Scandal at the Speedway — and why you should get over it

If you ain't cheating, you ain't racing.

As the fastest cars at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway lined up in pit lane for a shot at transferring to a later quali session where they could vie for the coveted pole position at the Indianapolis 500, chaos descended on Team Penske.

The No. 3 car had already crashed in that morning's warm-up session, demolished beyond repair before it had a chance to put four laps on the board in the Fast 12. Then, the No. 2 failed technical inspection after the No. 12 had passed. The team was instructed to remove both cars from the qualifying line, even as mechanics took grinders to the attenuator of the car.

Ultimately, both of the remaining Penskes were barred from qualifying. The following day, they were dropped to the rear of the starting order and fined. Two days after that, Roger Penske fired three of the most critical members of the Team Penske operation.

Why? Well, someone had sealed a gap where two plates met on the rear attenuator. That constituted modification to a spec component, which is barred by the rules.

But let me ask you this: Why do we care?

The motorsport segment of the internet has erupted in the wake of this scandal, with fans lashing out and condemning the moral character of the drivers involved, the ethics of the team, the conflicts of interest on Roger Penske's part, and so much more. There are calls to ban the team, to review photos of previous races to see if Penske were cheating in those events, and then to revoke their wins. How dare Roger Penske mar the integrity of this sport! How dare his drivers allow this to happen!

Frankly, I don't understand all this backlash. I don't understand it on multiple levels. And that's what I want to talk about today.

If you ain't cheating, you ain't racing

Show me a person in the paddock who claims they've never fudged the rules in pursuit of an advantage over the competition, and I'll show you a liar.

The most perplexing thing about this whole Penske affair is how quickly people have taken to moralizing about how the team has destroyed the credibility of the sport, as if cheating has not been the point of racing since the dawn of time.

In 1969, USAC officials wouldn't let Mario Andretti's team fit an oil cooler to his car before the Indianapolis 500, even though the car was running so hot it literally blistered his back. The team put it in anyway, without anyone noticing, and Andretti won that race.

In 1969, Penske was acid-dipping its cars to make them lighter and therefore gain an advantage on the competition.

In the 1980s, designers in Formula 1 threw everything at their cars: Hydraulic suspension to meet ride-height regulations, and water tanks for ‘cooling’ brakes that were really just designed to be emptied at the start of the race to make the cars lighter and more competitive.

In 2007, Ferrari designed a flexible floor for its Formula 1 machines. In the 2000s, Jimmie Johnson dominated NASCAR because he and crew chief Chad Knaus found hundreds of cheats. Hell, Formula E drivers were even accused of buying bot votes for the “FanBoost” social media votes to get a little smidge of extra power in a race. And that's not counting the intellectual property theft, financial fraud, and political scandal that has gone on behind the scenes.

The very nature of designing a race car is defined by flirting with the rules. Designers and engineers pore over a regulatory set, looking for little holes in the regulation that might allow them to do something different when compared to the competition — making a front wing more flexible, perhaps, or keeping a few bolts loose to save time on a pit stop.

I have absolutely no problem with this, and I think most fans wouldn't either if they actually took the time to understand just what an active role ‘cheating’ plays in racing.

By all means, fudge the rules! See what you can get away with! But don't be surprised if you get caught, and don't fight your punishment when it comes.

We're pointing fingers in the wrong direction

I don't know exactly how many times the Nos. 2 and 12 went through technical inspection during the build-up to the 2025 Indianapolis 500. I don't know if their gooped-up attenuators were present on their cars during any other on-track sessions this month, or if — as some folks have been trying to claim — they've been in use for literal months. I have no idea.

The problem is, neither did the tech inspectors.

As I argued above, I have no problem with a team trying to cheat so long as they accept the consequences of their actions — and Team Penske has done that. In fact, the team has taken preventative measures to avoid this in the future by firing some of its highest ranking and longest standing personnel. They didn't have to do that! No one was making them do that! They chose to!

