Bob Pockrass
FOX Motorsports Insider
In the wake of the team’s second major technical violation in two years, Roger Penske announced the departure of three of its main INDYCAR race team executives, including longtime executive Tim Cindric from the Team Penske race team organization.
The statement from the team called them “departures,” but it has all the looks of a firing. Cindric, who was the team president throughout all series up until this year when he stepped back to run the INDYCAR team, had been with the organization since 1999.
Also ousted were the team’s INDYCAR managing director Ron Ruzewski and general manager Kyle Moyer. All three also served as team strategists — Cindric for Josef Newgarden, Ruzewski for Will Power and Moyer for Scott McLaughlin.
Ruzewski had been with the team since 2005; Moyer since 2015.
“Nothing is more important than the integrity of our sport and our race teams,” Penske said. “We have had organizational failures during the last two years, and we had to make necessary changes.
“I apologize to our fans, our partners and our organization for letting them down.”
The most recent violation came in qualifying Sunday when INDYCAR officials found the cars of Newgarden and Power had fill in the seams at the connection with the attenuator at the rear of the car.
Neither was allowed to participate in the Sunday qualifying session for the top-12 cars and INDYCAR president Doug Boles announced Monday they would start at the rear of the field for the Indy 500 while Cindric and Ruzewski were suspended for the race and the teams fined $100,000.
In the wake of the violation, photos of the 2024 race-winning Newgarden car that is also displayed in the speedway museum also appear to have the seams filled as well.
This violation still paled in comparison to the one at the start of the 2023 season when Newgarden was stripped of his St. Petersburg victory and Scott McLaughlin was disqualified from that race for having the push-to-pass system engaged during restarts, a violation of INDYCAR rules. Roger Penske then decided to suspend Cindric and Ruzewski for the month of May as well as the team engineers.
Cindric, in commenting Sunday after the violations were discovered, said the seam filling appeared arbitrary as McLaughlin’s crashed car from earlier did not have the seams filled (which was confirmed by Boles). McLaughlin kept his starting position of 10th.
“In our eyes, it’s not a performance advantage but at the end of the day, if they don’t like the seam being filled, they don’t like the seam being filled,” Cindric said Sunday. “You’ve got to do what the inspection process is and conform to that.
“We’ll live with it and start on the fourth row. … Everybody’s trying to make the cars as sleek as you can and whether this much makes a difference or not, the facts are this didn’t pass inspection.”
Because Penske owns both the series and has race teams that compete in the series, how the team is treated by series officials when it comes to the rules attracts major scrutiny.
Boles said on Wednesday that INDYCAR continues to work on creating a separate entity to handle officiating and technical inspections that will make it more separate from Penske’s motorsports operations with the goal of having it in place for 2026.
“We have been working very, very hard to create an officiating entity — race control and tech inspection — that is completely removed from anything that has to do with Penske Entertainment or Roger Penske or the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 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.”
Boles also said with time in tech being limited, they often focus on parts and pieces that can impact competition rather than safety, and the attenuator issue was a safety issue, not a performance enhancement.
“On parts that are specifically designed for safety, our team in tech does not, on a regular basis, look at those,” Boles said. “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?”
So why was it found on Sunday?
“[Our official] doesn’t know why he looked at it,” Boles said. “There are 600 part numbers on a Dallara car that include about 1,000 parts, not including the bolts and the washers and the nuts.
“Our team is focused on making sure that they’re paying attention to the parts that actually impact what happens on the race track. So there’s a lot of parts that you might see out of the corner of your eye or might cause you to look at that.”
Appearing on Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast this week, rival team owner Chip Ganassi didn’t mince words.
“All teams have a certain responsibility to uphold the integrity of the sport in any series,” Ganassi said. “And [that includes] no team more than Team Penske. They’ve had so much success over the years. … It’s certainly a problem when the pursuit of winning compromises integrity and sportsmanship.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and IndyCar for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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