Welcome to the RACER Mailbag. Questions for any of RACER’s writers can be sent to mailbag@racer.com. We can’t guarantee that every letter will be published, but we’ll answer as many as we can. Published questions may be edited for length and clarity. Questions received after 3pm ET each Monday will appear the following week.
Editor’s note: IndyCar’s news cycle has been quite a ride over the past few days, and RACER’s readers had a lot to say about the controversy surrounding Team Penske – far more than we could fit into a Mailbag. To keep things somewhat manageable and minimize repetition, we’ve chosen a selection of submissions that we feel represents the full spectrum of letters and opinions that we received. Apologies to those whose letters we couldn’t fit in, but we hope that you’ll still find the answers you were looking for amongst those below. OK, here we go…
Q: Who was it that said, “If you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’ hard enough”?
Were the penalties honest mistakes by Team Penske, or were they trying to cheat? Since IndyCar found it without much effort, I find it hard to believe that Penske did it deliberately. What do you think?
I think the penalties to Newgarden and McLaughlin were appropriate, but why was Will Power docked points if he didn’t use push to pass on restarts?
Doug Mayer
MARSHALL PRUETT: I think it was Ricky Bobby who said that.
There are so many amazing people who work on and run Penske’s cars that I know, and I don’t look at them as being accomplices in or responsible for this nonsense.
There are also so many contradictory statements from Josef Newgarden and Penske president Tim Cindric where Josef swore everyone on his car thought they could legally use P2P like they did at St. Pete, saying “The key difference on the 2 car, which is important to understand, is that somehow, some way, we convinced ourselves that there was a rule change to restarts specifically with overtake usage.”
But the day before, Cindric, the boss and strategist of Newgarden’s car — the most important member of the ‘we’ Newgarden referred to – told me this with his managing director Ron Ruzewski on the call: “The number one thing I wanted to understand, that Roger wanted to understand collectively is, was this done on purpose? And if so, who, what, where and why? Who would think that they would even remotely get away with something like this? And if we did, for how long?”
So if the No. 2 Chevy team — again, led by Cindric, the boss of the team, and the boss of the car – believed they could use the anytime P2P on restarts, why on earth would Cindric launch an internal investigation to find a potential cheater… since, according to Newgarden, everyone on the No. 2 car thought what they were doing was legal?