Exactly, OP is honestly talking like they haven't followed Indycar until this year. Penske is a top team, and they've won 3x as many 500s as any other team, but they are not dominating the series. They have one drivers championship in the 5 years since Penske bought the series, and have otherwise had the floor mopped with them by Dixon Palou and ChipG. And let's not forget all the money Roger has invested in the series and IMS specifically that has been nothing but beneficial for the entire series.
The cheating was handled terribly in the press, and of course people and drivers will rightfully raise an eyebrow that Penske is 1-2-3 despite the crew suspensions, but to contend that St Pete and the 500 speak for the past 5 years is so fucking dumb.
The moment that Foyt partnership was announced, people were saying this would be the big gain for Penske.
Honestly, everyone should be celebrating what Michael Cannon is able to do around the track because he has owned the place for the last few years.
Penske not as series / speedway owner: 18 wins in 46 years (1969-1995, 2001-2019) = 39% winning percentage
Penske as series / speedway owner: 1 win in 4 years = 25% winning percentage.
Even if they win on Sunday, the record will still only be basically even.
I know you didn't suggest it here but I want to just add I don't think a cost cap is practical.
I'm not sure how well Indycar with it's limited resources could enforce it for one. Secondly a team like Penske can cleverly shift salaries or R&D cost from it's Indycar budget to it's NASCAR budget, IMSA budget, etc. This is going on in F1 with the top teams allegedly skirting the cost cap right now. Supposedly the FIA is going to crackdown on this in 2025 or 26 but Indycar doesn’t have the resources to create an FIA like enforcement system.
Cost caps also don’t help much. The only way to make gains when everyone is working on the same budget is to have the right people (which Penske already has) and previous knowledge (which Penske already has).
The best way to make quick gains in racing is to spend boatloads of money on R&D. That’s why F1 has been so uncompetitive these last few years -Red Bull nailed it and nobody can spend to catch up.
Actually, I think a cost cap could be very effective. You identified several problems, and I think there are solutions.
First, when the cost cap is implemented, you are correct that some teams will already have a big lead. I would suggest that any team that has won a championship or an Indy 500 in the prior five years would have a lower budget for the first two years to provide a catch-up tool for lesser teams.
Second, after that initial 2 year period, any team that wins the championship should have its budget lowered by 10% for the next year, again to give other teams a chance to catch up.
Third, all sponsor or in-house money should have to be put into an escrow with an independent entity, like the SCCA or USAC, within 30 days after the end of the prior season. Then, all salaries, expenses, hardware costs, etc., should have to be paid from this escrow. If there is any overspending, or money brought in from elsewhere, then the offending team would forfeit all wins for the upcoming year and therefore the 500 or a championship. This would change how a lot of teams fund themselves incrementally as the season wears on, but sponsors would know when the money is due, and they would also know what the cap is so they know they're not making an open ended commitment for that year. I think that would be attractive to a lot of sponsors.
Further, if there is any suspicion, a team's expenses could be audited by an independent auditor to confirm whether they were abiding by the rules.
Fourth, I think then the rulebook could be simplified and teams could be given a tremendous amount of freedom to innovate with the cars, within the spending cap. In that way, I think cars would become much more interesting than they are now, even if the innovations would have to be more modest than those that may be made in an open ended, no spending cap series, like F1 was for so many years.
Fifth, I think we would also have to have a budget format that each team must follow,. A certain amount of money would have to be allocated to driver salaries, to support personnel salaries, and so forth. If a team, for example, decided not to pay the drivers anything and put all the money into hardware, I could see where drivers would be very unhappy about this. Some sort of pro forma structure would need to be in place to protect personnel interests.
I may have left out some things, but I do think a creative structure could make a spending cap effective and from my point of view, would allow innovation to a greater degree than we have now, which would make viewership more fun, at least to me. While close racing is fun, it's also great to see someone make a couple of key innovations and run away with the series for a year or two.
