Team Penske again swaps strategists for Josef Newgarden, Will Power for Indy 500 in wake of suspensions

INDIANAPOLIS -- Team Penske has again tinkered with its lineups on Josef Newgarden and Will Power's Indianapolis 500 entries, stemming from the four suspensions Roger Penske levied related to the program's push-to-pass scandal.

Both Indy 500-winning drivers will be paired with their third strategists of the year -- and second in two weeks -- starting with Tuesday morning's two-hour practice that opens the month. Jonathan Diuguid, who has spent close to 20 years serving in a multitude of roles with Team Penske, will take over strategy duties for Newgarden -- the job typically filled by suspended Team Penske president Tim Cindric. Presently working as Porsche Penske Motorsport's managing director for its IMSA and World Endurance Championship arms, Diuguid previously spent nearly a decade as an full-time IndyCar engineer for a Penske driver lineup that includes Ryan Briscoe, Helio Castroneves and Scott McLaughlin.

He also worked on 500-only programs for Castroneves in 2018-20 alongside serving as a full-time engineer on Penske's sportscar program.

With the addition of Diuguid to Newgarden's car for the 500, Jon Bouslog, Team Penske's special projects manager who called strategy for Newgarden in last weekend's road course race, will switch over to being the strategist on Power's No. 12. The move now allows Power's longtime race engineer, David Faustino, to solely focus on his day-to-day engineering role, rather than having to also call strategy for Power, as he did during the No. 12 Chevy's run to a runner-up finish on Saturday.

Bouslog has been part of more than a dozen of Team Penske's 19 Indy 500 victories and called strategy for Scott McLaughlin during his rookie IndyCar season in 2021. He also recently served as the general manager of Penske's IMSA program. Bouslog replaces Power's typical strategist Ron Ruzewski, who serves as the Team Penske IndyCar program's managing director and who, like Cindric, stood in solidarity with its pair of suspended engineers and will be absent from the track and off the radio both IndyCar races this month.

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The team will stand pat with its engineering changes made leading into the Sonsio Grand Prix on the IMS road course ahead of last weekend's race. In place of Newgarden's race engineer Luke Mason, Penske will hold onto Raul Prados, a lead engineer from its Porsche sportscar program that operates both in IMSA in North America, as well as worldwide in the World Endurance Championship. In his seven years with Team Penske, Prados not only has experience on the IndyCar side, but he's won an IMSA DPi title with the No. 7 Team Penske Acura entry in 2020 and grabbed a Rolex 24 overall win with the No. 7 Porsche Penske GTP car earlier this year.

Paulo Trentini Filho will continue in his elevated data engineer role for the next two weeks, filling in for Power's lead data engineer Robbie Atkinson. Trentini Filho has been part of Team Penske for just over five years.

Atkinson and Mason were suspended for their roles in Team Penske's push-to-pass scandal uncovered last month that led to Newgarden and McLaughlin being disqualified retroactively by IndyCar from the St. Pete season-opener where the pair finished 1st and 3rd. All three Penske cars had illegal use of push-to-pass on starts and restarts because of a line of code that had been inserted into the drivers' setup profiles last August when hybrid testing ramped up.

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According to the team, that profile software didn't make its way into the software Team Penske uses for race weekends until just ahead of the St. Pete opener in March, when the coding that gave the team widespread use of push-to-pass for testing purposes was copy-and-pasted into the drivers' 2024 setup profiles. At St. Pete, Newgarden used overtake three times (for a total of 9 seconds) when the rest of the non-Penske field didn't have access to it. McLaughlin used it once for 1.9 seconds and Power didn't ever hit the button out of typical circumstances.

After an internal review from Penske Corp.'s general counsel, Atkinson was found to have put the coding in the team's test software back in August and then forgot to make the switch to bring the cars up to legal standards. Though not entirely spelled out, it was implied Mason's shortcomings stemmed from Newgarden and others on the No. 2 car believing that push-to-pass rules on starts and restarts had changed in the offseason to allow drivers to hit the button any time the race was green. That belief then fueled Newgarden being unaware he'd broken any rules at St. Pete until the coding was discovered during the Sunday morning warmup at Long Beach. Others in the paddock have also implored that Mason, and perhaps other Penske and Chevy engineers, should've caught the abnormalities in Newgarden's data during or shortly after the St. Pete weekend.

During their suspensions, which stretch through the checkered flag for the 500 May 26, the four Penske IndyCar team members are not permitted at the track or in Indianapolis and have been barred from any type of contact with team members while cars are on-track for practice, qualifying or racing. In separate conversations, Penske and a team spokesperson both declined to say that Cindric, Ruzewski, Mason and Atkinson would be barred from contact with the team of any kind, seemingly opening the door for them to continue participating in end-of-day debriefs and other team meetings.

Theoretically, the pair of engineers may still be able to also work on projects for their respective IndyCar entries from afar, too, when they're off-track, though that has not been explicitly stated. A team spokesperson did say Cindric would be permitted to go on with his traditional duties as team president with Penske's NASCAR, IMSA and WEC programs. He was spotted over the weekend attending Penske Porsche's IMSA overall win at Laguna Seca.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Team Penske confirms pair of Indy 500 strategist changes for Josef Newgarden, Will Power