In an intensive 45-minute phone call on Thursday between RACER, Team Penske president Tim Cindric and managing director Ron Ruzewski — the two senior-most leaders of Roger Penske’s IndyCar Series program — explained their side of the push-to-pass (P2P) saga that has brought embarrassment to the team and the series owned by Roger Penske.
Caught by IndyCar during Sunday’s morning warmup at Long Beach, the findings of improper uses of 50hp shots of power from the P2P system when the systems were deactivated led to championship leader Josef Newgarden losing his victory from the opening race of the year at St. Petersburg, teammate Scott McLaughlin being disqualified from his third-place result, and Will Power — whose car was capable of exploiting the system but it went unused — being stripped of 10 championship points.
In the case of Newgarden, who has maintained his silence since the penalties were announced Wednesday morning, the Tennessean is due to speak with the assembled media on Friday morning at Barber Motorsports Park. For McLaughlin, an urgency to protect his reputation led to a social media post on Wednesday night. Power followed suit with his own statement on Thursday.
But Team Penske has not given an in-depth explanation of what happened from a procedural and technical standpoint until now, which Cindric and Ruzewski offer below.
“We want to clear it up to where we’ll put it on a platter and expose it to everybody,” Cindric told RACER. “There’s nothing here to hide. We screwed up a process and it went undetected by us and everyone else, which to me is still surprising. But it did. And thankfully this thing happened in the warmup or we’d be talking about Long Beach.”
THE INFRACTIONS
Before we cover off the operational aspects of how Team Penske says its three cars were erroneously set up to bypass the P2P controls created by IndyCar to disable the system during race starts and restarts, let’s get the instances of illegal P2P use at St. Petersburg out of the way.
“Number one, none of our drivers used it on the start,” Cindric said, which RACER has independently verified. “It would have probably been a lot easier to see because everybody is set at 200 seconds of use or whatever the number is, and if it shows 170 or 180 for us and it shows 200 for everybody else, which is what happened in the warmup, it would be pretty obvious what happened.
“Individually, car 2 (Newgarden) used it three times for a total of nine seconds, all during restarts. There’s three seconds of push-to-pass on the restart on lap 30 on the front straight. There were 2.4 seconds going into Turn 4 (on the same lap), and that’s when the 2 overtook the 26 (Andretti Global’s Colton Herta).
“Josef used the push-to-pass for 3.6 seconds on the restart on lap 72 when he was leading. Scott used it out of Turn 9 on lap 30 for 1.9 seconds.”
Newgarden’s three uses for nine seconds and McLaughlin’s single use for 1.9 seconds were also externally verified to RACER as being accurate.
INVESTIGATION
IndyCar called Team Penske to its operations trailer Sunday morning after the cars were found to be out of compliance in the warmup and began its investigation into the matter. Ruzewski says he led the charge internally to assist the series with the process.
“As soon as we were aware of it at Long Beach, as soon as the race got done, we started going through stuff,” he added. “It was Monday when Tim presented all the information to IndyCar. We were forthcoming and said, ‘Here’s what happened at St. Pete,’ because this (P2P usage) was in there. This has been in there. There was no waiting for accusations or whatever from the series. We were like, ‘Holy s••t, this is bad. This is wrong.’”
HOW THEY SAY IT HAPPENED
The ability to bypass IndyCar’s control of its P2P system is centered on two electronic boxes, the CLU (Central Logger Unit) and the MyLaps timing and scoring transponder, which works together with the CLU in sending on or off instructions to the ECU (engine control module).
A deeper explanation exists in Wednesday’s analysis story for those who are interested, so to avoid repetition, just know that the CLU/MyLaps boxes behave as the gatekeepers to whether the ECU is instructed to give or take P2P away from the drivers.
As some engine technicians and data engineers believe, Team Penske spoofed the “on” signal IndyCar sends remotely and wirelessly through the CLU/MyLaps communications path to trick the ECU to give Penske’s drivers a live button on starts and restarts.
Given an open forum to explain how IndyCar’s P2P controls were circumvented, Cindric says it was a case of shortcuts being taken by the team and a legacy of incorrect settings being carried over from hybrid engine testing in August of 2023 at Sebring.
“From my perspective, it is not any one person,” Cindric said as he started an extended narrative. “The process in which we got there was flawed. But we’re certainly not here to hide anything about what happened, because it’s important for us to be completely transparent with everybody.