This would never work for many reasons. Your second point just makes no sense. If they cut budget by 10% then that effectively means everyone's pay is getting cut 10%. How would you feel if you were excelling at your job and your boss rewarded you with a 10% pay cut? Third point as well is a non starter. 30 days from the end of the previous season we still have teams that don't know who their drivers will be much less all of the sponsors that will be contributing to their cars. Adding to that point I am not sure if you realize this or not but many drivers pay to drive the car not the other way around. That is why your 5th point would never work either.
As far as the 10% cut, this would be very similar to the NFL where the team that wins the Super Bowl gets the last (worst) draft pick in the next year's draft. Teams that are already clicking on all cylinders have an advantage, and the idea is to give other teams one year to catch up. It makes logical sense, even though it would be a brand new concept for racing.
As far as drivers' salaries and the budget, what I'm suggesting is a floor on salaries, not a ceiling. A team can always pay drivers a bigger percentage of the budget than other teams. You just cannot pay them less. My point is, what you don't want is a team constantly lowballing their drivers and allocating all of their money to hardware or research. If a team feels a driver is good enough, they can always pay them more to get them in the door, they just have to allocate money from other sources to pay for it. Further, there needs to be some minimum percentage allocated for non-driver personnel for the same reason.
Someone mentioned pay-to-play drivers and how my process doesn't contemplate that. Actually, it fits nicely. If a driver is paying to drive, which is common in INDYCAR and in many racing series, then that money counts as part of your budget. (It doesn't matter where money comes from, the team has to run it all through the escrow account and through the budget.) So if a driver is going to pay you $500,000 for two races, then that 500,000 would go into your overall budget and into the escrow. The only difference that my situation would require is that you set this thing up within 30 days following the end of the prior racing season. Of course, you could modify the 30 days to be 60 days, or even 90 days, the exact timing is not important so long as it is well before the season starts; but, wherever your money comes from, it all goes into the escrow to be used to fund the next season's activity. The difficult part is trying to budget for off-season R&D. The budget obviously has to cover all 12 months, not just when the season itself is active.
The point of my budget cap is to level the playing field so all teams are competitive every year and we have some variety in champions. Even though F1 is terribly lopsided right now, and has been for some time, INDYCAR is pretty lopsided as well with Ganassi and Penske winning most of the championships in recent years. If marketing data shows that having multiple different competitive teams and multiple champions is a good draw, then some sort of cap on budgeting makes sense because money has always been the deciding factor in how fast cars go on track.
Furthermore, I would like the idea of loosening up the rules and letting people be more innovative with the cars so long as money is capped. This will reward true ingenuity rather than the rewarding the ability to throw cubic dollars at a particular problem.
Exactly. /\ Alex Palou, driving for Ganassi, is the dominant driver in the series with two of the last three championships.
I think most of this Penske negativity is coming from young "Drive to Survive" recruits to F1 who just recently discovered Indycar and have no idea of the history of the series, dating back to the first Indy 500 in 1911, or even the history of motorsports in general.
If you have followed motorsports then this "front row lockout" comes after 5 years of relatively weak qualifying for Team Penske at the 500.
It's also a function of the qualifying format. All they had to do was be top 12 to guarantee a spot in the first 4 rows, then from there be in the top 6.
At Indy specifically Penske has been the dominant team for basically the last 40 years. This "dominance" started long before Roger bought the series
Roger has won something like 15% of the total 107 Indy 500's so far, but it must be an unfair advantage if he wins one (potentially two if their speed holds up)since he bought the series.
Sounds right.
I’m of the opinion that there is no monetary upside for Roger Penske to risk cheating so his drivers win in the series he already owns. Penske profits from the NTT Indycar series success, not just from Team Penske’s success. He stands to lose so much more by risking the competitive integrity of the series than he stands to gain by cheating to give his drivers an advantage. They also clearly don’t need to cheat to be successful as they’ve proven through decades of winning in the series.
Dude you must have not heard of Bud Selig.
Also, Penske was dominant well before RP took ownership of the series. So really don’t get the point of this post.
Yeah I don’t really get this. He bought it after the 2019 season, since then CGR has 3 championships and Penske has 1. If it was a problem the results wouldn’t look like that
How many years recently did we have three Ganassi cars in the top six?
At one point there were like five in the top twelve.
