How Team Penske took push-to-pass beyond the limit
Self-incriminating evidence. That’s what brought Team Penske’s illegal use of push-to-pass to light on Sunday in Long Beach.
Through the use of remote wireless activation, the NTT IndyCar Series turns its push-to-pass (P2P) system on and off from race control. Its normal routine is to activate P2P for the entirety of the warmup sessions, which allows teams to complete their final pre-race practice with all of the in-race systems at their disposal.
When its cars are meant to have P2P in warmups and the races, a switch is thrown in race control and the P2P button on each steering wheel is made active, and when depressed, increased revs and additional boost from the turbocharged engines is delivered to the tune of an extra 50hp or so, which assists in passing or defending against passes.
IndyCar sets a time limit for P2P use in the races, with anywhere from 150-200 seconds provided to drivers to use as desired. However, the series makes one stipulation: The system is turned off on starts and restarts.
It’s the same type of remote process used in Formula 1 by its race directors with the Drag Reduction System (DRS), where DRS is unavailable for starts and restarts. Until F1’s race control team enables DRS, the upper rear wing flaps will not open.
On Sunday, IndyCar was experiencing technical difficulties in race control during the first 10 minutes of the 30-minute warmup session, and with their attention turned to those issues, P2P wasn’t activated when the green flag waved.
Where the story takes an interesting turn with Team Penske and P2P is during those opening 10 minutes when P2P was unintentionally inactive for the field of 27. Well, make that 24 of the 27.
While nine of IndyCar’s 10 teams spent those 10 early minutes without the use of P2P, IndyCar and others saw something strange through telemetry where the Team Penske cars — and only the Team Penske cars — had functioning P2P as Penske drivers were racking up seconds of P2P use.
It’s unclear if all three of Penske’s drivers were successful in using the P2P button when it was deactivated, but what we now know is that some or all of the trio comprised of Josef Newgarden, Scott McLaughlin and Will Power managed to expose Team Penske for having live P2P during the warmup while the system was off.
Having pointed a finger at itself in the warmup, Penske’s engine data and recent use of P2P became the subject of an immediate review by IndyCar, whereupon it was found that Newgarden and McLaughlin deployed P2P during the inactive start/restart phases at the first race of the season. Newgarden’s St. Petersburg win and McLaughlin’s third-place results were subsequently voided. Power, who did not use the button illegally, was docked 10 points.
If not for the issues in race control to start the warmup session, Penske might not have been caught and the ongoing use of illegal “anytime” P2P in Sunday’s race, just as Newgarden and McLaughlin benefited from in St. Pete, could have continued.
IndyCar did not state whether the prohibited use of P2P happened at the second event of the season, the non-points $1 Million Challenge at The Thermal Club, but with its prior use at St. Pete and afterwards at Long Beach, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibilities to suggest Team Penske has had full-time P2P available at every stop on the calendar this year.
In its statement, Team Penske president Tim Cindric said the unapproved ability for his drivers to use P2P was due to a software version error in the ECU.
“Unfortunately, the push-to-pass software was not removed as it should have been, following recently completed hybrid testing in the Team Penske Indy cars,” he said.
Newgarden and McLaughlin both benefited from permanently-available push-to-pass at St Petersburg, and it was only a fluke technical glitch in race control at Long Beach that led to the exploit being detected. Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images
In hybrid testing, IndyCar has allowed teams to have anytime deployment of P2P, and based on the statement, it was errantly carried over into the official championship. According to multiple engine technicians, race engineers, and data engineers who spoke with RACER under the condition of anonymity, there’s more to the story.
Based on the information provided by those experts, there are no hybrid or non-hybrid P2P software versions to install or uninstall in the ECU. The culprit, as some deduced, is not the ECU, but rather the CLU, the central logger unit, which is the main data system on each chassis, and its associated MyLaps timing and scoring transponder.
To understand what likely took place, it’s worth explaining that Chevy and Honda and IndyCar interact exclusively with ECUs, and teams interface exclusively with the CLUs and MyLaps’ units.
Going into every race weekend, the ECUs are locked by IndyCar with what’s called “app layers.” There’s an IndyCar app layer and there’s an engine manufacturer app layer, and there are certain parameters a Chevy or Honda are allowed to modify and manipulate in the ECU, and there are parameters IndyCar prevents the manufacturers from accessing and changing. One of the items locked out in the ECU by IndyCar during practice and qualifying is the ability to use P2P.
Once the weekend reaches the pre-race warmup session, IndyCar provides Chevy and Honda with a special file they upload to the ECUs that unlocks the use of P2P in the warmup and the race. One by one, engine technicians from each brand plug into the 27 combined ECUs and upload that file to each car through the manufacturer app layer. That file also tells the ECU to sets the increased boost level and increase of 200rpm, and the 150-200s cap for P2P’s time-use limit.
But the ECU still isn’t ready to make P2P function.
The final step in the process happens in the form of a signal that gets sent from race control’s master P2P system, which gives each ECU the final go-ahead to unleash P2P. That happens as the signal is spread through numerous beacons placed throughout each circuit that are part of the timing and scoring system.
