"It's not as easy to work on in some ways as the Lola was," Micklewright commented, "But there are areas we can improve on as long as we get permission from Champ Car to do those things. Some of it is the guys getting used to a new way of doing things and new systems and so forth. But certainly some of the things I anticipated being big issues have turned out not to be and some of the things I didn't think would be an issue have been. I think that's to be expected, to a certain degree, with any new racing car.
"There are some areas here and there that could have been thought through a little better," Micklewright added, "We're looking at those areas with the experience of running the same car for five or six years. But I think, for a car that was designed, built and put together in a very short space of time, it's pretty good. It's going to evolve. I would say it's 95 per cent there. Some of the other five per cent is going to have to come from the teams and some of it is going to have to come from Panoz."
Most team bosses agree that Champ Car didn't push the prototype DP01 hard enough in initial testing last summer. They believe some of the problems encountered in recent winter testing could have been fixed earlier by doing more performance testing with the prototype.
"I'm not sure the amount of development they did with the car prior to pulling the trigger for the mass production was an awful lot of benefit," Micklewright said, "I don't think they beat on it hard enough. They didn't give it enough performance testing. It's like anything else. You can develop it until you're blue in the face but, until you actually use it an anger and thrash on it, you don't find some of the things that are going to be issues."
