Fresh new look for Hinchcliffe
Canadian readies for fourth season with new car, new sponsor
TORONTO — The first thing you notice about James Hinchcliffe is his wardrobe.
It’s more — how do you put it — presentable. Gone is the lime green colour scheme of his former sponsor GoDaddy.com.
Instead, on a chilly Wednesday afternoon in Toronto, the IndyCar driver from Oakville, Ont., is sitting upstairs at Steam Whistle Brewing, wearing a subtle black golf shirt that bears an understated blue-and-white logo of his new sponsor, United Fiber & Data. Has Hinchcliffe gone corporate? No way, he says. While United Fiber & Data sounds like the kind of company Go Daddy would parody in its offbeat commercials (which used to star Hinchcliffe), it is actually a broadband networking company owned by members of Live, a 1990s alternative band.
“I’m basically sponsored by rock stars,” Hinchcliffe says proudly.
“It makes the possibility of fun pretty endless.”
It’s still not Go Daddy, a multimedia sponsor that helped market Danica Patrick and also made Hinchcliffe a sort of a celebrity by plastering his face on billboards. That much was apparent when Hinchcliffe arrived to the track one day to get a look at his new car.
“It’s completely different,” he says of the paint job. “The Go Daddy car was easy to spot from Mars. It might not be as easy to spot (his new car) out on track but hopefully, if we’re running up front, it will be.”
Up front is where Hinchcliffe began last season, where he picked up his first IndyCar win in the first race of the series in St. Petersburg, Fla. It was a breakout year for the 27-year-old, who won twice more in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Iowa. But he struggled with consistency and ended up eighth in the overall rankings for the second straight year.
With a new sponsor and a new car engine — his team, Andretti Autosport, switched from Chevrolet to Honda — Hinchcliffe is hoping that he can put it all together for his fourth season on the circuit, which begins on March 30 in St. Petersburg.
“Last year was an up and down year from the start,” he says. “The second half was a little more consistent but we didn’t quite have the pace. Now we have to combine those two elements. We need the pace from the first part of the year and the consistency from the second part of the year.”