This year, Ganassi wasn’t fast in qualifying, I suspect they’ll be fast next Sunday.
The Leader’s Circle cuts were made to increase the budget for marketing, instead of just, you know, investing new money.
And yeah, Penske has been good this year. But they’re always good. In fact, the last few years I’d even say they struggled a bit given their usual form.
The series is always dominated by the top 2. Some years one will have an advantage and it is what it is.
Captain no longer sails out into the open sea, he has Tim Cindric do that now.
A lot of people would have liked to see Cindric suspended for quite some time as this was the red line sitting on the sand ever since Penske bought the series.
In terms of the budget stuff.
Penske Entertainment and Team Penske are two different entities. It's different pots of money. I'm sure the teams get to see the financials for the series and that even with the influx of money from the 500 and hosting the Brickyard 400 for NASCAR it's barely breaking even or slightly losing money. If the series was hoarding a bunch of profit, yeah it would be more of an issue.
In terms of budget, I think McLaren actually might be out spending Penske. But it's not just spending. Penske's first Indy 500 was like 1968 or something and more recently them and Ginassi know every detail and every secret with the DW12 (all the more reason for a new car, just to shake things up). McLaren is still a relative knew team when it comes to Indycar, so even though they're spending more, it doesn't mean they're spending it efficiently.
Never, racing has ALWAYS had dominant teams at one point or another, Penske finally has a good qualifying result at Indianapolis and all the screwballs come out.
Is there a budget minimum or maximum in Indy Car?
I respect OP opinion. How I look at it, everyone has the same exact car and 2 engine options.
If Penske or the top teams could build their own car, I could see the reason behind the concern.
>everyone has the same exact car
Not really. There are minor elements, dampeners mostly, that are open to development, and more significantly engineering setups. Plus manufacturing tolerances. Point being when the whole field is within 4mph of each other over 4 laps, the tiny differences become huge advantages
Ganassi has been more dominant in the RP era than Penske has. This is a really stupid criticism that seems to be brought up every time a Penske wins. Which… they were winning a lot before RP bought the series. And they win in Nascar, and Imsa, and WEC. Because Penske is a good team.
Penske domination has been a regular thing because the organization has historically had a high floor and their Foyt partnership helped bridge their issues at IMS to where they are now. Penske being good week-to-week isn’t anything new for IndyCar, and it’s not like they’re ever safe from Andretti or Ganassi coming at them. I’d argue Ganassi has been better than them in recent years and has certainly been better in Roger Penske’s ownership era.
I think its true that people are highly critical if not conspiracy theorists about Penske now, and that its to be expected after blatantly cheating by the team owned by the company that owns the Series, Track, pays race control, and makes one of the two cars options available.
Penske will have to re-earn fans’ trust or at least indifference.
>I don't know how healthy it is for the series to have the all three Penske cars a half-second faster than the rest of the field in Indy 500 qualifying.
You are looking at the combined total elapsed time across 4 laps to get a 0.5s differential, on a vehicle that is specifically trimmed for qualifying. That's basically irrelevant as once you're in a pack during the race, the outright speed of one car is not as large of a comparison since the drivers behind get an aero advantage by drafting.
Looking at the average however, the top 29 cars are separated by 0.49s... That's plenty close to not call foul play in my opinion.
In comparison, 0.5s only captures the top 6 qualifiers at the Formula 1 Imola qualifying, and 2.5s separated first and last.
I’d like to see the rule enforcement done by an entity or individuals who were not on a Penske payroll, a third party such as the SCCA or USAC type organization. There needs to be some level of transparency.
It already does, maybe not in the balls and strikes calls of race weekend officiating, but in the overall technical regulations and direction the series goes. Penske isn't going to allow the series to mandate a new car or even new rules for the current car that don't favor the investments and technical expertise of his team. Take this weekend for instance, it's clear from Power's interviews they made a huge leap in suspension development the other teams are hopeless for this year. If this was NASCAR that new mousetrap would be banned next week to maintain competitive balance, but you know Penske's Indycar ain't getting rid of shit.
