Team Penske announces subs for suspended IndyCar members for Sonsio GP, 500 plans TBD

Team Penske is yet to announce who will fill-in for its four suspended IndyCar team members for the Indianapolis 500, but the team has rolled out its list for this weekend's Sonsio Grand Prix on the IMS road course -- including adding more to a veteran's plate and welcoming back a longtime Team Penske IndyCar regular.

David Faustino has been attached at the hip to Will Power for well over a decade, having served as the two-time IndyCar champ's race engineer since both joined Team Penske full-time in 2010 (with two additional years in the pair's pre-Penske days). Faustino has helped engineer Power to 40 of his 41 wins. This weekend, he adds being the strategist of the No. 12 to his resume, filling in for Ron Ruzewski, who is also Team Penske's IndyCar managing director.

Though not typical, Faustino holding the lead engineer and strategist roles on the No. 12 Chevy this weekend isn't unheard of. Arrow McLaren's Will Anderson has held both roles on Pato O'Ward's No. 5 Chevy entry since the start of 2023.

In place of Josef Newgarden's longtime strategist Tim Cindric, who also serves as president of Team Penske, Jon Bouslog, one of Penske's longest-serving team members, slides over from his day-to-day shop-based role as Team Penske's special projects manager to call the shots on the No. 2 Chevy. 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.

To replace its two benched engineers -- Newgarden's race engineer Luke Mason and Power's data engineer Robbie Atkinson -- Team Penske has dug into its deep pool of engineers to fill a pair of gaps this weekend. Mason's replacement, Raul Prados, serves as a lead race engineer for Penske's Porsche sportscar program -- both wings of which are active this weekend at Spa (WEC) and Laguna Seca (IMSA). In his seven years at Team Penske, along with previous IndyCar experience, he also 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, the team's data engineer replacement for Atkinson this weekend, is more plug-and-play, having started this year in a lesser data engineer role on the No. 12 Chevy. He's been part of Team Penske's engineering corps for just over five years.

Roger Penske: 'Proper investigation' led to 4 IndyCar team suspensions including Indy 500

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.

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.

More: Penske president Cindric allowed to cover NASCAR, IMSA, WEC duties during IndyCar suspension

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 -- including potentially attending any of those series' five total events between now and May 26.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Team Penske names subs for suspended employees for Sonsio Grand Prix