But I want to draw your attention back to the fact that on Sunday, the No. 12 Penske Chevrolet passed tech. The No. 2 did not. Both had the same illegal modification, but the folks in the inspection bay only recognized it on one of the two cars. It was Team Penske that opted to withdraw the No. 12 out of an abundance of caution.

Again — how long was Penske using the illegal attenuator? We have no idea, but it's hard to think this was something that changed overnight, which raises an additional question: How many times did tech inspectors miss it?

Here's a little excerpt from a great Motorsport.com article by Bozi Tatarevic that highlights just how long this has been a problem:

The new version of the attenuator saw its biggest change at the start of the 2024 season as a mandatory update required panels to be bonded internally and externally in order to make the attenuator stronger based on FEA analysis. The bonded panels on the outside that are in question in the current Team Penske penalties make their first appearance here as attenuators are sent back to Dallara in order to have those panels added.

Prior to this update the attenuators were one smooth piece, but now these carbon panels are glued to the outside in order to improve strength of the overall piece

According to multiple sources that aren’t authorized to speak publicly, Team Penske started receiving these updated attenuators back from Dallara in early 2024 and members of leadership were not pleased with the aesthetics of the new glued-on panels as they showed a bright glue line that stood out and with a large raised edge. A member of the technical leadership is rumored to have instructed members of their team to “clean up” the edges on the pieces in order to make the bright glue stand out less so these technicians applied a dark compound to the edges and smoothed them out.

Once these attenuators were modified, they were cleaned up and coated with sealer - per the standard procedure for many carbon fiber parts at Penske - and placed into their parts rotation to be installed on the cars to start the 2024 season.

Tatarevic is able to point out several instances where this smoothed-over attenuator was in use throughout the last year.

The only reason tech inspectors noticed the violation was because other competitors had started to question its legality.

Tatarevic's story posits a theory that these attenuators were modified for aesthetic, not performance reasons — and I haven't seen any evidence to imply otherwise. The modified attenuator was present on both oval and road courses. The whole point was for the car to look better, which, if you know literally anything about Roger Penske and his racing operations, you will know is his whole entire thing.

I've been rereading The Unfair Advantage by Mark Donohue, an engineer/driver who was effectively Roger Penske's right-hand man during the earliest days of Penske's team ownership. In it, Donohue describes multiple — multiple — instances where Team Penske took extra steps to make sure its cars were impeccable, including:

• Spending the extra time to repaint wrecked bodywork, even if it meant being late to the next race.

• Plating exhausts and other components in chrome just because it would look better than the competition.

• Detailing bodywork in elaborate pin-striping, because it looked nice.

• Polishing, cleaning, and buffing every single component of the car — even the ones that competitors couldn't see — in order to maintain cleanliness.

It is very unlikely that the smoothed-over attenuator provided some significant performance advantage; Scott McLaughlin's No. 3 didn't feature the modified part, and he was quicker than his teammates. The problem here almost wholly comes down to inconsistent inspections.

No, Penske shouldn't be retroactively penalized

When a car passes technical inspection, its results should count. Particularly when that car passed both pre- and post-race technical inspection, plus any other required mid-weekend tech inspections.

If you're mad that Penske “got away” with cheating for so long, that's fine. Be mad! No one is stopping you! But you should also probably be mad at the folks who OK'd the attenuator weekend after weekend. And instead of calling for Penske to be banned from the sport for doing something that every team in every paddock has done since forever, you should be calling for inspection reform. You should be calling for better and more effective processes to catch things like this. And I hope you'll carry your same frustrations to the other teams and drivers caught for other infractions.

Penske was penalized when it was caught. It accepted the penalties and also took steps to address the roots of the issue within its own organization. Two of the best cars in the field will be starting the biggest race of the year from the very back of a 33-car grid, and the team will be competing without the men who have defined this program for years. Personally, that seems like a pretty effective punishment for what's currently looking like an aesthetically-motivated violation of the rules.