The Fastlane Motorsports Forum

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SBan83 wrote: ↑2 months ago Dan Wheldon documentary/movie coming on March 12 (on HBO Max if you're in the US). Looks like it'll be as much about Dan's career as his two young sons racing - something I didn't know but must be extra tense for their mother given what she already went through with losing Dan.

First among them is the Abel Motorsports Indy NXT program, which made a one-off IndyCar appearance last May at the Indianapolis 500 with a chassis belonging to its driver RC Enerson. The team founded by Kentucky construction magnate Bill Abel has purchased a Dallara DW12 of its own, and the necessary pit equipment, to run a car at every race. In 2023 and again this May, Abel will use Chevrolet’s 2.2-liter twin-turbo V6 engine to power the No. 50 entry. It’s unclear whether continuing to use Chevy engines after Indy is an option.

The Pratt & Miller Motorsports team, which facilitates Chevrolet’s factory IMSA GTD Pro effort, is pursuing its first foray into IndyCar, but has not purchased a car, nor does it have an engine lease in place. And then there’s the multi-discipline PREMA Racing team from Italy, which is at the forefront of IndyCar’s potential growth.

Looking to IndyCar’s two engine manufacturers and their efforts to share the burden of supplying the season-long field, Chevy has 12 motor leases in play for the year and Honda has 15, which would point towards Team Chevy as the brand with the strongest likelihood of supporting any new teams next year. To get to 29 or 30 cars, Chevy would need to come closer to Honda’s lease number.

To that end, multiple sources tell RACER that Prema — which has a robust European junior open-wheel and sports car operation and has expanded into the U.S. through its running of the Iron Lynx Lamborghini IMSA GTP program — has secured a pair of engine leases from Chevy and is expected to announce a two-car IndyCar effort in the coming weeks.

“We dropped Theo in about as much in the deep end as he could be dropped,” Ward said.

“We had high hopes and I love the way he approached the weekend. He just got built up to it. He's completed every lap and just got better and better. Really, really impressive debut. …

“His enthusiasm is infectious. You could hear it on the radio. He was enjoying himself out there and that's fun. He's just been super happy to be in IndyCar and make the most of this opportunity, so that makes everybody smile.”

During last weekend’s event in Long Beach, the series found the three cars from Team Penske were able to bypass that software restriction and use push-to-pass at any time.

“During the Sunday, April 21 warmup session ahead of the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, IndyCar discovered the team’s possible rules violation,” the series stated.

“An extensive review of data from the race on the streets of St. Petersburg revealed that Team Penske manipulated the overtake system so that the No. 2, 3 and 12 cars had the ability to use Push to Pass on starts and restarts. According to the IndyCar rulebook, use of overtake is not available during championship races until the car reaches the alternate start-finish line. It was determined that the No. 2 and the No. 3 gained a competitive advantage by using Push to Pass on restarts while the No. 12 did not. Additionally, all three entries have been fined $25,000 and will forfeit all prize money associated with the streets of St. Petersburg race.”

Beginning with this week’s race at Barber Motorsports Park, new technical inspection procedures will be in place to deter this violation.”

Team Penske issued a statement through president Tim Cindric after the matter was made public by the series and blamed a software oversight for the problem and subsequent advantage that was seen when Newgarden streaked away from the field at St. Petersburg to win by more than eight seconds.

“Unfortunately, the push-to-pass software was not removed as it should have been, following recently completed hybrid testing in the Team Penske Indy cars,” Cindric said. “This software allowed for push-to-pass to be deployed during restarts at the St. Petersburg Grand Prix race, when it should not have been permitted.”

Cindric also acknowledged Newgarden and McLaughlin chose to use the illegal access to push-to-pass power, which calls into question whether the unfair advantage was known to exist in advance.

....sources suggest, the CLU/MyLaps transponder is the one area of electronics in the P2P communications chain that has long been ripe for exploitation.

The wording in the series’ press release points to where it found the illegal activity: “Rule 14.19.15. An indicator to enable Push to Pass will be sent via CAN communication from the timing and scoring beacon on board the Car to the team data logger. This signal must be passed on to the ECU unmodified and uninterrupted during all Road and Street Course Events.”