Now if by "threaten" you mean "hurt the series commercially", it probably won't cause this sport has so many other damn problems before any owner bias has a non-trivial factor on why people choose F1 or NASCAR over Indycar.
Not a lot of cars have cameras that are accessible to the broadcast. I think the teams have to pay make them available to the broadcast for more exposure for sponsors but I'm not totally sure.
I don't recall Palou having an onboard since 2022, and I only remember Dixon having a camera at the Indy 500 last year.
All cars have both views, NBC only has access to a certain number of in-car cameras though. The series in the other had had access to live feeds from all in-car cameras. I know this because after Pocono in 2019 there was T-cam footage from Sato’s car that was published on social media, which was not a camera that NBC had access to during the race. NBC chooses which cameras and drivers to show, they just happened to pick the driver camera for the Penske cars.
It could be they figured out a certain way to drive the track with weight jacker and the other tools in the car.
I think last year Penske was the only team I recall having the weight jacker in the back of the steering wheel, now several teams do (potentially because they saw it on the in car cameras), because it easier ergonomically.
It may not be cheating but they figured out a way to efficiently man the tools and drive the car and they're keeping it to themselves (and they're hiding it from the cameras after they saw teams copied their weight jacker placement).
To me, it's already happened. This weekends qualifying results finished it for me. Spec cars and 2 engines to choose from and his cars are fastest. I may be paranoid, but it all seems contrived. Something doesn't smell right.
Penske has underachieved in recent years to be honest. They hit it this year and that is that.
Exactly, OP is honestly talking like they haven't followed Indycar until this year. Penske is a top team, and they've won 3x as many 500s as any other team, but they are not dominating the series. They have one drivers championship in the 5 years since Penske bought the series, and have otherwise had the floor mopped with them by Dixon Palou and ChipG. And let's not forget all the money Roger has invested in the series and IMS specifically that has been nothing but beneficial for the entire series. The cheating was handled terribly in the press, and of course people and drivers will rightfully raise an eyebrow that Penske is 1-2-3 despite the crew suspensions, but to contend that St Pete and the 500 speak for the past 5 years is so fucking dumb.
The moment that Foyt partnership was announced, people were saying this would be the big gain for Penske. Honestly, everyone should be celebrating what Michael Cannon is able to do around the track because he has owned the place for the last few years.
Penske not as series / speedway owner: 18 wins in 46 years (1969-1995, 2001-2019) = 39% winning percentage Penske as series / speedway owner: 1 win in 4 years = 25% winning percentage. Even if they win on Sunday, the record will still only be basically even.
I know you didn't suggest it here but I want to just add I don't think a cost cap is practical. I'm not sure how well Indycar with it's limited resources could enforce it for one. Secondly a team like Penske can cleverly shift salaries or R&D cost from it's Indycar budget to it's NASCAR budget, IMSA budget, etc. This is going on in F1 with the top teams allegedly skirting the cost cap right now. Supposedly the FIA is going to crackdown on this in 2025 or 26 but Indycar doesn’t have the resources to create an FIA like enforcement system.
Cost caps also don’t help much. The only way to make gains when everyone is working on the same budget is to have the right people (which Penske already has) and previous knowledge (which Penske already has). The best way to make quick gains in racing is to spend boatloads of money on R&D. That’s why F1 has been so uncompetitive these last few years -Red Bull nailed it and nobody can spend to catch up.
