joanne

Alright. It's about time to make a blogpost.

Motorsports has an accountability problem. We're going to talk about the latest Penske scandal, yes, but we're also going to talk about Mohammad Ben Sulayem and the degradation of checks and balances in the FIA. We're also going to talk about the France family and the charter trial going on in NASCAR right now.

Why all three of these things at once?

Because I think the issue at the heart of them is all the same.

Accountability is eroding all across the world of motorsports.

Let's talk about this week's scandal first: the second Penske cheating scandal.

In short, last Sunday, three Penskes made it into the Fast Twelve in qualifying and were preparing to make their runs. First, Scott McLaughlin crashes out in morning practice, so he's out on the spot. This leaves Josef Newgarden and Will Power flying the flag for Team Penske.

Will Power makes it through an evidently rushed tech inspection without issue, however, then something happens. It's not clear what exactly the story is:

Some say that Chip Ganassi Racing (perhaps even Chip Ganassi himself) noticed something wrong on Power's attenuator and alerted the tech team.

Others day that the tech team just happened to notice something was changed on Newgarden's attenuator and then proceeded to check Power as well.

Others still say that "Rocket" Kevin Blanch makes up the tech rules as he goes anyway, so teams never know what will and won't pass.

Maybe it was one of these, maybe it was all of these, maybe it was something else entirely.

What matters is that an illegal modification was found on Newgarden's attenuator, and it was then found on Power's car as well. That's bad.

It's difficult to tell with McLaughlin's wrecked car, but all reports indicate the modification was not on Scott's car. As far as anyone can tell in the moment, that's suspicious.

People begin speculating that Penske modified the attenuators specifically for Fast-12 and the Indy 500, effectively the two most important sessions on the Indycar calendar.

Then Nathan Brown goes into the IMS Museum and finds that illegal modification - a blended attenuator gap - on Josef Newgarden's 2024 winning car. That's really bad.

Now take into account that at this point a year ago, Penske had their strategists suspended for the Indy 500 because of a push-to-pass (P2P) scandal where, a month after the St. Pete GP, all three Penskes were found to be running illegal software to circumvent P2P restrictions, allowing the Penskes to use the overtake button whenever they wanted, even when the system was supposed to be deactivated.

Newgarden used it repeatedly at St. Pete. McLaughlin was found to have accidentally used it once. Power didn't use it in the race but he was found to be running the software.

All three cars had the software and were using it in Long Beach GP practice, which is when they were actually caught, hence the month gap.

Newgarden and McLaughlin were disqualified from St. Pete, Will Power was docked points and fined. Additionally, senior team personnel Tim Cindric and Ron Ruzewski were suspended for multiple races, including the Indy 500.

Josef Newgarden won the 2024 Indianapolis 500 in spite of all that controversy, but with this blended attenuator being found on the car, now all sorts of question marks were up in the air. If everything to this point was bad for Team Penske, this was catastrophic.

As far as the court of public opinion was concerned, Penske had cheated at St. Pete, they cheated in the 2024 Indy 500, and they were planning on cheating for the 2025 Indy 500.

Now, the blended attenuator is not actually what this scandal is about.

Pretty much every reasonable source agrees that the blended attenuator had next to no performance advantage and it's certainly not the difference between Penske making the field or not. It's probably not even the difference between Penske making the Fast-12 or not.

However, it's an issue of optics.

Roger Penske owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Roger Penske owns the Indycar Series. Roger Penske owns Team Penske. Roger Penske even co-owns Ilmor Engineering, who makes the Chevrolet engines used by half the Indycar field.

One man owns the venue, the governing body, the offending team, and the company that makes the engines the team was using.

That is the kind of power that Bernie Ecclestone could only dream of having over Formula One.

That is what this scandal is about.

All the other teams, and the other engine manufacturer in the series in the form of Honda, are pissed off over the level of power that Roger Penske has over Indycar Racing. They don't trust Roger Penske's series fining Roger Penske's team for breaking Roger Penske's rules.

To his credit, Roger Penske himself seems very aware of this, and he has acted very carefully to protect his reputation. Newgarden and Power not only got blocked from participating in the Fast-12, but they were ejected from their 11th and 12th starting positions, getting sent to the back of the field.

That is not a proportionate punishment for a modification that is supposedly just an aesthetic change to a part that isn't even in direct airflow. Whatever performance advantage they could get from blending the attenuator is so small as to be immeasurable.

Penske punished them to protect himself.

