Penske's 2024 Indy win car admission adds to IndyCar crisis

IndyCar president Doug Boles says the series will not change the result of the 2024 Indianapolis 500, even after Roger Penske appeared to admit that Josef Newgarden’s winning car had an illegal part.

Newgarden’s Team Penske car failed inspection before Fast 12 qualifying last weekend because of an illegally modified attenuator, the rear crash structure, which was also modified on Will Power’s car.

Having initially been pulled from their qualifying runs but still set to start 11th and 12th, the two cars were put to the back of the Indy 500 grid on Monday.

In the wake of Roger Penske firing three of the most senior people in his team - IndyCar president Tim Cindric, managing director Ron Ruzewski and general manager Kyle Moyer - Penske gave an interview to Fox about the rules changes, and that was followed by Boles updating media with his findings from more hours of investigation into the matter.

What's happening about 2024?

Asked by Fox about images showing Newgarden’s winning car from last year appearing to run the same modified attenuator, and asked if that was the case, Penske replied: “Well, I would say this, yes.

“I would say we had nine attenuators that were modified by Dallara back at the beginning of 2024 and those have been rotated through the cars over the last 15 months.

“We also had newer ones that we bought, and those have been in the same batch and that's why you see that [Scott] McLaughlin didn’t have an issue with his car. And from my perspective, when you think about the attenuators and what happened there, my question to you is: what would we do?

“We know that the situation was not right, from the standpoint from the officials on Sunday, but when I go back to 2024, that car was taken apart piece by piece in detail following the race, and it was said to be completely legal for the win.”

This apparent admission from Penske indicates that the 2024 winning car wasn’t legal if judged in the same way as the 2025 cars on Sunday, and that it was car builder Dallara which carried out modifications rather than the team.

Indy 500 starting grid after Penske penalties

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But despite this, Boles stood firm on the result. He said of the 2024 Newgarden car “it won the Indianapolis 500” and asked whether there would be alterations to the result in light of this admission the car was not legal he said “no sir”. 

What about alterations to other results? He added: “No sir.”

Boles highlighted that there have been two other instances of safety part infractions earlier this season and both were met with harsh fines but not race result changes. And therefore this decision does appear to be in keeping with how IndyCar has officiated similar scenarios.

The fact that the modifications had little to no performance benefit, something Boles has found in his investigations too, would make stripping the 2024 win incredibly harsh.

There doesn’t appear to be any right answer that will please all parties here. It sits wrong that a car not within the rules won the race. 

But this has happened in IndyCar before, such as when Alexander Rossi won a 2022 race at the Indianapolis road course despite the car using the drinks bottle and contents as ballast to meet the minimum weight requirement. He kept the win but the Andretti team got a hefty fine and points deduction.

Plus, what if Newgarden was thrown out from last year? The car passed inspection before and after the race by IndyCar. What authority would it have to then exclude the car after it had passed the tests it oversees? That sounds like a legal mess if ever there was one.

What have we learned about independence?

Every time Team Penske breaks a rule in IndyCar it opens up people to attack the fact that the person who owns the series has a team competing in it and there’s not enough independence between the two.

Even if no one is accusing Penske of meddling in the affairs of the officials in race control, scrutineering or rule making - something he says he hasn’t done and he can “look myself in the mirror and say, I’ve done the right thing” -  the fact he owns the series and a team in it is an uneasy situation.

Asked about that, Penske said: “For probably the last six months, we’ve talked internally as IndyCar, Mark Miles, and now of course, Doug Boles, and some outside input on how we could become more independent from the operational side of the of the racing inspection, race control, etc.”

Boles added: “We have been working very, very hard to create an entity, an officiating entity, and by officiating, I mean race control and tech inspection, and an entity that is completely removed from anything that has to do with Penske Entertainment or Roger Penske or the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the IndyCar Series.

“We want to ensure that we have an officiating entity that has no ability for folks to say, 'it’s got influence from Roger Penske’.

“Am I saying that the last 72 hours had influence from Roger Penske? I’m telling you it absolutely did not.

“If it did, I probably would have left those cars exactly where they were in [11th and] 12th place, but I believe that because of the timing of that violation and the fact that that violation would have left them essentially where they could have qualified anyway that the penalty needed to be much more severe, and I can tell you that was not a fun phone call to the owner of that team.

“I’m not making excuses. We made a mistake. We missed something that is crucial to the way that we go through tech, and that is a tech element that’s related to safety, and frankly, nothing is more important than safety on those cars, even more so important than what’s happening on the racetrack because we do not want to have our drivers injured.”

Why Penske disagrees with disqualification demands

Many people have asked for IndyCar to throw the Penske cars using the modified attenuator out of the Indy 500 completely, adding it’s not fair that Jacob Abel (pictured above) was bumped from the field when two of the 33 cars ahead of his during Saturday qualifying were likely to have been running in an illegal spec.

Penske gave his combative take on that line of opinion.

“Well, I don’t agree,” he said.

“Number one, those cars went through inspection on Saturday, got the sticker, they performed in the top 12 and were available to run on Sunday. From that point on, there was a question about our cars on Sunday. We actually pulled the cars and did not make a run because of the question from the officials.

“But as far as I’m concerned, they earned the right to be in the 109th running of the Indy 500.”

Technical inspection moving forward

Boles went into incredible detail on what the function of the scrutineering team is, what they are focusing on, and the processes involved, partly because he, like many, wanted to understand how this modified attenuator had escaped the view of the tech team.

“I can tell you after the last 48 hours that I feel 100% confident that the tech team has not failed in ensuring that all of those elements that cause a car to be faster or slower because of following the rules have been followed,” he said.

“On parts that are specifically designed for safety, our team and tech does not, on a regular basis, look at those, and this is one of those parts that was not looked at until it was seen on Sunday.

“Is that a miss? Absolutely it’s a miss. Is it a part that everybody should be exposed to at every event, if they’ve changed it they’re outside of the rules? 100%."

He later added: “So coming out of qualifying, do I feel like tech did their job? 100%. Do I feel like we have a lot of opportunity to be better in tech? 100%. So one of the things that we will definitely be doing going forward…I've been three months in this job. This is an opportunity for me to get thrown into the deep end, figure out a way to make sure things like this don't happen in the future.”

Boles has promised that if investment in equipment or personnel is needed, it will be done and accounted for in the weeks and months ahead. 

He was asked about 3D scanners that have become popular in other series and explained that “there has to be a reference point in the car, and generally those reference points are built in the car as the car is designed and built, so this is definitely something that we're already looking into as we think about the next generation of car”.

He added the focus of scanning in most series is to focus on performance parts too, so the attenuator modification on the Team Penske car would likely not be spotted through that process.

'I didn't help the integrity of the sport'

Penske says he called the team owners to discuss the events of Sunday and what’s happened since.

“People have come to me and said, you’re supposed to be a leader of the sport and here you have these two situations, and I think the integrity of the sport, I didn’t help it any, from my perspective,” said Penske.

“What I have to do, I told this to the team owners, I’ve got to take the role on, along with the Penske Entertainment leadership, and gain back that credibility. Because I know the Speedway here this weekend, it’s a world-class event, the best racing event in the world, and the last thing I want to do is tarnish it with any kind of issues from the standpoint of any inspection or any rules violation.

“So my thinking is, we got to make it better. I have to help do that in a way that I’m not affecting anything beneficial for our team.”

He also said “we really have had an organisation failure two times, not once, but two times and believe me, that it hurts me in my gut”.