While a 2-3-4 finish at Iowa Speedway last Saturday marked something of a comeback for Team Penske, it followed that up the next day in the second race of the double-header with two DNFs and a car that should have won finishing 10th.
Before Iowa - arguably the team's best track - it was on a run with an average finish of 19.73 over the previous five races across its three cars, clearly well below what people would expect of the team.
But there are so many layers to this season for Penske that merely calling it a team in crisis because of its results would be a lazy analysis.
Sure, there's been tension, missed opportunities, underperformance, and even a high-profile rule breach in the biggest race of the year.
But there's also cause for hope and unity, using the nightmare season as a learning experience and coming back stronger as a group. This is a defining moment in the 60-plus year history of Team Penske.
The numbers do paint a bleak picture, though. Josef Newgarden is on his longest run without a win since he joined the team in 2017. Five races without a podium - before Iowa - hadn't been done by Penske as a whole since 2013. It has 12 DNFs this season, one per race on average.
Let's try to get to the bottom of its current form, where its season has come undone, and more.
Is it the drivers' fault?
It's absolutely clear that none of Penske's drivers are having their best IndyCar seasons. They've all made high-profile errors in key moments when good finishes were in the offing. So let's start with that proviso.
Scott McLaughlin crashed on the warm-up lap for the Indianapolis 500 and crashed into Nolan Siegel in Detroit, although that collision was unfortunate when you look at where Siegel braked.
Will Power overshot his pitbox in the Indy 500 and spun at Road America.
Newgarden crashed at Road America and, unless an issue is retrospectively found, spun out alone at Mid-Ohio on the first lap.
But, excluding runaway championship leader Alex Palou, you'd struggle to find a driver that hasn't made a mistake in two races this season. And the number of additional things that have gone wrong outside of the Penske drivers' control, listed below, has got to be higher than the rival top teams.
Penske drivers' external issues
McLaughlin
Thermal: MGU overheating, 27th
Gateway: mechanical issue, 24th
Mid-Ohio: tyre delaminated, 23rd
Iowa race two: hit before start, 26th
Power
St Petersburg: taken out on lap one, 26th
Gateway: tyre failure, 27th
Mid-Ohio: misfire, 26th
Iowa race two: engine issue, 24th
Newgarden
St Petersburg: fuel issue meant third instead of likely second
Long Beach: seat belt issue, 27th
Indy 500: fuel issue, 22nd
Gateway: leading but hit a spinning car, out of his control, 25th
Iowa: cautions in both races cost what looked like certain wins
McLaughlin would have been in the top five at Gateway, Power was second there, and Newgarden could have won in St Petersburg, at Indy and Gateway, and both Iowa races. Those results would make a big difference in the points: had he won those races he'd be second in the championship.
So, yes, the drivers haven't been flawless. It's worth adding Power and Newgarden have been poor in qualifying at times compared to McLaughlin.
But there are easily four or five wins that could have gone their way and a string of top fives and top 10s that have become 27ths or so.
Really, all three drivers ought to be positioned between fifth and 12th in the championship without some of the extreme poor fortune.
It's not all the team's fault
While some of the issues Penske has had may have been avoidable, there haven’t been any repeat issues that point to poor preparation.
Penske is one of the best-resourced and thorough teams in the paddock when it comes to preparation and turning out perfect cars.
Perhaps this isn't the best example, but it springs to mind that Penske chromes its suspension arms. This is a team hell bent on putting the best possible product on track, even if there's no performance gain.
It hasn't been perfect on strategy, pitstops or reliability. But it hasn't deserved the number of issues it has had either. A glance back at the drivers' misfortune shows you 13 instances - out of 36 race entries across its three cars in 2025.
That being said, it's hard to reconcile the 12 effective DNFs - the most the team has suffered since 2000 and one per race when averaged out - with five races still to go.
It's not the first time a winless streak like this has happened recently either. In 2021, it took Penske until the 10th round of the season to win with Newgarden at Mid-Ohio.
But this drought has eclipsed that one, and the difference in 2021 was a host of runner-up and podium finishes before breaking the duck. Running at the sharp end has been less frequent this year and that has to change. The second place Newgarden took in Iowa race one was Penske's best result of the season.
You wouldn't expect Penske to 'settle' for a top-five finish. Anything other than a win is usually failure for this team, such is its usual competitiveness. But Power's reaction to his third-place finish in race one at Iowa was telling.
"I was stoked to get a podium, I really was," he said.
"Wins are nice, but considering what's been going on, just [a] top five would have been good. Just finish the bloody race, get some points.
"For crying out loud, we have such potential every week. Just to leave so much on the table in the last few races has been really disappointing. Just nice to have a solid result and build on it."
What's going on with Newgarden?
It's clear Newgarden has had a rough couple of years, whether that's been a teary-eyed press conference at Barber last year - discussing his role in the push-to-pass scandal at the 2024 season opener, which was both brave and a testament to his character to own up to his mistake - or three seasons of struggling to find consistency outside of the Indy 500.
There have been personnel changes around Newgarden, and he's spoken of trying to adjust his approach to enjoy racing more, even admitting there was a time pre-2024 where he didn't enjoy strapping into the car each week.
In recent weeks, he's cut a downtrodden figure, rarely appearing in TV interviews and giving short, brief answers when he has been so insightful in the past.
