For the second time in as many years, Team Penske is involved in a high-profile IndyCar cheating row, resulting in everything from harsh penalties to questions about how the championship is governed.
After Will Power and Josef Newgarden were put to the back of the field for the Indianapolis 500 amid a row over the modification of a rear body part, IndyCar president Doug Boles - who only took over the role this year from Jay Frye - stepped out to answer questions about what happened, how IndyCar arrived at its penalties and whether non-qualifier Jacob Abel had been robbed.
Let’s go through what Penske did and the major questions the affair is prompting about how IndyCar is run.
What happened?
On Sunday before Fast 12 qualifying, Josef Newgarden’s Penske car failed pre-qualifying inspection because of some filler being added to the seam between the attenuator - including the pillar that holds up the rear wing - and nearby bodywork. Smoothing this seam over would likely provide a very small aerodynamic boost, if any at all.
The video below explains where the part is and where the work would have been done.
Prior to this happening, the #12 Will Power car had gone through and passed tech inspection, despite IndyCar technical director Kevin Blanch (known to most as Rocket) noting on the #12 car that “the attenuator might have been modified" according to Boles, who added Blanch “in his head was pretty sure that we had a rule, but he didn't have the rule book with him”.
The IndyCar rule book can be accessed in seconds from a smartphone. It does make you wonder what the point of the pre-qualifying inspection is if a car can clear it, roll out and qualify, and then be disqualified in the post-qualifying tech. Why not just do the post-session inspection rather than both if this can happen?
Once IndyCar alerted Penske that the #12 car would fail the post-qualifying inspection, Penske pulled the car out of line.
Boles had told reporters in the paddock any penalties would come after the race, but explained on Monday that while that is the normal procedure, IndyCar realised that wouldn’t be adequate this time.
“You realise the gravity of this event, it certainly makes you feel like: ‘you know what, we shouldn't be treating this like any other event,’” Boles explained.
No driver has won the Indy 500 from lower than 28th, and Newgarden’s bid to become the first driver to win three Indy 500s in a row looks much, much harder from 32nd. Power starts last in 33rd.
The team's car of Scott McLaughlin crashed in practice so also didn't start the top 12 qualifying session, but Boles says IndyCar has inspected McLaughlin's wing and it didn't have the seam and attenuator work the other cars did. That's why he has been able to keep 10th on the grid.
"We do have the attenuators from all three of these cars," said Boles.
"The #3 car attenuator from the crash with the crashed wing still attached to it was provided to us, and we still have it. That attenuator was not modified at all."
The penalty
It wasn’t immediately obvious when the penalty was announced why the Penske cars were being put to the back of the grid because there didn’t seem to be a rule to legislate for it. But Boles has clarified this.
“Thinking about the integrity and the importance of this race, IndyCar has a rule,” he said. “It's Rule 9.2.1: Penalties can be determined by the gravity of the violation and its impact on the fairness of competition. IndyCar has the authority to impose any or all or any combination of the following penalties against any member for any violation of the rules at any time.”
Boles continued: “For us, especially on that stage, we believed that allowing the two cars, the #2 and the #12, to start in 12th and 11th, which is a place that they might have actually qualified in had they been allowed to qualify, was not a sufficient enough penalty and did not present an appropriate enough result for the violation.
“Therefore, we have decided to move the #2 and the #12 car to the back of the grid.”
Why this reflects on Roger Penske
It’s less about Roger Penske himself and more his position as the owner of the IndyCar Series, the Indianapolis 500, and Team Penske as it competes in those events and at that track.
Honestly, ever since Penske took over the series in 2020 there have been conversations about whether IndyCar needs to have a separate and independent body for matters relating to rules and governance. This has never come to fruition.
Boles only took this job prior to this season starting and he’s had a mess of issues to deal with and this debate only really comes up when Penske breaks a rule!
This cry for more independence started last year when Penske was deemed to have broken the series' push-to-pass laws, which resulted in some of the strongest penalties ever dished out by IndyCar including disqualifications for the St Petersburg win.
As a side note, that controversy led to Penske suspending Tim Cindric, the team's IndyCar president, and team manager Ron Ruzewski, for last year's Indy 500. Both will now be suspended for this one too as they’re Newgarden and Power's strategists respectively, and them being suspended was part of the punishments for the attenuator infringement.
At this stage, my opinion is that an independent rules body would help Penske more than anyone else! Every time it breaks a rule or one of its drivers does or doesn’t get a penalty in a race, it’s immediately vilified in a much harsher way than any other team would likely be.
Even today’s penalty, you could argue the $100,000 fine and suspension of the strategists of the two cars is as much a signal of intent to appease people making links between Penske’s ownership of the team and series in the paddock as it is purely assessing a course of events.
The word integrity keeps being used by Boles and it's used in the initial IndyCar statement. I wonder if IndyCar felt it had no choice but to give Penske a bigger penalty than it might have other teams to avoid being accused of a conflict of interest.
We can’t know the answer to that fully. But at this point an independent body has to be a priority for everybody.
“I get the optics challenge, and it's definitely something we should think about,” said Boles, when asked about Penske's position as team owner and series owner.
