LEEDS, Ala. – The investigation into Team Penske’s push-to-pass manipulation via an incorrect line of code embedded in the software of the three IndyCar entries has been completed and closed, Series President Jay Frye told a small group of media Friday at Barber Motorsports Park, without expecting further punishment.
That review, said Mark Miles, president and CEO of Frye and Penske Entertainment Corp., included an extensive data dive into all three of Team Penske’s cars – going all the way back to the start of the 2023 campaign. One review included an additional look at the final three road and street races of 2023, which came after Team Penske president Tim Cindric said his team’s engineers manipulated code on the test chassis ahead of the manufacturer’s launch of hybrid testing in August at Sebring.
“We believe the No. 1 job for the series is to enforce the rules and uphold the integrity of the sport, and nothing will stop us from doing that to the best of our ability,” Miles said. “I believe a thorough investigation was conducted in this case. Jay and his team and a lot of engineers looked at a lot of data and everything they could, going back to every weekend in 2023 – where we found nothing.
“We have come to the conclusions we have and have imposed the sanctions we deemed appropriate.”
How IndyCar made decisions about fines and sanctions
The penalties, which included the first disqualified race winner since 1995, knocked St. Pete victor Josef Newgarden and third-place finisher Scott McLaughlin off the podium, losing them a total of 88 points from their championship title. Penske teammate Will Power, who unlike the previous two did not use passing action on starts and restarts in St. Pete, was credited with 10 points. All three teams were fined $25,000 and forfeited all related prize winnings from the season opener.
One of the questions IndyCar managers answered in the 14-minute scrum minutes before the first practice of this weekend’s on-track activities was about the thought process that led to Power’s punishment. Although he gained no advantage on track (Newgarden pressed the button three times for a total of nine seconds, while McLaughlin did so once for a 1.9 second boost) his car did not meet technical specifications.
IndyCar has a drivers’ and competitors’ championship and can take different points amounts from each depending on the penalty situation — as sometimes happens in NASCAR — and Miles said that was discussed. Ultimately, they arrived at a fair middle ground that best addressed team and driver guilt. McLaughlin has since claimed that his button press was accidental and not something he realized until Cindric brought it up when explaining the team’s problems on Tuesday. Newgarden said Friday he believed there was a rule change and expected the button to work.
“We did what we felt was appropriate and imposed significant penalties based on violations of our rules, and that’s what the role is,” Miles said. “I hope fans know that the sanctioning body has acted correctly.”
Although IndyCar and Team Penske are owned by Roger Penske, with Penske Corp. as a parent company, Miles emphasized that both are set off as separate branches of the larger company – meaning the penalty money paid by Team Penske is not part of the same individual corporate book before it is paid to Penske Entertainment.
‘It’s the truth’: Newgarden knows the explanation for the push-to-pass violation is not credible
How IndyCar wants to prevent similar software leaks
Frye said that going forward, the series has determined that the CLUs (central logger unit) in each car that communicate with the associated ECUs will now be locked by the series, making them inaccessible to team engineers to prevent software tampering. While there were no specific details, Frye said a few other firewalls will be installed within race control “to highlight these types of things more clearly,” though he didn’t go into specifics.
When asked about the ways in which race control fell short and could have detected this anomaly in St. Pete, or even in the following weeks during typical reviews of race data, Frye had little explanation. He did say that in the weeks between St. Pete and Long Beach, no team had filed formal complaints that tipped off IndyCar officials.
“We didn’t notice it in St. Pete, and that’s our responsibility, so we have to go back and evaluate what we did or didn’t do at this point,” he said. “There are a lot of different mechanisms and millions of data points coming out of these cars – millions of them.
“So again, we think that by what we do with the CLU and lock them down in the future, this will prevent this from happening in the future. We’re dealing with 27 very, very good racing teams and a lot of very smart people. We also have a lot of smart people in IndyCar, and it’s our job to ensure the integrity of the sport and the racing. We are confident and comfortable with what we are doing going forward, ensuring this cannot happen again.”
‘Do you think we’re all stupid?’: IndyCar drivers and owners respond to Team Penske rule violations
‘It is very difficult to determine intent on the part of the police’
As Newgarden noted Friday morning, and Cindric acknowledged in a phone call with IndyStar on Thursday, increasingly vocal parts of the IndyCar paddock are not seeing the viability of Team Penske’s twisted story about how it accidentally broke the rules.
When asked Friday whether he, too, questioned the intentions of Cindric and the engineers under his leadership, Frye offered no opinion either way.
How it happened: Tim Cindric explains how Team Penske ran afoul of IndyCar rules
“It’s very difficult to monitor or assess intent, so ultimately it’s about data, and again, it’s our responsibility,” Frye said. “We haven’t noticed it in St. Pete, but we have mechanisms in place that we believe should prevent this from happening in the future.
“Our job is to enforce the rules and to do so independently and with good judgment, based on the data. That is our focus.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar President Frye, CEO Miles: Team Penske investigation complete