The words “unmodified and uninterrupted” would seemingly explain how Team Penske bypassed IndyCar’s P2P on/off commands.

And with the previous note on how the series’ CAN message is encoded, it would suggest the team found a way to both interrupt IndyCar’s “off” signal and prevent it from being received by the ECU. But that doesn’t explain how the Penske drivers had functioning P2P during the warmup, all prior to IndyCar activating the system and sending the “on” signal to the ECUs. One expert suggested Penske found a way to spoof the “on” signal through the CLU/MyLaps units and tell the ECU to enable P2P.

With no “on” signal having been sent to the field for the first 10 minutes, and only the Penske cars making use of P2P when it was off, the expert’s theory could have merit.

The breach appears to have taken place in an area of the electronics chain that is controlled by the teams rather than the manufacturer or series.

For the sake of reinforcing access and roles, the CLU and MyLaps system is the domain of the teams, not the manufacturers. As such, and when asked for comment, a Chevy spokesperson shared the following with RACER: “The code that modifies the IndyCar push-to-pass MyLaps transponder signal resides on the CLU and is the responsibility of the team. Chevrolet has no input or responsibility for the software or operation of the CLU. The engine responds to the output of the CLU.”

In distancing itself from Team Penske, Chevy has further fortified the notion that it was not involved in the P2P trickery. But that does not completely absolve the brand from being accountable for the data it would have seen coming off of the Penske cars.

A standard practice for every engine technician is to download the data from their car’s ECU after each session, and in most cases, they pour over the information in an obsessive and investigative manner. They look for any irregularities in how their engine is performing, and with a countless number of data channels being captured, basic items like speed, engine RPM, and turbo boost are recorded and reviewed.

With the illegal ability for Penske’s driver to have P2P power before everyone else, the Penske ECUs would have documented the premature rise in boost and RPM, and shown the P2P button being successfully used when it should have been inoperable. Team Penske would have seen similar things on their side through the CLUs. Opportunities to self-report were seemingly present but not acted upon since St. Pete.

It’s also a common practice for manufacturers to pool the data from all of its cars and engines, and overlay the data where, at least at St. Pete, irregularities in Newgarden’s No. 2 Chevy and McLaughlin’s No. 3 Chevy should have been seen. This point was raised while asking the brand to comment, but it was not addressed in its answer, which leaves open the possibility the early spikes in power and RPM weren’t caught.

Separate from Team Chevy, Penske’s contravening of the rules should have been caught by IndyCar through a few avenues.

The series takes each team’s CLU data which also has basic engine data, after most sessions and definitely after each race. The series has live telemetry coming into race control whenever cars are on track, which delivers all of the important channels it would need to monitor for P2P use, and so on. It also has onboard videos to review, which would reveal a driver pressing the P2P button when it was meant to be disabled.

Through all of the means of information it intakes — both live and for review after the race — this could have been caught before Penske incriminated themselves through a random issue in Sunday’s morning warmup.

RACER also understands at least one team raised its concern regarding Penske drivers illegally using P2P in 2023 and went as far as sending the series onboard video clips of what it considered abnormal button use for IndyCar to review.

Give full credit to IndyCar president Jay Frye, who oversees the operations side of the series. He took aim at his boss’s team, did exactly what he should have done, and treated Team Penske no differently than any other entrant. This is how a sport should work.

At the same time, the series also missed an ongoing, multi-event infraction that could have been found without having to look beyond the basic data it collects. Relying on good faith that all teams will play within the rules cannot be allowed to continue.

The main question left to answer is how hard IndyCar wants to look into Team Penske’s recent history and comb through the detailed data it has from the three cars to check whether the illegal P2P practices started before 2024.

This is a black eye for Roger Penske, Tim Cindric, Josef Newgarden, Scott McLaughlin and the series. Decisions were made to bypass the P2P rules and there were far too many people who plug into the cars and see the data to claim it was a simple software mistake.

RACER was told in the hours after the penalties were announced that IndyCar has sent a patch to be installed that would prevent future bypassing of P2P rules through exploiting the CLU/MyLaps loggers. This shouldn’t happen again. But was it an isolated incident?

For those who care about the integrity of the sport, let’s hope Frye’s team looks back a few years to find out, and that no interference from Penske is received. What a sad day for IndyCar.