IndyCar president Doug Boles said Wednesday that “absolutely it’s a miss” that Team Penske raced with modified attenuators for at least a year before an IndyCar tech team member finally caught the infraction Sunday prior to qualifying for the Indianapolis 500.
An attenuator is placed in the rear of each Indy Car solely for safety reasons, to absorb energy when a car crashes into a wall backward. For this reason, per Boles, attenuators are not allowed to be tampered with.
While there is visual and anecdotal evidence that Team Penske drivers have been racing with smoothed rear attentuators for at least a year – including on the car driven by Josef Newgarden when he won last year’s Indy 500 winner – they did not get caught until Sunday.
According to Boles, rear attentuators have zero effect on how fast a car goes. And with a limited time to inspect each car, IndyCar’s tech teams focus on the car parts that might give a driver an unfair advantage during a race.
“On Sunday, when the 12 cars that were in the Fast 12 were presented in the tech line, we had a 30-minute window to get 12 cars through tech,” Boles said Wednesday.
“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, (and) if they’ve changed it, they’re outside of the rules? One hundred percent.”
On Sunday, Team Penske was caught because, according to Boles, IndyCar technical director Kevin “Rocket” Blanch noticed during inspection that the attenuator on Team Penske driver Will Power’s No. 12 car had been smoothed over. Then he checked the attenuator on Newgarden’s No. 2 car and discovered the same illegality.
Their penalty for the illegal modifications included being sent to the back of the official starting grid for Sunday’s Indy 500. Newgarden and Power will be in the 11th and final row when the 33 drivers hit the track.
Earlier Wednesday, Roger Penske – who owns Team Penske, IndyCar, the Indy 500 and Indianapolis Motor Speedway – fired Team Penske director Tim Cindric, IndyCar managing director Ron Ruzewski and IndyCar general manager Kyle Moyer for “organizational failures.”
According to an Associated Press report, some competitors accused Team Penske of cheating with their adjusted attenuators. They believed the smoothed part allowed Penske’s drivers to have an edge while qualifying.
“This is not an investigation as far as I’m concerned, but … we are going to continue to understand how the process failed and how we can make it better,” Boles said. “And the most important thing we have to do is make sure that, A, our drivers stay safe, but B, that the levelness of the playing field can’t be called into question, and when a team or a driver is on track and they get beaten by somebody or they beat somebody, that neither one of those teams can say they did it because they got an advantage because tech missed something.”
-Field Level Media
