Three brand-new street circuits on one INDYCAR calendar is unusual. Arriving at all three with cars already optimized for tracks nobody has ever raced on is a different problem entirely. Honda Racing Corporation USA is solving it with a multi-million-dollar Driver-In-The-Loop simulator at its Indianapolis technical headquarters, and the process is considerably more complicated than it sounds.
The 2026 NTT INDYCAR SERIES schedule added Arlington, Washington D.C., and the Ontario Honda Dealers Indy at Markham, set for August 16, as fresh temporary street circuits. Markham is 2.19 miles and 12 turns of Canadian asphalt that has never seen a racing tire. No historical lap data, no onboard footage, no rubber buildup on the surface. For HRC’s engineering group, that blank canvas is both the appeal and the anxiety.
The HRC DIL simulator has been running in some form since 2013. The current generation, unveiled in May 2024, represents a substantial upgrade: a modified IndyCar cockpit with 360-degree yaw rotation and a 270-degree visual field from a screen 2.5 meters high and nine meters in diameter. The system generates up to 1.5 megabytes of data per second across approximately 2,000 available channels. It can replicate the current Dallara-Honda IndyCar, the Acura ARX-06 hybrid GTP car, and a range of Honda and Acura concept racing vehicles. In June, HRC named 2024 INDYCAR Rookie of the Year Linus Lundqvist as the program’s official simulator development driver, tasking him with logging thousands of virtual laps on new circuits to sharpen HRC’s prediction tools.
Building a usable digital version of Markham starts the moment IndyCar confirms the layout. HRC works from architectural drawings defining the circuit geometry, pit lane, start-finish line, and safety runoff areas, then hands that data to rFpro, which physically scans the streets and returns a point-cloud model. That raw scan cannot be driven on directly. As Davide Tarsitano, Head of Vehicle Performance at HRC US, describes it: “Imagine these track models are just like clouds of points that are scanned. You cannot drive on a cloud of points. You need to drive on the surface. Otherwise, there are basically holes everywhere.” Fitting a driveable surface through millions of scanned points, filtering out elevation artifacts and noise, is its own engineering task. HRC targets a finished digital model eight weeks before race day.
Even a perfect digital twin of the layout doesn’t solve grip. On a Canadian street circuit, winter frost warps the asphalt annually, and city road crews patch broken stretches regularly. A single repaved corner can invalidate whatever tire-behavior assumptions the engineers built in. “If there are just a couple of corners that have been repaved because the street broke down during the winter,
Source: Honda. Images courtesy of Honda.