Once activated by race control, the signal hits the beacons and is carried first to each car’s CLU/MyLaps transponder, and then onto the ECU, upon which the ECU makes the buttons on the steering wheels live for shots of 50hp between starts and restarts.
The same process is used to deactivate P2P by sending a signal through the beacons to disable the buttons. The CLU/MyLaps transponder is the intermediary in the process and is not locked down by IndyCar or its engine manufacturers in any way.
Also, the CAN (controller area network) P2P signal sent by the series is encoded and cannot be manipulated; teams and manufacturers are unable to hack the P2P on/off instructions.
But as our sources suggest, the CLU/MyLaps transponder is the one area of electronics in the P2P communications chain that has long been ripe for exploitation.
The wording in the series’ press release points to where it found the illegal activity: “Rule 14.19.15. An indicator to enable Push to Pass will be sent via CAN communication from the timing and scoring beacon on board the Car to the team data logger. This signal must be passed on to the ECU unmodified and uninterrupted during all Road and Street Course Events.”
The words “unmodified and uninterrupted” would seemingly explain how Team Penske bypassed IndyCar’s P2P on/off commands.
And with the previous note on how the series’ CAN message is encoded, it would suggest the team found a way to both interrupt IndyCar’s “off” signal and prevent it from being received by the ECU. But that doesn’t explain how the Penske drivers had functioning P2P during the warmup, all prior to IndyCar activating the system and sending the “on” signal to the ECUs. One expert suggested Penske found a way to spoof the “on” signal through the CLU/MyLaps units and tell the ECU to enable P2P.
With no “on” signal having been sent to the field for the first 10 minutes, and only the Penske cars making use of P2P when it was off, the expert’s theory could have merit.
The breach appears to have taken place in an area of the electronics chain that is controlled by the teams rather than the manufacturer or series. Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images
For the sake of reinforcing access and roles, the CLU and MyLaps system is the domain of the teams, not the manufacturers. As such, and when asked for comment, a Chevy spokesperson shared the following with RACER: “The code that modifies the IndyCar push-to-pass MyLaps transponder signal resides on the CLU and is the responsibility of the team. Chevrolet has no input or responsibility for the software or operation of the CLU. The engine responds to the output of the CLU.”
In distancing itself from Team Penske, Chevy has further fortified the notion that it was not involved in the P2P trickery. But that does not completely absolve the brand from being accountable for the data it would have seen coming off of the Penske cars.
A standard practice for every engine technician is to download the data from their car’s ECU after each session, and in most cases, they pour over the information in an obsessive and investigative manner. They look for any irregularities in how their engine is performing, and with a countless number of data channels being captured, basic items like speed, engine RPM, and turbo boost are recorded and reviewed.
With the illegal ability for Penske’s driver to have P2P power before everyone else, the Penske ECUs would have documented the premature rise in boost and RPM, and shown the P2P button being successfully used when it should have been inoperable. Team Penske would have seen similar things on their side through the CLUs. Opportunities to self-report were seemingly present but not acted upon since St. Pete.
It’s also a common practice for manufacturers to pool the data from all of its cars and engines, and overlay the data where, at least at St. Pete, irregularities in Newgarden’s No. 2 Chevy and McLaughlin’s No. 3 Chevy should have been seen. This point was raised while asking the brand to comment, but it was not addressed in its answer, which leaves open the possibility the early spikes in power and RPM weren’t caught.
Separate from Team Chevy, Penske’s contravening of the rules should have been caught by IndyCar through a few avenues.
The series takes each team’s CLU data which also has basic engine data, after most sessions and definitely after each race. The series has live telemetry coming into race control whenever cars are on track, which delivers all of the important channels it would need to monitor for P2P use, and so on. It also has onboard videos to review, which would reveal a driver pressing the P2P button when it was meant to be disabled.
Through all of the means of information it intakes — both live and for review after the race — this could have been caught before Penske incriminated themselves through a random issue in Sunday’s morning warmup.
RACER also understands at least one team raised its concern regarding Penske drivers illegally using P2P in 2023 and went as far as sending the series onboard video clips of what it considered abnormal button use for IndyCar to review.
Give full credit to IndyCar president Jay Frye, who oversees the operations side of the series. He took aim at his boss’s team, did exactly what he should have done, and treated Team Penske no differently than any other entrant. This is how a sport should work.
At the same time, the series also missed an ongoing, multi-event infraction that could have been found without having to look beyond the basic data it collects. Relying on good faith that all teams will play within the rules cannot be allowed to continue.
The main question left to answer is how hard IndyCar wants to look into Team Penske’s recent history and comb through the detailed data it has from the three cars to check whether the illegal P2P practices started before 2024.
This is a black eye for Roger Penske, Tim Cindric, Josef Newgarden, Scott McLaughlin and the series. Decisions were made to bypass the P2P rules and there were far too many people who plug into the cars and see the data to claim it was a simple software mistake.
RACER was told in the hours after the penalties were announced that IndyCar has sent a patch to be installed that would prevent future bypassing of P2P rules through exploiting the CLU/MyLaps loggers. This shouldn’t happen again. But was it an isolated incident?
For those who care about the integrity of the sport, let’s hope Frye’s team looks back a few years to find out, and that no interference from Penske is received. What a sad day for IndyCar.
