg our new bumper pod, and we'll introduce more modifications through the year."