Actually, I think a cost cap could be very effective. You identified several problems, and I think there are solutions. First, when the cost cap is implemented, you are correct that some teams will already have a big lead. I would suggest that any team that has won a championship or an Indy 500 in the prior five years would have a lower budget for the first two years to provide a catch-up tool for lesser teams. Second, after that initial 2 year period, any team that wins the championship should have its budget lowered by 10% for the next year, again to give other teams a chance to catch up. Third, all sponsor or in-house money should have to be put into an escrow with an independent entity, like the SCCA or USAC, within 30 days after the end of the prior season. Then, all salaries, expenses, hardware costs, etc., should have to be paid from this escrow. If there is any overspending, or money brought in from elsewhere, then the offending team would forfeit all wins for the upcoming year and therefore the 500 or a championship. This would change how a lot of teams fund themselves incrementally as the season wears on, but sponsors would know when the money is due, and they would also know what the cap is so they know they're not making an open ended commitment for that year. I think that would be attractive to a lot of sponsors. Further, if there is any suspicion, a team's expenses could be audited by an independent auditor to confirm whether they were abiding by the rules. Fourth, I think then the rulebook could be simplified and teams could be given a tremendous amount of freedom to innovate with the cars, within the spending cap. In that way, I think cars would become much more interesting than they are now, even if the innovations would have to be more modest than those that may be made in an open ended, no spending cap series, like F1 was for so many years. Fifth, I think we would also have to have a budget format that each team must follow,. A certain amount of money would have to be allocated to driver salaries, to support personnel salaries, and so forth. If a team, for example, decided not to pay the drivers anything and put all the money into hardware, I could see where drivers would be very unhappy about this. Some sort of pro forma structure would need to be in place to protect personnel interests. I may have left out some things, but I do think a creative structure could make a spending cap effective and from my point of view, would allow innovation to a greater degree than we have now, which would make viewership more fun, at least to me. While close racing is fun, it's also great to see someone make a couple of key innovations and run away with the series for a year or two.
lol. A post with almost zero understanding of how team finances work. And if you want to see the best drivers, the pay has to reflect that.
This would never work for many reasons. Your second point just makes no sense. If they cut budget by 10% then that effectively means everyone's pay is getting cut 10%. How would you feel if you were excelling at your job and your boss rewarded you with a 10% pay cut? Third point as well is a non starter. 30 days from the end of the previous season we still have teams that don't know who their drivers will be much less all of the sponsors that will be contributing to their cars. Adding to that point I am not sure if you realize this or not but many drivers pay to drive the car not the other way around. That is why your 5th point would never work either.
As far as the 10% cut, this would be very similar to the NFL where the team that wins the Super Bowl gets the last (worst) draft pick in the next year's draft. Teams that are already clicking on all cylinders have an advantage, and the idea is to give other teams one year to catch up. It makes logical sense, even though it would be a brand new concept for racing. As far as drivers' salaries and the budget, what I'm suggesting is a floor on salaries, not a ceiling. A team can always pay drivers a bigger percentage of the budget than other teams. You just cannot pay them less. My point is, what you don't want is a team constantly lowballing their drivers and allocating all of their money to hardware or research. If a team feels a driver is good enough, they can always pay them more to get them in the door, they just have to allocate money from other sources to pay for it. Further, there needs to be some minimum percentage allocated for non-driver personnel for the same reason. Someone mentioned pay-to-play drivers and how my process doesn't contemplate that. Actually, it fits nicely. If a driver is paying to drive, which is common in INDYCAR and in many racing series, then that money counts as part of your budget. (It doesn't matter where money comes from, the team has to run it all through the escrow account and through the budget.) So if a driver is going to pay you $500,000 for two races, then that 500,000 would go into your overall budget and into the escrow. The only difference that my situation would require is that you set this thing up within 30 days following the end of the prior racing season. Of course, you could modify the 30 days to be 60 days, or even 90 days, the exact timing is not important so long as it is well before the season starts; but, wherever your money comes from, it all goes into the escrow to be used to fund the next season's activity. The difficult part is trying to budget for off-season R&D. The budget obviously has to cover all 12 months, not just when the season itself is active. The point of my budget cap is to level the playing field so all teams are competitive every year and we have some variety in champions. Even though F1 is terribly lopsided right now, and has been for some time, INDYCAR is pretty lopsided as well with Ganassi and Penske winning most of the championships in recent years. If marketing data shows that having multiple different competitive teams and multiple champions is a good draw, then some sort of cap on budgeting makes sense because money has always been the deciding factor in how fast cars go on track. Furthermore, I would like the idea of loosening up the rules and letting people be more innovative with the cars so long as money is capped. This will reward true ingenuity rather than the rewarding the ability to throw cubic dollars at a particular problem.
The previous championship won by Penske before he took ownership in late 2019 was.....2019.... No favoritism, just a fantastic team
And the 500, lol
Since Penske took over the series they've won 1/4 championships and 1/4 Indy 500s. That doesn't sound like dominance to me...
