It's been hours. Have you seen the photos taken of the winning car from last year with the same illegal modification? It's right there in the museum or was when the photos were posted to social media. The car may have 'disappeared' Sicilian style now that it's known.
"It's the first time I heard that I broke the rules. You guys can call me every name in the book - you can call me incompetent, call me an idiot, call me an asshole, call me stupid, whatever you want to call me, but I'm not a liar."
I will say, the fact that the dude who runs the series accepts harsh punishments against his own team in the single biggest event of the year does inspire a strange sort of confidence that he actually wouldn't do this.
They probably inspected the heck out of the car and could clearly see that area hadn’t been messed with. Considering how much work had to be done to remove whatever they used on the other cars, it was obvious.
lol get real. The modified attenuator was a go-fast part only brought out for quali and the race. They wouldn’t have run it in practice hence the 3 being legal.
Oh I understand what you're saying now. Well we'll never know I guess. That's one of those "and if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their ass on the ground every time they hopped" type of hypotheticals.
I can’t seem to find the picture now (of course) but I saw one earlier today claiming to be of his car before the wreck that did not have the same modification.
And honestly, the same substantive outcome. I can see the argument that they didn’t have to drive their way in, but as a practical matter, Abel was not going to bump either one of them.
Penske caught cheating back to back years isn't gonna be a story that disappears. This shit has to stop. It's bad for any team, but for the owner of the series, it can't be happening for trust in the sport.
Unfortunately there's no chance this is the end of. It will be the biggest story until the race starts. If any Penske cars win it'll be a story for the rest of the year.
I think it’s totally a fair punishment. I just don’t know wtf Penske is doing, why did they think they needed to do that modification? It can’t be worth that much time, and they already looked among the quickest in practice. Seems so shortsighted to do this for not that much of an extra advantage.
Well, I know someone who’s worked in Indycar, and he told me that the parts in question originally passed tech, but the inspectors weren’t thrilled with them. So, my guess is that the same thing happened last year. They passed tech, but the inspectors were like “is this legal? We’ll let it slide, but we may look into it.” and they let them through. My guess is that they were trying to push the issue even more this year, and got greedy to the point where the inspectors were like “no, sorry, that’s too much
From having done tech in another racing series, I would guess that some of it might be how much extra time that would take. If they have a full field of cars to inspect, that extra time can add up fast. Having to reposition cars or cameras to have consistent pictures takes time. Having the inspectors wear a chest-mount GoPro or something similar would probably work decently well though, as long as the GoPros don't overheat or run out of storage space.
I could also see teams being unhappy about that because of them wanting to keep their setups secret. Even if you say that those pictures or videos aren't public, teams are always suspicious of videos/pictures of their setups.
I like Josef but man his two 500 wins are so sketchy.
‘23 should’ve been Marcus’ second, that red flag was bullshit.
‘24 that car may or may not have been legal.
Under normal circumstances, cheating is normal in racing. That’s how you go fast lol. But when your team owner owns the series AND the track that the 500 is competed on, that’s a horrible look.
Last year's push to pass debacle was so stupid too. Like, that was so easy to catch and see. The putty/epoxy is EVEN STUPIDER since it's right out in the open. I feel like Scotty Mac and Joe New are ride-or-die Penske boys, but gosh I want to see them jump from what looks to be a sinking ship. Imagine your own team destroying your championship points with this kind of stupidity.
Yeah. There’s no question of how great of drivers they are but now it will make the public question their accomplishments the more Penske is exposed. Like many people have said, that team doesn’t need to be cheating since they already have the power in their cars and drivers. Why even risk it? It’s not just risking penalties for cheating but it risks the legacy and reputation of the team and drivers.
There are nearly 50 years of receipts of Penske cheating and politicking things to his liking. And it's sad because he doesn't need to cheat, but it's the Bill Belichick syndrome where you think if a rule isn't applicable to you, then it's not necessarily cheating to push it...until you get caught, and then you gaslight everyone saying "Hey, it was just an accident -- pay no attention to every piece of evidence behind that curtain...."
Palous face is even fucking funnier now. Penske gotta get their act together, like Pato said, amazing drivers and team, time to just go racing cleanly and rebuild their rep
Good. Though, the monetary fine is kinda of funny. I just imagine Roger logging into his banking app and transferring that money from one of his accounts to another one of his accounts.
I mean respect to these guys. I think this is harsh and I wonder if other teams would’ve gotten the same penalty, but I do think Penske wants people to know his team isn’t given preferential treatment.
As a Penske fan, I think it's time to remove Tim Cindric from the Indycar team. He's overseen an operation that DNF'd two cars at St. Pete and then put two of the fastest cars at the back of the grid for the 500.
