mollie 😸

to start with, just to get things out of the way, i’m going to show a couple of pictures & give some context. feel free to skip to past the link if you already know everything.

this is what the seam on the rear-attenuator of the car looks like. it smooths things out and creates a sleeker look for the car. the attenuator that they use in this photo was adopted following the 2023 season.

this is the rear attenuator of josef newgarden’s car in the penske garage following the infraction before fast 12 qualifying. team penske members were witnessed scraping the putty-like substance off of the crack in an attempt to get it off of the car so they could qualify. this is not allowed.

this is the rear of scott mclaughlin’s car in 2023, which was pictured prior to the implementation of the updated version of the attenuator (the one team penske has modified).

this is the rear attenuator of scott mclaughlin’s car prior to his practice 7 wreck on sunday—it is missing the modified seam. it is the line below the yellow piece of tape.

this is josef newgarden’s winning car from 2024 at a meeting with the current president (it was the clearest photo of it, sorry—i cropped him out of the photo bc i do not want to see that man).

here’s a quick (ish) background on that:

in 2023, indycar announced that they would be changing their attenuators. the new attenuators, which they started using in 2024, were reportedly perceived as quite ugly. some time before the indy 500 was ran, team penske began patching the seam on the attenuator. the purpose of the attenuator is to make the car safer during any crashes. the attenuator is located on the rear of the car, where air does not flow, and it has been determined that the seal provides no aerodynamic advantage, nor a safety advantage. it is a purely aesthetic patch, used to make the car look prettier—more “penske perfect”. linked below is my most recent source on the matter.

https://www.motorsport.com/indycar/news/penskes-modifications-arent-the-actual-problem-the-fact-that-no-one-caught-them-is/10724722/

bearing all of this in mind, i think the most obvious explanation for this is that members of the 2, 3, and 12 teams didn’t like the way the seam looked, added the putty-like substance to “clean it up” a bit, and sent it through technical inspection to see if it was okay. nobody said it wasn’t, so they continued to do so. they have been doing this for at least a year now, as evidenced by the seam on josef’s winning 2024 car (which can also be seen in photos taken that day—i just couldn’t find any that were super clear).

the seam is apparently evident on both scott mclaughlin’s pole winning and josef newgarden’s race winning cars from 2024. i seriously doubt that team penske would parade the cars around if they thought they were getting away with cheating with the seam—or they’d remove it in the museum, at the very least.

i think it’s a simple situation of “well, they haven’t told me i can’t, so i’ll keep doing it”, and calling it cheating is a stretch. i don’t even know that i’d even call it a modification, since it doesn’t impact the way the attenuator works. is it an infraction of the rules? yes. are they necessarily wrong for it? no, i don’t think they are, especially if they haven’t been faulted for it for so long. i certainly don’t think newgarden should have his 2024 race win revoked for it, and i don’t believe that this really has anything to do with the integrity of the team.

i also find it interesting that the person to point this out was chip ganassi. team penske has been doing this since at least may 2024 and they’ve gone through every technical inspection up until now. if i remember correctly (and i could be wrong), chip said that everyone knew for a while and that he had to be the one to “step up” and call out the rule violation. sure, chip, but isn’t it also convenient that calling out this infraction prevented newgarden and power from advancing to the fast six (which was almost guaranteed to happen) and pretty well ensured that his two drivers, scott dixon and alex palou would advance? he had seven practices prior to qualifying to call out this supposed issue, and he’s had four races before that to do it as well. this is all speculation, but it sure seems convenient.

anyway, i think that if it were any other team, no one would’ve even cared enough to go looking for proof. everyone fails technical inspections from time to time. it happens. i think that p2p-gate has unfortunately stained the name of team penske and it doesn’t matter what they do now—everyone will cry cheating for even the smallest, most insignificant issues. if anyone needs to be held accountable, it’s those inspecting the cars because they have allowed this issue to slip through the cracks for a long time. they need to be setting precedents and following through with them, not switching up when they get yelled at by chip ganassi.