Juan Pablo Montoya and Oriol Servia gave the new design the thumbs up after completing extensive test runs in their respective Chevrolet- and Honda-powered Dallara IR-12s

"From Lap 1, it just felt at home," said Servia. "The car felt great. I was flat on it out of the pits, which just says how good the car felt right away.

"I think it's going to be a fast, good racer."

"It's exciting because, for the first time in the car, it drives really, really well," said Montoya. "I think they addressed a lot of the things and the car looks great. I think having one aero kit for everybody is great for the sport. The car looks good and it drives really good."

The move to a uniform body specification is a departure from the originally intended regime in which the engine manufacturers could homologate their own design, within an existing set of parameters.

"We were pleased," said Bill Pappas, INDYCAR's vice president of competition/race engineering who headed up the technical development of the universal kit. "It matched up with our numbers that we predicted in the wind tunnel and CFD (computational fluid dynamics), so we were very happy for that."

More testing for the two cars is scheduled in August at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course and Iowa Speedway, and Sebring in September.