Whether you believe IndyCar needed it or not, the hybrid device has certainly thrown a spanner in the works of the series' teams which might be more treading water than maximising car set-up right now.
The hybrid was introduced at Mid-Ohio in July last year, which means it hasn't been raced at any of the first seven races on this year's (largely similar) calendar.
Races hybrid hasn't been used at
Thermal, Long Beach, Barber, Indianapolis road course, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Detroit, Road America, Laguna Seca
Races hybrid has been at
Gateway, Mid-Ohio, Iowa, Toronto, Portland, Milwaukee, Nashville
The attention when it was introduced was all on how the drivers might exploit it for a performance gain with a boost of energy allowed each lap - the amount varies track to track - in addition to the 200 seconds of push to pass allowed on road and street circuits.
But the bigger topic in the paddock now is how the added weight of the unit impacts the performance of the car. That's not just the total weight added with the device (120lbs or just over 54kg); the distribution of that weight and its positioning to the rear of the car is the bigger factor.
Turn 3 is treacherous 😬
— NTT INDYCAR SERIES (@IndyCar) February 28, 2025
Catches @smclaughlin93 with an incident on track. pic.twitter.com/nr6S3eqQid
At St Petersburg, we saw quite a few drivers spinning at the right-hand Turn 3 kink which was sometimes blamed on the additional weight - drivers have admittedly spun there most years but it seemed to have been exacerbated - and this points to the difficulty teams are having in making the car compliant and fast while accounting for the changes to the car initiated by the hybrid.
This was certainly the case during a multi-team test at Barber last week, where you'd struggle to find a team or driver taking part that didn't acknowledge how much this new weight impacted car performance.
Teams can obviously use the data they gathered last year and some of the problem-solving they did to account for the additional weight compared to previous races and apply the same logic. They can also run endlessly in the simulator.
But none of those things can account for getting the car on track in this specification for the first time, taking into account the accurate surface and temperatures.
The spanner in the works of all this is, if we rewind to the pre-hybrid era, one of the biggest explanations for fluctuations in form of teams and drivers from track to track was the tyre compound being used at each race.
A new compound almost always shakes up the competitive order. It doesn't always change it completely, but there's always a significant impact.
So now, teams are dealing with this additional weight distribution factor thanks to the hybrid, and the unpredictability of tyre behaviour, especially with regards to surface and temperatures.
Of course, the bigger teams with more resources will deal with this better. That's how motorsport works. But that doesn't mean they have been immune to the peculiarities of setting up an IndyCar in 2025.
Ironing out kinks is tricky too. Most teams had three days of testing pre-season, but then after that your overall set-up philosophy is pretty much locked in because you don’t have the testing time to be able to make big changes to it. Make a small tweak in one area and it totally throws off another.
It's a bit like if you were alone, and going from one end of a seesaw to another. You can sit one side down, but when you leave it to sit the other side down, it will swing out of control again.
If we purely look at the results, it may well be that the form teams continue to win and the competitive order remains similar. But you can bet every team is fighting the effect of the added weight and how to set the car up track to track in a bid to get ahead.
