On Monday, Robert Clarke reflected on his fifteen years running Honda Performance Development and his most recent efforts in establishing this year's Acura ALMS programme. Today, Clarke discusses Honda's IRL engine programme and looks at where it may, or may not be heading.

Over the past two years, of course, Honda has been the spec engine supplier to the IRL and is contracted to continue in this role through 2009.

Without any competition Honda's focus in the IRL is on showcasing the quality of its products by achieving and maintaining a perfect reliability record, and with this goal in mind Honda's IRL engine supply programme is ticking over comfortably with only minor changes for next season.

“HPD and Ilmor's support of the IRL engine programme is a pretty well-oiled machine right now,” Clarke observed. “It's not a difficult programme, other than we're concerned that we'll get lazy at some point and start letting the quality slip. That's something we keep reminding ourselves of. We have reflection meetings quarterly and keep beating-up on each other to make sure the quality is maintained. It's the only thing we have and we can't lose that.

“We had to make some fairly significant changes from last year to this year because of the move to ethanol, but from this year to next there only a few minor things we are doing. One is we're trying to improve the overall life of the engine to make it even more economical for us and for the teams, too. We're also trying to improve on the oil control so we have less oil consumption and less likelihood for detonation, just trying to make the engine a bit more robust. The League is introducing a paddle shift system for next year so that requires an electric throttle blipper on the side of the engine and some software changes to the ECU to accommodate it.”

Clarke has also been pushing to create a quieter exhaust note. “We've prototyped a new exhaust silencer system that gets the engine down another ten decibels. It should definitely be noticeable.”

Regretfully, Clarke is not happy with the results of the Indy car of 2011 design concept project with the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena.

“The whole point of that programme in my mind was to get the IRL thinking about things beyond what we have today,” he commented. “I think they were struggling with doing that. As far as a particular design coming out of it and everybody saying, 'Oh, that's it! Let's get that off to a chassis manufacturer and build it.' I never expected that, but I'm not thrilled with what came out of it as far as car design.”

Honda supported a similar project with the Art Centre College back in 1994 when the company was first breaking into Indy car racing.