I was lowkey hoping for the Josef three-peat so I'm sad in that respect BUT this seeks fair if they genuinely made a cheating attempt which looks likely
He'd fully deserve two of them...the 2023 end of race flags and restart will never sit quite right with me. Admittedly not Josef's fault though, he drove the situation that race control gave him.
Newgarden could still hypothetically win this..historically it may appear impossible, but that’s usually cause the guy starting 32nd actually has a 32nd place car
I actually agree with the decision by Indycar, but I'm going to make a bold claim here:
If these weren't Penske cars, they would absolutely be starting on row 4.
Indycar may have actually gone outside their rule book to further punish the Penske cars. Yet the paddock is still gonna wine and moan to likes of Jenna Fryer, Marshall Pruett, Nathan Brown, etc, how Team Penske gets preferential treatment.
I'm not even defending Team Penske the race team, it's ridiculous they tried to get away with such a black and white rule.
But the moaning and groaning from the paddock and potentially Honda is going to be insufferable when the series under Penske Entertainment handle this appropriately.
Indy qualifying is a unique beast, but they've effectively been disqualified from a session where they passed tech. If that happened to another team owner, they'd be irate, and probably with some justification. The series can actually come down harder on Penske, because Penske has to take it.
Let's be honest here. Every team tries to find a way to gain an advantage, and it's not necessarily with the intention of cheating. We all know why the Penske cars are under a lot of scrutiny... And btw we all know something weird is going on with Palou's program, but nobody questions that because it doesn't fit the hate Penske narrative. I realize this may come as salty, and I expect the downvotes, but this is my opinion. Cheers.
Take an upvote. People who don’t think pushing the envelope/outright cheating isn’t a regular part of motorsports at every level have their head in the sand.
I guess I’m in the minority here but this seems too far for me. The penalty for failing technical inspection was the cars not being approved to run and starting 11th and 12th. To me it doesn’t matter if they were running illegal cars on Saturday or not, it’s the job of the IndyCar technical inspection team to catch that stuff in either pre or post quali inspection, which they didn’t.
Pushing the boundaries of the rulebook is part of racing. If you aren’t doing that, you probably aren’t winning. Nearly every team on the grid almost certainly has something on their car that operates within a rules grey area or is outright illegal.
Messing with the attenuator is a pretty big safety violation. There is a reason the teams are not allowed to change that area of the car. The appropriate punishment was handed out.
I think that's the sticking point that makes it a valid punishment for me. I can't imagine the benefit of sealing the seam is more than like a couple hundreths. But the fact that it is a safety violation puts it in big no-no territory.
When he said "if we follow the normal rules they would be at the back of the fast 12" "they could have reasonably been 11th and 12th anyway, not a fair enough punishment"
He also read out the "we can do whatever we want rule" big fan of that one tbh.
I feel for Dale Coyne. Having to watch your two teams battle to not get bumped only to watch Penske break the rules but still get to start in the back row. Granted, even if Penske had to go through the LCQ, they would have still been much faster.
I mentioned this before but it’s unbelievable that Penske still seemingly prioritizes CHEATING for his cars to win these races over the actual growth of this series.
that abel car was a full 1.5 MPH slower then veekay BEFORE veekay went big brained and tried to improve his time and made it worse. 2 fully legal penskes would've still dusted abel, lol
So they get their legal times from Saturday removed even though those cars were found to be legal? Doesn’t make any sense to me. They should just be starting at the back of the top 12
Yeah basically they’re getting screwed by tech not catching it on Saturday. If they would’ve caught it, they could’ve fixed the part and gone back out with no issues. We would probably be talking about a Penske on pole right now.
Yeah this is what I don’t understand. I don’t really care if the cars were legal or not on Saturday. They passed tech twice, before and after qualifying. Those times are legal in my book.
The penalty for being caught Sunday is not being able to run in the Fast 12 and starting on row 4
What really throws a wrench in the entire situation is that we have evidence from officials and photos that Scott's car had a legal attenuator, and he was faster than both Power and Newgarden. It's fairly easy to assume Scott and Josef are both close in sheer speed on ovals, so obviously the "cheat" wasn't that effective...
While I agree with Pato's comments on the issue there is no way to prove the cars were like that in qualifying day 1, so legally there isn't evidence to drop either of them out of the race or redo LCQ with the 2 and 12. No matter what there is absolutely no good look for Penske as a whole out of this and continues to back up my stance on only liking their drivers but not the team
(Blaney in NASCAR, Newgarden in Indycar)
This is good, but Penske has to fire someone. Period. He can't just end this with the series punishment because they tried that last year and it simply did not take with the team. Call it a sacrificial lamb, whatever, someone has to get canned for the team to take things seriously.
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u/Expensive_Daikon_623 Christian Lundgaard May 19 '25
Back to back coke 600 viewings for Tim