Likewise, Team Penske was punished severely. Team President Tim Cindric, Managing Director Ron Ruzewski, and McLaughlin's race engineer Kyle Moyer have all been fired. That is an immense amount of talent that Penske just let go a week before the biggest race on the calendar.

Why? To protect the Penske brand.

It's all about optics. Penske is punishing himself because what really matters here is control. Roger Penske controls all the key elements in Indycar and he doesn't want to lose that, to the point where he's willing to gut his own team's leadership, potentially gut his own team's chances at Indianapolis, in order to stay in control of the series, the track, and the engines.

To tie this to a Formula One example: in 1978, Bernie Ecclestone's Brabham team ran a fan car at the Swedish Grand Prix and Niki Lauda was able to dominate with it.

Everyone else complained, so despite the fact that Bernie Ecclestone felt he had a legal case for the fan car, he voluntarily withdrew it. For Bernie, control over the Formula One Constructors' Association was more important than a performance advantage for Brabham.

Brabham was sacrificed for FOCA.

Team Penske is being sacrificed for the IMS empire.

Roger Penske is holding his team accountable internally because the other teams are growing increasingly upset with the state of affairs in Indycar. The likes of Chip Ganassi, Dan Towriss, and Zak Brown are sick of Penske holding all the cards, they want change, and Roger is trying to stay in front of the demands for change.

This doesn't exist in a vacuum however.

The same thing is going on internationally.

Enter Mohammad Ben Sulayem, President of the FIA since December 2021.

In the past few months, we have seen Ben Sulayem attempting an unprecedented concentration of power. We have seen the checks and balances on the FIA Presidency eroded, and we have seen a flurry of resignations all around Mohammed Ben Sulayem as any signs of dissent are removed and replaced by loyalists.

The most blatant example of that is that, amid allegations of financial mismanagement by MBS, Sulayem pushed through a vote that restructured the FIA Ethics Committee. In effect, the Ethics Committee could no longer independently audit or investigate allegations without the approval of the President of the FIA (Mohammed Ben Sulayem) as well as the President of the Senate (Carmelo Sanz de Barros).

Deputy President Robert Reid and Motorsport UK boss David Richards would resign as well in protest.

All the while, Mohammed Ben Sulayem has been distracting the media with unrelated controversies such as the swearing ban which the WRC drivers vehemently opposed, as well as the potential return to V10s, which one: was a complete non-starter amongst every single manufacturer in F1, and two: dominated the F1 news cycle for nearly a month.

This was deliberate. MBS consolidated power behind the scenes while distracting the public with these largely irrelevant peripheral scandals.

MBS is playing the FIA like Palpatine played the Galactic Senate.

Bit by bit the FIA Presidency has grown stronger and stronger with fewer and fewer checks on its power.

Once again, accountability is fading.

Then there is NASCAR, where there is now a very loud, very public legal battle over power. On one side is the NASCAR establishment, led by Jim France, the latest name in a family that has dominated NASCAR since Big Bill France at the very beginning of the sport. On the other side is the new money in NASCAR: 23XI, owned by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin, as well as Front Row Motorsports, owned by Bob Jenkins.

The chief issue here is charters. The teams want charters to be permanent, and they want the charter-holding teams to have a greater level of influence, ownership, and revenue from the series. In effect, they are taking influence from the franchise model in many American sports legals, where the teams collectively own the sport and the profits are divided amongst them.

The France family wants to keep control over the pie, and they want that pie to be as opaque as possible.

All throughout this legal process, we've seen NASCAR refusing to hand over documents, we've seen then repeatedly trying to influence the judge into dismissing the lawsuit, and we have seen them try to threaten 23XI and Front Row's current standing in the sport in an attempt to strongarm them into submission.

The France family has been absolute in NASCAR, and this is them actively fighting against something which might make them more accountable.

Motorsport has always been an exclusive club and leadership has always been for only the most exclusive. We see that with the FIA, where early Presidents included noble lords like Etienne van Zuylen van Nyevelt, Filippo Caracciolo, and Paul Alfons von Metternich. The oldest of the old money aristocrats.

That is not a demographic that knows much about accountability.

The names may have gotten less obvious, but the substance has not.

All across motorsports, owners are attempting to consolidate power as much as possible. The once-infinite tobacco money has been pushed out, the underdog privateers have sold their operations to outside investors and venture capitalist firms, and all the while, racing has only gotten more and more expensive. The pot is shrinking, and competition is greater than ever.

Thus, the series bosses lord over what little they can like petty warlords.

NingLi 🌸