THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to historic WeatherTech Raceway at Laguna Seca. A lot of drivers and teams have so much to celebrate here as we wrap up the 2022 NTT INDYCAR Series season, and that includes our friends from Chevrolet today, who have claimed their first manufacturer's title since 2017, seventh overall since 2012.
Joining us this afternoon, Jim Campbell, the U.S. Vice President, Performance and Motorsports, for Chevrolet. Also joining us Mark Stielow, Director, Motorsports Competition Engineering.
Jim, we'll begin with you. Obviously been a great season. Obviously in the championship hunt, as well. Let's just talk about the first championship since 2017, how gratifying this moment is for you guys.
JIM CAMPBELL: Well, thanks, Dave. It's great to see so many people here in the media center for the final race of the 2022 season. Big thanks to Mark Miles and Jay Frye. Dave, thanks to you, as well, and then on Jay's team, Darren, Bill and Tino, appreciate what you all are doing to give us this platform to race in.
As you know, for Chevrolet, our history and heritage kind of starts with Indy. Louis Chevrolet and his brothers, they raced in Indy, so here we are 100 years later, more than 100 years later and still racing. We love it. We absolutely love it.
We couldn't do it without great partners, so this year, our partners, 11 wins out of 16 races, so about two-thirds of the races, with Josef, Scott, Pato and Will bringing wins home, and obviously 12 poles, which obviously count towards the manufacturer's championship, as well, with Will, Scott, Pato, Rinus, Felix and Josef bringing home poles, as well, that really count for valuable points.
As I look in the back here, I see a bunch of our team members. From Team Penske, Tim Cindric and Ron Ruzewski are here; a great job by them. Arrow McLaren, Zach is here on the grounds. I think he's in a meeting right now, but Taylor Kiel is here, so thank you for your support. Ed Carpenter Racing with Ed Carpenter and Tim Broyles; of course AJ Foyt, I saw Larry a minute ago, so great to see Larry, and of Scott Harner helps us get the job done there. From Juncos Hollinger, Ricardo is here, so thanks for being here. There's Beth right there. From Paretta Autosport Beth Paretta is here.
Those teams work together to get the testing and preparation done. Some of them scored specific manufacturer points, so that we're thankful for. But they all contributed. So a huge thank you, and at the end I want to bring them up here for a quick picture to celebrate it. I know the trophy is not here, but as I said, we'll PhotoShop it in.
THE MODERATOR: The official one is tomorrow. So more to come.
JIM CAMPBELL: With that said, so much work to be done here this weekend today and tomorrow, and so the focus on the driver's championship with obviously Will and Josef, and Scott has got a shot, and we've got a couple tough Honda competitors, so we're excited.
Mark? Who else do you want to recognize?
MARK STIELOW: Just a lot of effort with our partners at Ilmor, our internal GM engineering team really put together a strong program for this year, and our team executed extremely well, so I'm very proud of the effort everybody put forward.
JIM CAMPBELL: We see Paul Ray is back there. Paul, are you there? Obviously Mario Illien back at the headquarters; Ben Chapman is here; Steve O'Connor, Wayne Bennett, thank you to the team. Also Rob Buckner, our program manager, here every race with the teams, and we appreciate everything that you're doing, and so thank you for that.
Hey, one thing I also wanted to mention, to win a manufacturer's championship is most meaningful when you're competing against somebody, and we compete against Honda, and I will tell you a couple unique things. One, Honda and our company, Chevrolet and General Motors, have about six or seven kind of major projects we do together in the auto industry, joint ventures, alliances, and everything from all kinds of technical projects, so we know how to work together.
We also know how to compete against one another in the showroom and on the track, but again, without Honda here, this award obviously has a lot less meaning, so when you're competing against somebody, you appreciate it.
One other quick note. I did pull in this morning to stop at the 7-Eleven, and it's about three or four miles from here. As it turns out, our seventh manufacturer's championship out of 11 years being back in the series, so that was appropriate, so I'm going to do that again tomorrow morning, make my 7-Eleven stop.
THE MODERATOR: Mark, I know there's been some changes this year, and the word I keep hearing drivers throughout the course of the season: Drivability that Chevy has brought to this. How proud are you, how satisfying is this championship for you, Mark?
MARK STIELOW: Very much. The guys at Ilmor, Ray Gosselin, Paul Ray, Steve O'Connor, all those guys, we really dug deep, really in the off-season worked on a new strategy, utilized a lot of our tools with our driving simulator, worked with the teams to really come up with a more robust package for this season, and we got a lot of positive feedback from the drivers and the crew chiefs and everybody. But what we were working on paid dividends, and we got a lot of positive feedback on it.
THE MODERATOR: To have a championship is just icing on a cake.
Q. A couple announcements recently or actually Arrow McLaren announced a while ago, but Juncos Hollinger just announced they're going to add a second. What's it going to be like adding two extra cars and trying to keep this championship momentum going forward?
JIM CAMPBELL: Well, yeah, for sure. Juncos Hollinger added a car, so that's great. Arrow McLaren will have obviously a third with Rossi coming over.
So yeah, it's great. We're a little bit less than half the field. We certainly have capacity to have half the field for sure, and we're by contract obligated to go a little higher than that; up to 60 percent we need to be.
So that's good, and having great quality teams is the key. What we've found in every series in which we race, and our company is in eight different series around the world between Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC, is that key partners are critical.
With less testing time available, you've got to work together, and as Mark said, the simulation tools, really learning from one another, which was a tough thing to do. We were brought up in this industry to compete against one another, driver to driver, team to team, and what we find is when we get the right trust level, the learning side goes faster when we work good together in certain areas. Certainly the teams have points of difference; they're going to work hard on their own. But it's good we'll have about half the field next year.
Q. I remember when you started this program 10 years ago, the big thing was to take some technology transfer from what you learned here to your road cars. Has that been as successful as you wanted, and are you still learning stuff here and bringing stuff here and putting it --
MARK STIELOW: Yeah, so definitely on the engine side, Ilmor has been a great partner for us, but we've also taken some of those learnings and rolled them directly into a couple of our street cars. The Corvette Z06 is an example of that, and there's some other areas where we have a lot of technology transfer between the simulation side of production, where we want to minimize the development time on the production side vehicles, but we also want to be able to come off the race trailer and go racing.
We really have been sharpening our tool chains and technology transfer between motorsports and the production car side a lot. Before this job, I ran our driving simulator operations and our Hardware-in-the-Loop operations for GM, and we definitely have a lot of technology transfer in that space.
JIM CAMPBELL: Yeah, and in fact, the simulator, that driving loop simulator, and I don't know if you heard Mark, but we also do Hardware-in-the-Loop, so in the room next door we actually run hardware that feeds into the simulator. That same simulator is down in the Charlotte area, exact same simulator, so we get the learning on how to use that tool set back and forth, racing to production and vice versa.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports