Pagenaud to begin full season at St. Pete

SIMON PAGENAUD STARTS THE IZOD INDYCAR SERIES AT ST PETERSBURG

Simon Pagenaud, Schmidt-Hamilton Motorsports

Photo by: IndyCar Series

A busy three weeks will have seen Simon Pagenaud switch from a rally in France (Rallye National de la Vienne) to last Saturday’s Twelve Hours of Sebring and, this weekend, the first Grand Prix of the 2012 IndyCar campaign which will take place in St. Petersburg, Florida. In the first two events, Simon Pagenaud’s very real chance of a podium finish were scuppered by mechanical problems, with electric trouble halting his Peugeot 306 Maxi early in France and a time-consuming refuelling coupling issue costing him long minutes at Sebring in his HPD ARX-03a. Today, however, the Frenchman turns his attention to his first complete IndyCar programme driving the brand new Dallara-Honda tended by Sam Schmidt/Hamilton Racing. The winter break saw Simon get in some solid testing and we shall soon see whether that groundwork will help him to a flying start to the year when practice begins through the streets of St. Petersburg!

SIMON SAYS... “This weekend marks the start of the 2012 IndyCar season. I can hardly wait for the racing to begin and see how our Honda powerplant compares with the Chevrolet and Lotus engines. We’ve got a great programme lined up this year with some top partners, including our principal sponsor Hewlett Packard and Magnolia. As a driver who competes internationally, it’s a fantastic opportunity to be able to represent a global company like HP. Along with my engineer Ben Bretzman and everyone at Sam Schmidt/Hamilton Racing, we worked particularly hard on ours car’s set-up over the winter! We now need to convert that into a strong performance this weekend in order to show the potential of our N°77 Dallara and start scoring as many points as possible before the Indy 500 in May!”