'You think we're all stupid?' IndyCar reacts to Team Penske's rules violations

"Insulting." "Brazen." "Bold-faced lie."

The IndyCar paddock is fuming after Team Penske, named after and molded by Roger Penske and his maniacal attention to detail, was found to have left an illegal line of code in its drivers’ setup files after six months of hybrid testing. This allowed them to use push-to-pass at last month’s season-opening Grand Prix of St. Petersburg during starts and restarts.

That Penske engineers changed the line of code in August to streamline the testing of IndyCar’s overtake system alongside its new hybrid system, and then forgot to reset that software to legal parameters before they were ‘copy-and-pasted’ into the teams’ 2024 driver profiles. It is problematic enough to many drivers and multiple non-Penske team officials IndyStar spoke to for this story.

But that Penske’s engineers, alongside those of Chevrolet, didn’t notice driver Scott McLaughlin using 1.9 seconds of overtake during a Lap 30 restart or Josef Newgarden doing so three times for a total of 9 seconds during the program’s routine post-race data dive – and that neither of the drivers noted the separate 50-horsepower bursts in the cockpit – has left the IndyCar paddock smoldering entering this weekend’s third points-paying race of the year at Barber Motorsports Park.

Tim Cindric, president of Team Penske, addressed the infractions and their related penalties – two drivers DQ’d after a podium and a win, another docked 10 points, three $25,000 fines and even more lost race winnings – in an exclusive interview Thursday with IndyStar. The head of Penske’s motorsports division detailed the team’s version of the story from how the illegal code came to be; how it was used at St. Pete; why his drivers were hitting the overtake button when it shouldn’t have worked; and why, frankly, that it was silly to think Team Penske would cheat in such an obvious way.

He couldn’t, though, explain why the coding error could have gone undiscovered for well over a month after it was illegally used at St. Pete, and then only by happenstance discovered during a Long Beach warmup last Sunday. Race control hadn’t yet turned on overtake capabilities, but Team Penske drivers were able to use them anyway.

TEAM PENSKE:Tim Cindric explains how team ran afoul of IndyCar rules 'by accident'

“I wish I knew, but that deployment isn’t typically looked at. Obviously, if it was, IndyCar would’ve noticed it earlier,” Cindric told IndyStar. “The telemetry, our competitors can see, and IndyCar gets all the data files after every race, so these are things you can’t hide.

“To say we purposefully did this to gain an advantage, I don’t know how you can come to that conclusion, unless that’s what you want to believe. The difficulty with this whole situation is people expect that we were trying to circumvent the rules with the software, and honestly, we weren’t.”

“The statement that Cindric put out is a bold-faced lie, and everyone knows that,” said one team owner, who was granted anonymity in order to speak freely on the subject. “For teams to read that, it’s, ‘Are you kidding me?’

“If you tell the lie enough times, it doesn’t make it true.”

Roger Penske's conflicts of interest

How could Penske be expected to separate the interests of his team and the series, while also owning Ilmor Engineering, the company that supplies engines for 12 of the 27 full-time entries and 16 cars in this year’s Indy 500?

“I don’t want to leave this conversation without (you all) knowing that I understand the integrity,” Penske said at his introduction as the series' new owner at the IMS Media Center stage on Nov. 4, 2019. “There’s got to be a bright line, and to me, I know what my job is. Hopefully, I’ve got enough credibility with everyone that we can be sure that there is not a conflict.

“I’ll do my very best to be sure there isn’t. If you think there is, I hope that – I know that you folks will tell me pretty quick. So I’ve got a lot of guys watching me.”

Whenever race control rulings (or no-calls) – most notably last year’s triple red-flagged Indy 500 won by Newgarden after a stoppage that surprised the paddock – happen to favor a Penske driver, the notion is enflamed.

It was largely a dormant topic … until Wednesday morning. So knowing the reputational harm on the line, Cindric reasons, why would his team knowingly skirt the rules and put its owner in a situation where he could look as if he was doling out an ounce of favoritism in a penalty ruling?

“People that don’t want to believe us aren’t going to, but believe me, if Roger or I thought anyone on our team was trying to circumvent the rules, you would’ve known who it was by now,” Cindric told IndyStar. “Why would we do something this intentional, when Roger owns the series?

