Lotus announced Thursday at the Autosport International Show in Birmingham its full factory partnership with the Dragon Racing IndyCar team.
Owned by Jay Penske, Chairman and CEO of the Penske Media Corporation, and son of US racing legend Roger Penske, Dragon Racing debuted in 2007, picking up fifth at the Indy 500 straight out of the box at the hands of Ryan Briscoe.
In 2012 the Lotus Dragon Racing will run cars for Katherine Legge, the first female driver to win a major open-wheel race in North America, and four-time Champ Car Series champion and former F1 racer Sebastien Bourdais. This means that four teams - Lotus Dragon Racing, Lotus HVM Racing, Lotus Bryan Herta Autosport, and Lotus Dreyer & Reinbold - will be packing Lotus power in the IZOD IndyCar Series.
The Judd-produced all-new twin-turbo V6 has its first shakedown today at the Moroso circuit in Jupiter, Florida, with Lotus HVM driver Simona de Silvestro driving the Lotus test car. “The engine has performed extremely well so far, and we and our partners are very pleased with the results,” said Claudio Berro, Group Lotus Director of Motorsport. “We had our first fire-up in a Dallara chassis in Palma, Italy on December 21-23, then the engine was sent to America, and today we’re having our first on-track shakedown, at Moroso, which is very exciting. On January 1st we opened a Lotus facility in Indianapolis which will be our US engineering and logistics hub, so it’s all go. We’ve still got a lot of work to do before the start of the season, but I couldn’t be happier with the progress we’re making,” Berro added.
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