Roger Penske has finally spoken publicly about the push-to-pass cheating scandal that has embroiled the Team Penske IndyCar program over the past two weeks.
He did so after the decision was made to suspend four key program employees through the end of the month, meaning each of them would miss everything leading up to and including the Indianapolis 500. The suspended parties include Team Penske president Tim Cindric, managing director Ron Ruzewski, No. 2 race engineer Luke Mason and assistant engineer Robbie Atkinson.
Penske spoke to Racer.com’s Marshall Pruett on Tuesday and detailed his feeling and the decision-making progress that led to the suspensions. Read that story for the full details but here is a summary of what he discussed:
Penske says Newgarden wasn’t suspended because he felt the disqualification was sufficient when factoring the points he lost via the disqualification and fine to his No. 2 team.
He says an internal investigation concluded the software was installed ‘eight months ago’ and was a ‘process failure’ from the teams and a ‘communication’ failure to the drivers.
During a press conference at Barber Motorsports Park the week after the infractions were discovered at Long Beach, Newgarden said ‘we convinced ourselves that there was a rule change to restarts specifically with overtake usage.’ He said ‘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.’
He said he recognized that the story was hard to believe.
“The story that I know, which is the truth, is almost too convenient to be believable. … I didn’t leave St. Pete thinking we pulled something over on somebody,” Newgarden said. “I didn’t know that we did something wrong until this week.”Then I’ve had to wrestle with the fact that, how do you explain a situation to people? I know what happened. I know why it happened. I don’t think it’s very believable, even when I try to tell the story back. I don’t think any of us believe it will be believable to somebody. But it’s the truth.”
Thus, Penske said that a combination of an internal review and the one conducted by Chevrolet, produced evidence that ‘Newgarden didn’t understand what the rules were, and he has taken the penalty.’
Penske said the four employees were suspended and not fired because ‘there was no malicious intent by anyone from the standpoint of what took place.’
Of note, Penske said he was in Europe at the time and that he was not even directly aware in real-time that the incident had transpired. And while he owns both the series and Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Team Penske, he has attempted to divest himself from that conflict of interest while delegating leadership of the race team to Cindric.
Also, Penske says an outside and independent law firm was not hired to investigate the matter because of Penske’s leadership divestment.
“I was not involved at all, no conversation – made the decision about the disqualification. And that’s the job that the series does,” Penske told RACER.
“We [Team Penske] did an internal investigation of the entire situation, with our chief legal counsel who interviewed the people who were involved, and as you know, the software was installed in the car eight months ago and there was no malicious intent by anyone based on our investigation, and the outcome and the actions we took, I think, were appropriate.”
Penske also says he took several weeks to speak publicly about the matter because he was in Europe, ‘didn’t have all the facts’ and then had to be part of the process of determining penalties.
Lastly, Penske addressed concerns that a culture of malpractice has developed at Team Penske across NASCAR, IMSA and now IndyCar as the organization has been penalized this year across all three disciplines. That narrative runs counter to the ‘Penske Perfect’ mantra, doing things the right ways, and all the things that the company has worked to embody for decades.
Penske said the IMSA violation was just ‘0.015 light’ and only ‘after the cars ran over curbs.’
“Again, no intent,” Penske said.
Logano said he was lectured by Penske in the aftermath of the NASCAR penalty.
“As far as the glove is concerned, Joey had a glove that was deemed not the right glove,” Penske told RACER. “NASCAR has a penalty system concerning many different penalties which happen from time to time within NASCAR. And he was he was made to make a drive-through and also a financial penalty. None of these things relate to what happened today.”
Penske closed the interview by saying any narrative that ties these incidents together or is a reflection of ‘some process inside our company (as) systemic’ would be incorrect.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.