“The number one thing I wanted to understand, that Roger [Penske] wanted to understand collectively is, was this done on purpose? And if so, who, what, where and why? Who would think that they would even remotely get away with something like this? And if we did, for how long? You know, people are gonna believe what they want to believe at this point. It’s a sensational story. As you know, in a competitive environment — nobody’s really your friend as far as your competitors.
“We tested at Sebring with a hybrid car. There were multiple iterations of software coming through on a pretty consistent basis. I wasn’t at this test, but one thing I understand is that there was a need to have the (P2P) button operational, independent of the hybrid deployment. And in the (CLU), there’s a way to do that. That’s accessible to all teams. So there’s an equation in there and a line that if you change the value to ‘1’ then push-to-pass is available all the time, provided that the ECU has been loaded with push-to-pass. And we did all the hybrid testing with this.
“And when it came time to run our race cars, there were so many things that had changed with channels, nomenclature, electronics and software, all that stuff. And at that point in time, we loaded the software in, basically the same file that was in the hybrid cars, instead of rewriting all the different nomenclature, labels, and whatever else.
“Somebody made the decision that it was easiest just to cut and paste out of that and load that into the three race cars. So now all the cars are loaded with this same push-to-pass equation, which is a constant. At that point, it’s just simply if you push the button, then you end up with push-to-pass active.”
THE TECH SIDE
According to Cindric, the team did not do anything that was intentionally devious like setting the CLU/MyLaps gateway to show it had the correct string of P2P code in the software while circumventing the gateway through other means.
In fact, Cindric says that instead of having the proper string of CLE code of “Choose(MYL_Overtake Staus ==3,1,0)” entered which would have given IndyCar full control over the use of P2P, its three cars competed at St. Petersburg through the time it was caught last weekend with that code replaced by the illegal “1” that gave the ECU a constant green light to give their drivers P2P whenever they wanted.
“They called me in and said we were defeating their control and showed me the equation,” Ruzewski said. “They said this (P2P) status equals ‘1’ all the time, which says you can operate it in a way where I was surprised. This is what caught me off guard because I had no idea. So I had to educate myself a little bit on how it was controlled, and once I found out, yep, that’s the case. It was as easy as that.
“We just literally took what we did from the hybrid, because it was so many new data streams, and we finally got to test everything and get everything working. And then it was a cut and paste error. An oversight.”
NEWGARDEN AND McLAUGHLIN
With a single use of the illegally-available P2P on a restart, McLaughlin’s assertion in his statement that it was done without forethought or malice has credible tones since it wasn’t used a second time. The 1.9s burst of extra power was, without question, an unfair advantage from Turn 9 to Turn 11, but did not result in his ability to make a pass.
Newgarden’s repeated use of illegal P2P at St. Petersburg is more complicated.
Some drivers make a habit of pressing the P2P button on starts and restarts in the off chance the system has been mistakenly activated by the series. Newgarden, in particular, is well-known within the driver group for frequently hitting the inactive P2P button on starts and restarts and did so prior to joining Team Penske.
Out of curiosity, Cindric asked his engineering team to create a report that would identify how many times his drivers pressed the P2P button in 2023 while it was disabled — use of the button, whether it’s active or inactive, is logged in the data — and the results were telling.
“I got the answer I expected, to be honest,” Cindric said. “Last year, Newgarden pushed the button 29 times on either starts or restarts. Power did it 12 times. And McLaughlin did it seven times. And the next thing that I wanted to understand is why is one driver doing it more than the others?”
Cindric points to the individual steering wheel dash arrangement preferences of his IndyCar trio as the likely reason why McLaughlin and Power do less of the habitual button pressing.
“In Will and Scott’s case, they asked for gray bars on the right and left side of their dash that are lit when push-to-pass is inactive,” he added. “In other words, on starts or restarts, it basically tells them, ‘Hey, it’s inactive.’ And Newgarden doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want those bars. He’ll probably tell you that he just pushes the button whenever he thinks he can use it, whether it works or doesn’t work.”
Having used the illegal P2P power to pull away from the field at the first restart and again on the final restart, Newgarden’s practice of stabbing away at the button when it shouldn’t be working would fit a long-held pattern of optimism-filled behavior.
