On track, the IndyCar Series offers the most competitive open-wheel racing on the planet, including one of its greatest races in the Indy 500. Off track, it’s an absolute basket case and its appetite for self-harm has reached a new level.
The storm that blew up around Team Penske last week is just the latest in a string of dysfunctional mishaps to roll your eyes at. While exploiting grey areas in the rulebook is part and parcel of motorsport, Penske’s gold standard has been smeared by this scandal, railroading through the push-to-pass overtake system to give the opportunity for its drivers to gain an advantage over their rivals by illegally using it at starts and restarts.
IndyCar officials only tripped over this when they failed to enable the system for warm-up at Long Beach, and all three Penske cars lit up the P2P live data stream in race control. Had that not happened, who knows how deep into the season it would have gone undetected?
Consider that Team Penske should be whiter than white on such matters. Due to Roger Penske’s incredible passion for the sport (and wealth), he owns the series, Indianapolis Motor Speedway and a team with a glittering history of success, built on a reputation of attention to detail. To avoid the potential for conflict of interest, Penske Performance Inc includes the IndyCar team, Penske Entertainment Corp owns the IndyCar Series and IMS, while RP also has an ownership stake in Ilmor, the technical partner that oversees Chevrolet’s IndyCar engines.
Team Penske president Tim Cindric, who runs the race team to further separate Penske’s church from its state, explained that a line of software code had been erroneously copied and pasted from its testing setup with the hybrid system. Starting in August 2023, they needed to access the push-to-pass in an unrestricted fashion, so the on/off variable was set to a constant ‘on’. This one line of code had wrongly been included in the central logger units of its 2024 race cars.
For outsiders, it seems hard to believe that one of IndyCar’s top teams, which prides itself on getting details right, would make such an egregious error. For series insiders, there’s a far more sinister undercurrent of suspicion: “It’s unbelievable,” one long-time