“How do you manage the optics challenge? A lot of these challenges, while they roll up to Roger at the end of the day, I think they are certainly below him. There are things that happen that don't ever get to Roger.”
He added “as far as the series goes, we are open to looking at wherever we are”.
Equally, this is an undoubted rule infraction at the event that matters most of all, by the team owned by the championship and circuit owner.
McLaren’s Pato O’Ward neatly summed up how that looks after qualifying on Sunday night.
“I’m not an engineer so I can’t tell you what they were doing, how much speed that is or if it is speed. But obviously it’s not in regulation, the rule is pretty black and white," he said.
"Those cars should have been in the last chance qualifier. Obviously they didn’t do anything in the Fast 12 but they should have been brought into the LCQ.
“Because they had that yesterday, I guarantee you, and until someone pointed it out today, so if they were disqualified today they should have been disqualified yesterday.
“It’s a shame really because they don’t need to be doing that stuff. They’re a great team, they’ve got great drivers, why are you doing that? Makes no sense.”
Explosive allegations
During the Boles press conference, Racer journalist Marshall Pruett put it to Boles that “multiple teams” have “alerted IndyCar prior to Sunday that those modifications existed”, and “I’ve found and circled these components on the cars Saturday, Thursday, going back to April at the open test. I've had teams tell me they have photos of these modified attenuators from this race last year”.
On the same topic, Indy Star’s Nathan Brown and Pruett even noted that the seam appeared to be filled in on the car on display in the Indianapolis museum to represent Newgarden's 2024 win.
Pruett added: “These cars have gone through tech many times, and either this has been missed or wilfully ignored.”
Boles’ reply in full: “So I guess the first way to respond to that, it was found on Sunday. So those are the facts. The facts I know is it was found on Sunday. This penalty is based on what happened on Sunday.
“I have had teams tell me since last night that they have photos of cars - not just Penske cars, other cars - with things on cars that are not within the rules, and I've asked them why no one has sent anything to me or ever said anything to me about that? So I have never heard that.
“I know that's around the paddock, but I have never heard the news. If somebody had told me that was the case, I would have gone to Rocket and talked to Rocket and made sure we paid attention to that. In my conversations with Rocket, Rocket has said that he does hear from teams occasionally about a lot of things, but he did not specifically say that he heard something about this particular issue.
“Again, I'm just going on the facts that I have. The facts that I have is I know that yesterday the car was not conforming to our rules. I can only make a decision on what I know.
“I can only encourage people if there are photos of cars with things illegal on them, they need to tell me. Then I can address it, but I can't address something that happened last year when I wasn't even in this job, and I can't address something that happened on Saturday if nobody had the guts to come and tell me it was going on Saturday.”
That sounds like a challenge to IndyCar teams: come forward with what you have.
Why isn't Jacob Abel being allowed to race instead?
There’s been a clamour for Jacob Abel to be reinstated to the Indy 500 grid after being bumped out of Last Chance Qualifying on Sunday.
With Penske’s cars in violation of the rules many have asked why Abel still has to sit out a race he thereotically might have qualified for.
Boles' argument is that the Penske cars passed inspection and were therefore deemed legal on Saturday, so they made the field based on that. Who took pole and who was bumped happened in a new day of action on Sunday. To throw the Penske cars out entirely would undo the work the cars deemed legal did on the Saturday.
“Those two cars, the #2 and the #12, qualified on Saturday,” said Boles.
“They had passed tech. We did not see anything illegal with those cars in tech. So, therefore, we are starting the 33 fastest cars in the Indianapolis 500. The #2 and the #12 just happen to start at the back.”
He added “do I feel gutted for Jacob Abel? Absolutely” but “in this instance I don't think that the result for the 33 cars should be changed”.
A thoughtful Abel replied “yes and no” when asked whether a part of him felt he deserved to be on the grid in light of the Penske revelations.
“I do see all the comments. I do appreciate everyone's support and everything saying that we should be in the race because we were legal and all of that,” he said.
“But at the end of the day, we knew what we needed to do on Saturday and we knew what we needed to do on Sunday. And unfortunately, we just came up short.
“I want to be in the Indy 500 more than anything in the world, but I don't want to be there on a technicality. I want to deserve to be there.
“We had our chance just like every other car did. And we didn't make it, simply put. We had issues with our cars.
“As much as it stings, there's a reason we aren't there and we knew what we had to do and we didn't get it done.
“So, yes, again, I appreciate all the support. I appreciate everyone chanting that I should be in there.
“But at the end of the day we knew what we had to do and we couldn't get it done. And that's kind of the reality that we're going to have to live with.”
What happens now
Practice! After Newgarden was told he couldn’t run in qualifying yesterday, he ran around the track! He even ran up to the radio booth and correctly predicted Robert Shwartzman would win pole in a fun, laid-back interview.
But if winning three in a row wasn’t enough of a first, he’ll have to do it from a starting spot no one has done it from before.
IndyCar teams found some inventive ways to update their starting positions on social media, many of which involved a graphic with the crossed-out starting position with the new one scribbled on.
Teams still have two practice sessions to perfect their cars for Sunday’s race. That’s all Penske can focus on and is within its control.
- Jack Benyon
