Team Penske has made sweeping changes to its IndyCar Series program.
The new managerial and engineering assignments follow in the wake of May’s firings of team president Tim Cindric, managing director Ron Ruzewski, and team manager Kyle Moyer, which led to the July appointments of Porsche Penske Motorsport managing director Jonathan Diuguid as Cindric’s successor – he carries dual roles in leading Penske’s IndyCar and IMSA teams – and Travis Law as competition director.
Under the guidance of Diuguid, an array of promotions have taken place within the IndyCar program during the offseason to fill and fortify its infrastructure, starting with 16-year Penske race engineer David Faustino
(main image), who won the 2014 and 2022 IndyCar championships and the 2018 Indianapolis 500 with Will Power, and 11-year Penske race engineering veteran Ben Bretzman, who won the 2016 IndyCar title and 2019 Indy 500 with Simon Pagenaud.For Faustino, it’s an elevation to technical director and overseeing its IndyCar R&D programs, setting and deploying long-term engineering initiatives, and liaising with key technical partners.
In Bretzman’s case, it’s a promotion to engineering manager of competition, where he’ll serve as the leader across the team’s race engineers, performance engineers, plus the traveling competition group, while ensuring the array of engineering departments are executing during and between race weekends.
In assuming their new posts, Bretzman will step away from engineering the No. 3 Chevy driven by Scott McLaughlin, and Faustino will no longer engineer the No. 12 Chevy, which will be driven by newcomer David Malukas.
“In our case, it’s driven a little bit out of necessity for obvious reasons, with the changes that we had in May,” Diuguid told RACER. “It gave us the opportunity to take the time to figure out exactly what we wanted to look like going forward. And the good thing is, we do have a lot of extremely strong and experienced people, and Dave and Ben h ave a ton of trackside experience in IndyCar, as well and so we’re well positioned.“
And honestly, when we looked at it, Ron and Kyle were taking on a lot of load between the two of them. So we’re taking our approach where, if it was numbers to numbers between Ron and Kyle and Tim, which were the management structure of the IndyCar team, we’ve spread the workload of three people across seven people going forward.”
Bretzman has most recently served as race engineer on Scott McLaughlin’s No.3 entry, but his new role will move him away from the timing stand. Chris Owens/Penske Entertainment
Diuguid will reveal Penske’s new race engineering plans – including the No. 2 Chevy for two-time champion and two-time Indy 500 winner Josef Newgarden – at a later date.
The promotions extend beyond Bretman and Faustino to include championship-winning chief mechanic Matt Jonsson, who shifts to the new role of assembly manager, and senior assistant race engineer Robbie Atk inson, who has been named as team manager.
“Matt and Robbie are going to be the pillars of splitting up the roles that we had before,” Diuguid said. “Robbie is going to take on a lot of personnel management, travel, logistics, and interacting with the series. And then Matt, along with Travis [Law], is going to be focused on car builds, the processes around car builds, parts management, and the mechanical focus and technician focus side of it.
“So between him and Robbie, that’ll be a strong pairing with different skill sets, but putting us in a good spot to cover all the bases there, similar to what we talked about with Ben and Dave, just on the shop floor side. And it’s not just to have a bunch of managers. It’s purely to react to the amount of workload that’s necessary and that attention to detail that we need to have going forward to remain competitive in IndyCar.”
One more promotion was made with the creation of a position to complement Bretzman’s trackside duties.