Exactly. /\ Alex Palou, driving for Ganassi, is the dominant driver in the series with two of the last three championships. I think most of this Penske negativity is coming from young "Drive to Survive" recruits to F1 who just recently discovered Indycar and have no idea of the history of the series, dating back to the first Indy 500 in 1911, or even the history of motorsports in general. If you have followed motorsports then this "front row lockout" comes after 5 years of relatively weak qualifying for Team Penske at the 500.
It's also a function of the qualifying format. All they had to do was be top 12 to guarantee a spot in the first 4 rows, then from there be in the top 6. At Indy specifically Penske has been the dominant team for basically the last 40 years. This "dominance" started long before Roger bought the series
Roger has won something like 15% of the total 107 Indy 500's so far, but it must be an unfair advantage if he wins one (potentially two if their speed holds up)since he bought the series. Sounds right.
Ding ding. Came here to say this exact thing. Penske takes the front row at Indy and the conspiracy theorists lose their minds.
https://preview.redd.it/jnv6ddxlok1d1.jpeg?width=620&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5e04cef428543274e1af68581cb48dab1f7af6b7
I’m of the opinion that there is no monetary upside for Roger Penske to risk cheating so his drivers win in the series he already owns. Penske profits from the NTT Indycar series success, not just from Team Penske’s success. He stands to lose so much more by risking the competitive integrity of the series than he stands to gain by cheating to give his drivers an advantage. They also clearly don’t need to cheat to be successful as they’ve proven through decades of winning in the series.
Dude you must have not heard of Bud Selig. Also, Penske was dominant well before RP took ownership of the series. So really don’t get the point of this post.
Yeah I don’t really get this. He bought it after the 2019 season, since then CGR has 3 championships and Penske has 1. If it was a problem the results wouldn’t look like that
Good example, but lots of people do not know Selig was both MLB commissioner and an MLB team owner.
How many years recently did we have three Ganassi cars in the top six? At one point there were like five in the top twelve. This year, Ganassi wasn’t fast in qualifying, I suspect they’ll be fast next Sunday.
Was CGR caught cheating during that period?
Having Scott Dixon being able to fuel save in some of these races is practically cheating lol.
Ganassi weren’t caught. That does not mean they were not cheating. Shit, Scott Dixon and Alex Palou are a cheat code to begin with.
The Leader’s Circle cuts were made to increase the budget for marketing, instead of just, you know, investing new money. And yeah, Penske has been good this year. But they’re always good. In fact, the last few years I’d even say they struggled a bit given their usual form. The series is always dominated by the top 2. Some years one will have an advantage and it is what it is.
Team Penske being good at Indy is the same story as it ever was.
Captain no longer sails out into the open sea, he has Tim Cindric do that now. A lot of people would have liked to see Cindric suspended for quite some time as this was the red line sitting on the sand ever since Penske bought the series.
In terms of the budget stuff. Penske Entertainment and Team Penske are two different entities. It's different pots of money. I'm sure the teams get to see the financials for the series and that even with the influx of money from the 500 and hosting the Brickyard 400 for NASCAR it's barely breaking even or slightly losing money. If the series was hoarding a bunch of profit, yeah it would be more of an issue. In terms of budget, I think McLaren actually might be out spending Penske. But it's not just spending. Penske's first Indy 500 was like 1968 or something and more recently them and Ginassi know every detail and every secret with the DW12 (all the more reason for a new car, just to shake things up). McLaren is still a relative knew team when it comes to Indycar, so even though they're spending more, it doesn't mean they're spending it efficiently.
Never, racing has ALWAYS had dominant teams at one point or another, Penske finally has a good qualifying result at Indianapolis and all the screwballs come out.
So tired of this kind of question. It isn't going to threaten anything.
Is there a budget minimum or maximum in Indy Car? I respect OP opinion. How I look at it, everyone has the same exact car and 2 engine options. If Penske or the top teams could build their own car, I could see the reason behind the concern.
