Ex-Penske employee on team's push to pass violations: 'I don’t really believe the story'

LEEDS, Ala. – Gavin Ward has sat in on those Team Penske engineering meetings, stood on that timing stand and worked closely with Josef Newgarden. Among those in the IndyCar paddock raising red flags about how convincing the stories of Tim Cindric and the team’s two-time championship-winning driver are regarding the illegal software modifications that led to historic penalties this week, Ward is as well-positioned as anyone to give an experience-backed opinion.

And he has some serious questions.

“You’re telling me no one on that stand was aware of the correct rules?” asked Ward, referencing Newgarden’s claim Friday morning that he was mashing his overtake button during St. Pete restarts because he thought there was an offseason rules change. In reality, push-to-pass rules had only been altered for IndyCar’s exhibition event at The Thermal Club – rules for which weren’t made public until four days after the race from which Penske had two cars disqualified.

IndyCar news: Penske's Josef Newgarden knows explanation for push to pass violation isn't believable

“I’ve been on a lot of different timing stands on several different IndyCar teams, and every single time a driver presses (the overtake button), somebody is on the intercom on that stand, saying, ‘On the button.’ It’s a flag on everybody’s telemetry. Everyone knows when you’re using OT. You’re telling me none of them realized that was not in the rules? You’re telling me everyone had the wrong read of it?”

The frustration was one of multiple holes Ward saw in Team Penske employees’ stories related to the infraction, which Cindric told IndyStar on Thursday date to changes in coding made to software for hybrid testing starting in August.

IndyCar news: Tim Cindric explains how Team Penske ran afoul of IndyCar rules -- by accident

The change, Cindric explained, helped Team Penske “test the overtake function in conjunction with the hybrid deployment.” But when Penske enigneers neglected to swap back that line of code leading into St. Pete, it ended up on the setup profiles of all three drivers’ cars – giving them the ability to successfully use the overtake button whenever the race was green.

While noting the caveat that Arrow McLaren was not involved in the earliest phases of manufacturer hybrid testing – Chip Ganassi Racing (Honda) and Team Penske (Chevy) spearheaded the early days – Ward said his team never explored making such a change.

“We didn’t have to circumnavigate the standard functionality of the ECUs," Ward told IndyStar in an exclusive interview Friday at Barber Motorsports Park. "The whole chain there, we didn’t have to do anything that wasn’t normal operations to be able to use overtake in the testing we did.

“Now, we weren’t involved in those tests at that stage, so I don’t know if that’s a valid thing they had to do or not.”

How about that coding not being swapped out of Team Penske’s setup profile software entering St. Pete?

“Could you copy-and-paste code by accident into all the setups? Sure, it’s possible,” Ward said. “Is it particularly believable? I’m not sure.”

Had Newgarden admitted Friday that he was mashing the overtake button at St. Pete as he’s known to do, hoping to catch IndyCar race control asleep at the wheel, Ward says he could’ve bought that – regardless of why it actually worked for him. In his seven years working in the series, Ward said he’s known of multiple instances where overtake either hasn’t been active when it should’ve been and vice versa. It’s likely why Cindric said Newgarden pressed the button 29 times in 2023 while it wasn’t active.

“So, for someone to try and make use of the system because the series left it open, I can kinda level with that, because if you don’t, someone else will,” Ward said.

The ex-Red Bull Racing F1 engineer also said he was willing to give Newgarden’s engineers grace. Ward said the data might look as if push-to-pass was active by the series, rather than Newgarden using the button when it was clearly illegal.

“Some people looking at the data, if they don’t know about the situation, and all they see is it appears to be enabled by IndyCar, then that’s all they see,” Ward said. “You could maybe be charitable on that. You want to give people the benefit of the doubt.”

It’s the collection of all these coincidences – having to change the code, overlooking its fixing and then missing Newgarden and McLaughlin’s illegal use of overtake – in combination with the assertion that Newgarden, Cindric and company flatly didn’t understand some of the series’ most basic on-track rules, that Ward’s willingness to accept innocence wears out. Someone, somewhere, at some level, Ward hints, had to have known something was amiss before Sunday morning at Long Beach.

“Josef isn’t the only one to blame,” he said. “The team (expletive) up. I don’t really believe the story, and a lot of people don’t.”

IndyCar needs to be more transparent

Ward would like to see more transparency. While it was dealing with another headache in race control, IndyCar officials had not turned on overtake capabilities for drivers and teams during the pre-race warmup, and yet, Penske’s drivers were trundling around using their boost button anyway.

In reality, Newgarden and McLaughlin’s illegal overtake pushes were visible on teams’ timing and scoring screens in St. Pete, had teams and drivers been paying enough attention – with one official from a separate team telling IndyStar on Friday that his engineers watched their monitors and spotted the exact moments the two Penske drivers’ overtake pool dropped during a pair of restarts.

No. 1 on Ward’s wish list: More resources – both systems and human capital – to help act as fail-safes.

“We’re investing – and all the teams are – in resources to out-engineer and out-smart and out-human-perform other teams, and you do all that on the hope and basis that you’re on a level playing field,” Ward said. “We really just want more confidence that that’s how everyone’s operating across the board.”

The second change Ward wants stems from suspicions he says Arrow McLaren has in the fairness of the fuel-saving game among those at the top of the sport. And he’d like to see it better-regulated.

“You can’t have everything but you can make efficient improvements in transparency. In this case, we found it because of the data that was shared,” he explained. “And I’d love to see sharing of fuel consumption and fuel use. We operate in good faith with something that is consistently a race-decider, and I’m not convinced that that is above-board.”

While unwilling to note any specific offenders, the concern comes just days after Chip Ganassi Racing and Scott Dixon delivered another one of their patented fuel-saving masterclasses Sunday at Long Beach. “I’m not saying there’s anything going on there, but we would be very much in favor and have been very vocally in favor of using standard fuel-flow meters, which are on almost every top racing series in the world," Ward said. "Put them in every fuel cell, and share the data with all the teams.

“Put it on the broadcast! I don’t care, but we’ve lost a lot of races over the last year on that topic, and we’d like to know that we’re on the same playing field as everyone else.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: McLaren's Gavin Ward on Penske's push to pass violations