“I mean, come on. It’s something so obvious to detect.”

The message, essentially, is this: Roger’s reputation, and that of his whole company, is more important than results on the racetrack. Oh, and if we were going to cheat, do you really think we’d be this bad at it?

But some fervently believe that no amount of cheating, in a sport where the best reach the top by pushing the boundaries of physics and rules alike, can be accidental – particularly at a team famous for its dueling mottos: Penske Perfect and Effort Equals Results.

This is a motorsports entity, many in the paddock are quick to remind, that lost its IMSA overall win at Watkins Glen last summer due to front skid wear less than one millimeter outside the legal limit, and then lost a front-row start at Atlanta in NASCAR earlier this year because star driver Joey Logano was wearing a webbed glove he was theorized to have used as an aerodynamic aid when stuck out the window.

Those three instances involve varied levels of culpability – running too close to the mechanical limits on parts (IMSA); at best, negligence and naivety (IndyCar); and an outright, blatant rules violation with a driver in on the plan (NASCAR). Still, those who work for Penske know public embarrassment may enrage him as much as anything.

“We’ve always been very respectful – like we never get in trouble – because that’s Roger’s way, right?” Penske Cup driver Ryan Blaney told reporters after the discovery of Logano’s illegal glove. “So it’s a real balance, because you’re always trying to find speed, but sometimes you have to kind of get a little in that gray area to find it.”

For what it’s worth, Cindric sees Logano’s glove and Newgarden and McLaughlin’s push-to-pass as diametrically opposite situations. “One is something a driver is aware of. Another is a case where our drivers had no idea.”

What IndyCar drivers think

Or so Cindric says.

The Team Penske president told IndyStar Thursday that his two drivers were unaware of the illegal code in their cars. They neither knew ahead of St. Pete; hit the overtake button when it typically wouldn’t work knowing that it would; or noticed anything odd physically on-track when they hit the push-to-pass button and got the car to respond during the first lap of a restart.

Though multiple drivers, both publicly and privately, have admitted to hitting the button on starts and restarts – either habitually or occasionally – in recent days. An equal 50-50 split of the dozen IndyStar polled for this story said there was no way one would do so without a reason. One went so far as to say they had always wanted to try, but were worried that, should it work, they’d get penalized.

The bottom line, that driver said, was this: You have two drivers physically pressing a button and hoping for a reaction that is against the rules. So how can you not jolt to attention when it unexpectedly works? On his "Off Track with Hinch and Rossi" podcast, ex-IndyCar driver and current NBC announcer James Hinchcliffe noted Newgarden has bragged about how often he has pressed the overtake button, hoping one time it would work.

According to Cindric, his two-time IndyCar champion driver pressed the push-to-pass button 29 times in 2023 when it was inactive. McLaughlin did so seven times.

Still, both doing so on the same race, and it working, pushes coincidental to an uncomfortable – if not downright impossible – level, many drivers said.

“Even if you discovered it, using it again is a blatant rules violation,” one driver said.

Said another: “I think they knew; otherwise, you’d never press it. If the penalty is that harsh, they had to know.”

'You think we're all stupid?'

The fact the illegal code was allowed to remain in place since March 10 left one team official calling Cindric’s initial statement, and ensuing interviews and statements in the last 36 hours “lies on top of lies.”

“I’m not opposed to pushing the limits. You push the limit to the max, but this is so blatant that I get offended,” another said. “You think we’re all stupid? How do you tell me the engine guy doesn’t know that that’s happening? It’s the biggest (expletive) I’ve ever heard. It’s (expletive) (expletive).”

The drivers won't speak until Friday, leaving a significant question: How did drivers not feel this? And how did some of the best engineers in the business not notice multiple instances of abnormal spikes in the data? And how could not just one of those anomalies happen – but two – and it all still be one big accidental gaffe?

It’s the one question – perhaps the central one – that Cindric couldn’t answer Thursday.

Trust us, he begged, essentially.

In the face of piles of evidence screaming otherwise, it may not be a problem even Roger Penske can fix.

“This is bad, because it’s bad for all of us,” one team representative said. “But that statement? That’s telling everybody, ‘You’re a bunch of idiots.’”