Normally, race weeks are all about the long build to Sunday’s crescendo, but this time around, IndyCar dropped a bombshell by announcing revised results from last month’s season-opening St. Petersburg Grand Prix, in Florida.
With one of its flagship teams caught cheating, multiple drivers disqualified, and a new race winner declared, this might be the craziest story of the year in any motorsport.
Let’s unpack what just happened and reckon with what it means for the various title races going forward.
How Team Penske got caught
During warmups at last weekend’s Long Beach Grand Prix, IndyCar officials discovered software anomalies surrounding the push-to-pass systems in all three Team Penske cars.
After correcting these anomalies and ensuring no other cars had anything similar, Long Beach went ahead as planned, but the stewards weren’t done investigating.
When they looked back at data from the race in St. Petersburg, they found that all three cars’ software violated the same regulations there and that two drivers, Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin, had used push-to-pass during restarts.
This alone was a smoking gun – not only is it illegal to deploy push-to-pass on starts or restarts, but the software that the Indy cars use is specifically coded to not allow it.
Add in that Newgarden and McLaughlin won and came third, respectively.
Team Penske is under the same umbrella of ownership as the IndyCar Series itself, and you can see why it was imperative for IndyCar to drop the hammer and protect their integrity – which, thankfully, they did.
On top of the fines and lost prize money assessed to all three Penske drivers, Newgarden and McLaughlin are both retroactively disqualified from St. Petersburg.
Newgarden keeps his pole position but loses all his other honours for the day, including his bonus points, lap times, and laps led.
Will Power also loses 10 points for having the illegal software on his car, but will keep his result, as his actual driving was entirely clean.
All things considered, it’s a firm, but fair judgment. Too often in sports, we see cheating swept under the rug and slapped on the wrist, as though fully acknowledging it is somehow more shameful than letting honest competitors get screwed over.
Just look at how Major League Baseball “punished” the Houston Astros for cheating their way to a championship.
So in that light, it’s a huge relief to see IndyCar catch this early, tackle it head-on, and make amends to the rest of the field with a direct and proportionate response.
Hopefully, this sets a strong precedent going forward, not just for teams tempted to cheat, but for IndyCar itself as a bastion of fair play if something like this happens again.
Lucky ducks and rookie records: the new results from St. Petersburg
Let’s start with the big one. With Josef Newgarden disqualified, Pato O’Ward is now the official winner of the 2024 St. Petersburg Grand Prix.
It probably doesn’t feel as good as just grabbing that checkered flag yourself, but after the heartbreaking way he lost the race last year, it’s nice to see the racing gods give back what they took away.
The win also puts O’Ward in some elite company – he’s the first driver from Latin America to win here since the legendary Juan Pablo Montoya in 2016, who was the first McLaren driver ever to win at this track, and the winningest driver in team history, breaking the record Simon Paginaud set a decade ago.
Joining O’Ward on the podium are Will Power in second and Colton Herta in third.
It’ll be a strange silver for Power, as the ten championship points lost due to penalties outweigh the eight gained from his teammates’ disqualifications. Herta, meanwhile, now outscores Power by six points on the day.
Rounding out the top five, we have Alex Palou and Felix Rosenqvist.
For the former, it provides what could be four very useful extra points in his quest to officially hit dynasty status.
For the latter the bonus might provide some comfort after brake issues Sunday at Long Beach kept him from capitalizing on the pole position he’d earned the day before.
A little farther down the results sheet, Santino Ferrucci and Kyle Kirkwood move up to ninth and 10th, respectively.
Ferrucci in particular will be grateful for this, as it marks both his and A.J. Foyt Racing’s first top-ten finish since his shocking bronze medal at last year’s Indy 500.
Finally, Kyffin Simpson adds a piece of history to his already impressive IndyCar debut.
Not only does he move up to 12th place, but with Newgarden’s laps all invalidated, the Caymanian inherits the fastest lap with a 1:00.8779 on lap 88.
It’s not worth a championship point, but it does give Simpson the record for the fastest lap ever recorded at St. Petersburg.
It’s an incredible feather to have in your cap this early, and it’s yet more evidence to suggest he’ll be the breakout talent of his rookie class.
What this means for the Championship going into Alabama
As you might expect, the two disqualified drivers took brutal tumbles down the championship standings. Josef Newgarden, who previously led the field by twelve points, now sits all the way down in 11th.
That’s still incredibly fortunate compared to Scott McLaughlin, who, between this DQ and that DNF in Long Beach, sank to dead last in the standings, behind a collection of rookies, part-timers, and Sting Ray Robb.
Obviously, Newgarden and McLaughlin are both legitimately great drivers who can easily regain ground if given a clean car, but they’ll each need to bounce back quickly in Alabama to keep their ambitions on track.
Even then, if it’s a tight race for the Astor Cup at the end of the year, this fiasco could absolutely come back to haunt both drivers.
With those guys down, the top 3 in the standings now match the top three at Long Beach: Scott Dixon, Colton Herta, and Palou, in that order.
Herta’s promotion to podium in the opening race helps him out here, bumping him to two points behind Dixon and one extra ahead of Palou.
Below them, O’Ward’s retroactive victory lets him snipe fourth place from Power; Alexander Rossi’s new six-spot steals seventh from Kirkwood; and Rinus VeeKay and Marcus Ericsson move up to gatekeep Newgarden from the top ten.
We even get some jockeying farther down the table, as Agustín Canapino, Pietro Fittipaldi, and Christian Lundgaard all snatch a spot off another driver.
However, the most interesting motion down low comes from the three British drivers.
Scott McLaughlin of New Zealand. (Photo by Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
Tom Blomqvist, an IMSA champion and two-time 24 Hours of Daytona winner now trying his hand at IndyCar, leapfrogs two drivers to take 18th.
Jack Harvey, Dale Coyne’s most consistent presence, takes 24th off of Sting Ray Robb and hilariously, Callum Illot moves up to tie with his own replacement, Théo Pourchaire.
As for the Manufacturers’ Cup, Chevrolet still keeps their win and pole at St. Petersburg, but the Penske penalties significantly shake the table, as Honda rises from two points behind to 52 points ahead.
Suffice to say, if Honda’s top teams dominate the day again in Birmingham, it could bust this race wide open and seriously set back Chevy’s quest for a three-peat.
Finally, just for fun, let’s bring back the Nations’ Cup, a former CART staple last awarded in the 2006 Champ Car World Series.
With the penalties applied, New Zealand actually moves up to first place despite losing points – partly because the United States lost even more, and partly because the Kiwi score had Scott Dixon to fall back on.
The two nations’ penalties also give third-place Spain a much easier time climbing the ranks, as their gap to second shrinks by 15 points.
Finally, Australia finds itself the unlucky country here—with Mexico and Sweden gaining ten and five points, respectively, Australia only needed to drop two points to fall two places from fourth to sixth.
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Whatever award you value most, it’ll be a whole new ballgame when the Alabama Indy Grand Prix kicks off this weekend, and drivers up and down the grid will be fighting like mad to maintain or improve upon their new spots.
Here’s to a good clean race in Birmingham, and to every twist and turn IndyCar throws at us the rest of the way.