IndyCar leadership met with the press on Friday at Barber Motorsports Park to address any lingering questions over the penalties doled out to Team Penske the preceding week.
The key takeaways from the infraction were that a line of code was altered in the Central Logger Units of the engine, which overrode a lock that prevented drivers from accessing the push-to-pass function before race control makes it available, typically the alternative start-finish line almost a full lap into a run.
Josef Newgarden had his win at St. Petersburg taken away when it was discovered that he used push-to-pass before he was permitted. Teammate Scott McLaughlin had his third-place result taken away for the same reason.
Will Power was deducted 10 points because his engine had the bypass code written into it but he did not use push-to-pass during the prohibited period. All three teams were also fined $25,000.
The CLU is different from the Engine Control Unit in that teams have access to it for a variety of competitive engineering purposes. ECU software can only be accessed by IndyCar, Chevrolet and Honda.
Newgarden, during an emotional press conference earlier in the morning, echoed the case made by his boss, team president Tim Cindric, that the line of code was accidentally entered into the Team Penske CLUs.
He said he used it believing the rules about push-to-pass not being available on starts and restarts had been changed during the offseason. That argument was not received well by his peers.
Nevertheless, in order to prevent that from happening again, IndyCar has made adjustments to its rule book to prevent teams from having open access to the CLU through the use of mandated software patched.
IndyCar is also adding a review of the software settings to its technical inspection process moving forward. IndyCar president Jay Frye detailed the reasons why on Friday during a paddock scrum as detailed by RACER.com.
“Before, they were unlocked,” Frye said. “So that’s one way to prevent this, going forward. There’s a couple of things we’re doing from a race control perspective, that will be different that will highlight things like this (and make them) a little bit more obvious.”
IndyCar caught Team Penske running the illegal software override on Sunday at Long Beach and the team proactively provided the series evidence that it had used push-to-pass before it was permitted to during the season opening Grand Prix of St. Petersburg.
Frye conceded that was a failure of the sanctioning body.
“That’s something that obviously we did not catch it. And that’s on us,” Frye said. “So, we have to go back and evaluate what we did or what we didn’t do at that point. Obviously, there was talk about the amount of time it took from St. Pete to Long Beach to address this. Obviously, if St. Pete and Long Beach would have been back to back versus five weeks apart, the outcome would have been the same.”
Frye also says IndyCar reviewed data going back to last season to see if there was any evidence of wrongdoing.
“We think the penalty was addressed,” Frye said. “It was, we think, severe. And it’s been handled and going forward (we’re) treating (them) just like we always treat everybody else.”
There is extra scrutiny surrounding the infraction because Team Penske is owned by Roger Penske, who also owned both the IndyCar Series and Indianapolis Motor Speedway since 2019. Penske has divested himself of operating the race team, instead delegating those roles to Cindric, but the optics were not great.
Also representing the series to address that element was Penske Entertainment Group CEO Mark Miles who said he and Frye handled this matter independently but that Penske would speak about it only if he so chose.
“Certainly (it’s) his choice as to when he wants to… where and how to conduct himself and whether he’ll communicate and with whom is on him to decide whether and when,” he said. “I would just say from our perspective — I think Jay feels exactly the same way — what was really important to us was there was never any question of any interference (from Penske). We could be objective and handle the data. In the same way that we would have handled it for any other team.”
Penske did tell the Associated Press last week that he felt embarrassed by the ordeal.
Miles said the case is effectively closed.
“We think Job No. 1 for the series is to enforce the rules and uphold the integrity of the sport, and nothing will keep us from doing that as best we can,” Miles said. “I think in this case, a thorough investigation was conducted. Jay and his team and a whole lot of engineers looked into a whole lot of data and everything they could, going back to every weekend in 2023 – where we found nothing.
“We reached the conclusions that we reached and enforced the penalties we thought were appropriate.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