Where the pattern is broken is on the first restart, where Newgarden made a second use of P2P, and not entering the front straight as the green flag waved where he’s known to press the button, but later in the lap to pass Herta at Turn 4.
The deployment of P2P power once more after that restart, and while the system had yet to be activated by IndyCar, raises questions of Newgarden’s awareness of the ability to exploit the illegal advantage and willingness to use it twice on lap 30.
He also elected to not use it on the second restart, which raises more questions as to why the advantage was used twice on the first restart for a combined 5.4s, skipped on the second restart, and used for 3.6s on the third and final restart on lap 72 to streak away from Pato O’Ward and eventually win by 7.9121s.
NOBODY KNEW DURING OR AFTER THE RACE?
Among the most critical aspects of this issue to understand is whether Team Penske was alerted to the ability to use P2P when it was meant to be disabled during the St. Petersburg race.
The question itself assumes the team and its drivers were ignorant of the situation before the race, which Cindric, Ruzewski, McLaughlin and Power say is true. Following that line of thinking, it should have come as a surprise to Newgarden and McLaughlin when it did work. McLaughlin, again, says he didn’t know it had been used.
Due to Newgarden’s silence prior to the Friday press conference, his ignorance of or complicity in the ordeal was unknown at the time of writing.
Left to ask if Newgarden, the team’s most active illegal user of P2P at the race, informed Cindric — his race strategist — or anyone else associated with the No. 2 Chevy during or after the race about the button being active, Cindric said, “It never came up in our debrief.”
AND NOBODY CAUGHT IT IN THE MONTH-PLUS LEADING INTO LONG BEACH?
The hardest item to process is notion that Team Penske — North America’s gold standard in motor racing with championships in IndyCar, IMSA, and NASCAR, plus countless wins at all of the country’s biggest events, who abide by the “Penske Perfect” ethos — missed all of the warning signs about its illegal P2P configuration and all of the irregularities captured in the race data of the Nos. 2 and 3 at St. Petersburg.
The same concern applies to Team Chevy and its engine technicians, who were also seemingly unaware of the illegal uses of P2P that were present in their ECU data.
Add up the amount of people on the team and manufacturer side who didn’t see or raise a red flag after St. Petersburg, and it’s easier to understand the reasoning behind IndyCar’s aggressive punishment and the wave of criticism and disbelief aimed at the team.
As well, the fact that all of the team’s systems/data engineers went more than a month with the anytime P2P value of “1” entered into the software on all three cars without noticing is remarkable.
Such a longstanding oversight would be more readily accepted from a smaller and lesser team.
OLD DATA AND VIDEO REVIEW
Since RACER posted its initial analysis of the situation and closed with a question of whether the series will look back to previous years and investigate whether Team Penske has used P2P illegally, RACER has learned this already took place — prior to the current scandal — and the team was cleared of any wrongdoing. It’s unknown whether IndyCar will take a second look in response to this week’s events.
As noted in the first analysis piece, one team told RACER it supplied onboard video clips to IndyCar in 2023 which depicted what it felt was suspicious uses of P2P.
“I definitely want to clear that up,” Cindric said. “If there was anything in 2023, IndyCar has all that data and everything there. There is zero chance that any of this current occurred in 2023. And they can go through all the data and look at it at any point in time.”
According to Cindric, there was another identical allegation leveled against the team in 2022 which he says resulted in the team being cleared by IndyCar.
“We also want to address this 2022 video,” he continued. “There were some questions in the past about whether or not we were using push-to-pass illegally. There was an inquiry in 2022. McLaughlin was moving his thumb at the button in qualifying, but the ECU wouldn’t have had any push-to-pass even loaded in it.
“IndyCar came and looked at our steering wheel because he was moving his finger around, which is something that he does. The wheel was completely disassembled and found to have no issues or infractions. So I just want to clear that up because it was reviewed and IndyCar did come and confiscate our steering wheel and go through all that stuff.”
FINAL
Having consulted with a current championship-winning IndyCar data engineer on the CLU/MyLaps explanation and Penske’s excuse of leaving of a “1” instead of the correct “Choose(MYL_Overtake Staus ==3,1,0)” string in the software that opened the door to anytime P2P, they agreed that it was possible, albeit not something they would expect from Team Penske, and said it could have happened as simply as Cindric and Ruzewski have outlined.