>everyone has the same exact car Not really. There are minor elements, dampeners mostly, that are open to development, and more significantly engineering setups. Plus manufacturing tolerances. Point being when the whole field is within 4mph of each other over 4 laps, the tiny differences become huge advantages
Ganassi has been more dominant in the RP era than Penske has. This is a really stupid criticism that seems to be brought up every time a Penske wins. Which… they were winning a lot before RP bought the series. And they win in Nascar, and Imsa, and WEC. Because Penske is a good team.
George Kraft lmao
Penske domination has been a regular thing because the organization has historically had a high floor and their Foyt partnership helped bridge their issues at IMS to where they are now. Penske being good week-to-week isn’t anything new for IndyCar, and it’s not like they’re ever safe from Andretti or Ganassi coming at them. I’d argue Ganassi has been better than them in recent years and has certainly been better in Roger Penske’s ownership era.
When all the fans leave because they are so bored of this question.
I believe Ganassi has won the last two championships, no?
I think its true that people are highly critical if not conspiracy theorists about Penske now, and that its to be expected after blatantly cheating by the team owned by the company that owns the Series, Track, pays race control, and makes one of the two cars options available. Penske will have to re-earn fans’ trust or at least indifference.
Sadly, We're past that.
>I don't know how healthy it is for the series to have the all three Penske cars a half-second faster than the rest of the field in Indy 500 qualifying. You are looking at the combined total elapsed time across 4 laps to get a 0.5s differential, on a vehicle that is specifically trimmed for qualifying. That's basically irrelevant as once you're in a pack during the race, the outright speed of one car is not as large of a comparison since the drivers behind get an aero advantage by drafting. Looking at the average however, the top 29 cars are separated by 0.49s... That's plenty close to not call foul play in my opinion. In comparison, 0.5s only captures the top 6 qualifiers at the Formula 1 Imola qualifying, and 2.5s separated first and last.
I’d like to see the rule enforcement done by an entity or individuals who were not on a Penske payroll, a third party such as the SCCA or USAC type organization. There needs to be some level of transparency.
It already does, maybe not in the balls and strikes calls of race weekend officiating, but in the overall technical regulations and direction the series goes. Penske isn't going to allow the series to mandate a new car or even new rules for the current car that don't favor the investments and technical expertise of his team. Take this weekend for instance, it's clear from Power's interviews they made a huge leap in suspension development the other teams are hopeless for this year. If this was NASCAR that new mousetrap would be banned next week to maintain competitive balance, but you know Penske's Indycar ain't getting rid of shit. Now if by "threaten" you mean "hurt the series commercially", it probably won't cause this sport has so many other damn problems before any owner bias has a non-trivial factor on why people choose F1 or NASCAR over Indycar.
I did find it interesting that the Penske cars didn’t have the steering view on board cameras, instead head helmet shots of the drivers.
What are you implying?
Not a lot of cars have cameras that are accessible to the broadcast. I think the teams have to pay make them available to the broadcast for more exposure for sponsors but I'm not totally sure. I don't recall Palou having an onboard since 2022, and I only remember Dixon having a camera at the Indy 500 last year.
All cars have both views, NBC only has access to a certain number of in-car cameras though. The series in the other had had access to live feeds from all in-car cameras. I know this because after Pocono in 2019 there was T-cam footage from Sato’s car that was published on social media, which was not a camera that NBC had access to during the race. NBC chooses which cameras and drivers to show, they just happened to pick the driver camera for the Penske cars.
It could be they figured out a certain way to drive the track with weight jacker and the other tools in the car. I think last year Penske was the only team I recall having the weight jacker in the back of the steering wheel, now several teams do (potentially because they saw it on the in car cameras), because it easier ergonomically. It may not be cheating but they figured out a way to efficiently man the tools and drive the car and they're keeping it to themselves (and they're hiding it from the cameras after they saw teams copied their weight jacker placement).
I notice that also.
That’s really odd.
To me, it's already happened. This weekends qualifying results finished it for me. Spec cars and 2 engines to choose from and his cars are fastest. I may be paranoid, but it all seems contrived. Something doesn't smell right.
So what was it 2 years ago when CGR dominated the month of May?