Why De Silvestro's long IndyCar break can help Road America return

De Silvestro made her return to IndyCar in last year’s Indianapolis 500 with Paretta Autosport, a female-forward team.

But for this year team owner Beth Paretta has elected to use the funding she has raised to run three IndyCar races – Road America this weekend, Mid-Ohio in July and Nashville in August – as she targets evolving the team into a full-time operation.

The current IndyCar chassis is still basically the same as the last one she raced on a road course, the DW12, but much has changed.

When she finished fourth at the NOLA Motorsports Park in the 2015 Indy Grand Prix of Louisiana, De Silvestro’s Andretti Autosport car had the Honda aerokit. Since then the universal aerokit was introduced for 2018, and there have been weight distribution changes due to extra safety reinforcements – not least the aeroscreen.

Yet De Silvestro sees this lack of recent experience as potentially helpful, given that several experienced drivers struggled to find roadcourse setups they liked when the aeroscreen was added in 2020.

“When I'm in the car, it feels pretty similar [to 2015] because it's the same chassis,” said the Swiss 33-year-old.

“But definitely with the aeroscreen it seems the behaviour of the car has changed quite a lot. Looking at the onboards, it looks different than how I used to drive it.

“To be honest at the moment, I haven't driven it. I'm a bit maybe overthinking a little bit. I need to go into the weekend and see what we got.

"The good thing is it's been quite a while. I think in a sense I won't really remember how it really felt like, so I can start from a blank sheet and work from there.

“I think a lot of the guys who have been running a lot, I think the aeroscreen changed a lot. I think they've been trying to get