It's clear Newgarden isn't happy with how his run has been portrayed, and it wouldn't be a leap to suggest he is not happy with how he has been treated by some people in the paddock. He probably just wants this season to be over with.
At Iowa, Power looked to take the pressure off his team-mate when he gave a short answer to an unrelated question about the high-line at Iowa, in which both drivers were smiling and laughing.
"Josef loves to answer questions at the moment. He's seething. Seething. He didn't win. He was close. I saw it. I was like, 'He's going to get him'. He's going to get him on the outside. But he moved him up a little."
Newgarden has always been one of the most honest and expressive interviewees in the paddock. Whether you like him or not, he doesn't deserve a lot of what's been thrown at him on or off track. Only those around him really know how this stretch has impacted him, his family and his team, but at his best he's still among the IndyCar elite and a great character.
In terms of results, the Iowa opener marked his first podium - his first respite - since St Petersburg in March.
He hasn't even had an Indy 500 win to kind of fall back on - he'd taken two in succession before this year - despite delivering what former IndyCar racer James Hinchcliffe described as one of the best drives he'd ever seen at the Speedway. Newgarden started 32nd - a position the race has never been won from before - but was in contention by the halfway point, before he retired with a fuel issue.
At Iowa, things picked up with a second and a 10th, which should both have been wins had he experienced a little more fortune. Still, it helped him jump from a barely fathomable 19th in the points up to 14th.
While still not his usual talkative self, he did seem more open to media that weekend too, at least in IndyCar's press conferences.
Asked about his recent run, he said: "I have zero doubt in our process and what we do.
"I've been here a long time. I've worked with it feels like the best of the best, it really does, across the board.
"We have really good people, still do, and I think the worst thing to do would be to change what our process is. To overreact would be the wrong decision. That's definitely not what we should be doing.
"It's been a unique stretch for us, but we've got the team, without a doubt. I believe in every individual here."
With Newgarden seemingly struggling to process his run of form and how it looks, Power not knowing if he has a future at the team as he awaits news on a new contract, and McLaughlin struggling to replicate his scintillating form, the team's poor season just carries another level of stress and anxiety for its drivers.
It's clear Honda has an advantage
Honda had won all 10 races before Iowa (Pato O'Ward won race one for Chevrolet-powered McLaren), and while that is so, so impressive, that apparent Honda-Chevrolet disparity has to be taken with a pinch of salt.
McLaren had come close to at least one other win before Iowa and fellow Chevy runner Penske could have had three with Newgarden alone, so it'd be lazy to just say Chevrolet has been bad and Honda has been good. It's far more nuanced and dependent on teams.
Flipping the script, if Ganassi was having Penske's season, would it still have won every race without Palou and the #10 team to rely on? I don't think so, although that's not to take away from Honda's gains.
It has brought updates this season which have improved driveability. Sources in the paddock will tell you the Honda engine is better on fuel mileage and there's been quite a few races reliant on that this year, too.
As with the drivers and the team, Chevrolet being second-best in 2025 is another small factor in Penske's struggles, but another that is adding up to a big deficit.
I'm sure Chevrolet also wants to improve reliability, which has played a role this year.
What's going on off-track
Starting with the push-to-pass scandal in 2024 and culminating with the 2025 Indy 500 qualifying debacle, in May, Penske fired its senior leadership team with a combined stint at Penske of 68 campaigns. Tim Cindric, the leader of the team, had been there since 1999 until his exit in May.
There's no doubt that incidents like these, and multiple instances of being called every name under the sun mainly by fans of other teams, will create a bonding 'us versus them' mentality that will bring Penske's employees together.
But the results on the track combined with the vitriol off it must at some point lead to a strain in relations, which in turn puts a strain on morale.
Given Roger Penske felt the need to fire a senior leadership team with that amount of experience, you could argue there was a culture issue there, and hiring replacements was always going to be tough.
This seemed like a perfect opportunity to go against Penske's usual policy of hiring from within and bring in some fresh perspectives, fresh ideas. Given everything that went wrong and the length of time these people were in charge, from the outside it feels almost like a necessity to get new blood in to freshen things up.
Instead, Penske has promoted Jonathan Diuguid and Travis Law. Diuguid was McLaughlin's engineer before switching to lead the Porsche Penske Motorsport team that won the World Endurance Championship and IMSA SportsCar Championship last year. Law has been at Penske since 2007, worked with Newgarden previously, and also was at PPM, as competition director.
The upside is that they bring knowledge of the personnel and way Penske works. But both are also ingrained in the culture and have a big remit across IndyCar and IMSA. It's likely it will take some races to figure out how all this will work and how the IndyCar team - the struggling operation right now - can benefit from this move.
The good thing about Penske is it has the resources and will act accordingly. If it needs more people, it can afford to go out there and get them. But I fear it will need to do that and could have done it now, amid a losing season, giving new blood time to bed in before next season instead of during it.
There's going to be a bedding-in period though even for Penske employees, right at the time the IndyCar team is already struggling.
What's certain is that this is an unprecedented time for everyone involved. Perhaps forgoing new ideas for people familiar with the team and able to protect it is the right call.
Maybe this was the best short-term play, but will it work out in the long run?
