Team Penske names replacement players for suspended employees for the Sonsio Grand Prix

Team Penske has not yet announced who will replace its four suspended IndyCar team members for the Indianapolis 500, but the team has released its roster for this weekend’s Sonsio Grand Prix at the IMS road course – including adding more members to the List a veteran plate and welcome back a long-time Team Penske IndyCar regular.

David Faustino has been closely associated with Will Power for more than a decade, having served as the two-time IndyCar champion’s race engineer since both joined Team Penske full-time in 2010 (with two additional years in the pre-Penske era). ). Faustino has helped Engineer Power to 40 of his 41 wins. This weekend, he adds to his resume being the No. 12’s strategist, filling in for Ron Ruzewski, who is also Team Penske’s IndyCar general manager.

While not typical, it is not uncommon for Faustino to fill the role of lead engineer and strategist in the No. 12 Chevy this weekend. Arrow McLaren’s Will Anderson has held both roles in Pato O’Ward’s No. 5 Chevy since the start of 2023.

Replacing Josef Newgarden’s longtime strategist Tim Cindric, who also serves as Team Penske’s president, will be Jon Bouslog, one of Penske’s longest-serving team members, moving from his day-to-day role as Team Penske’s special projects manager to make the decision on the No. 2 Chevy . Bouslog was involved in more than a dozen of Team Penske’s 19 Indy 500 victories and provided strategy to Scott McLaughlin during his rookie IndyCar season in 2021. He also recently served as general manager of Penske’s IMSA program.

To replace its two replacement engineers – Newgarden’s race engineer Luke Mason and Power’s data engineer Robbie Atkinson – Team Penske has drawn on its large pool of engineers to fill two gaps this weekend. Mason’s successor, Raul Prados, serves as lead race engineer for Penske’s Porsche sports car program – both wings of which are active this weekend at Spa (WEC) and Laguna Seca (IMSA). In his seven years with Team Penske, in addition to previous IndyCar experience, he also won an IMSA DPi title with the No. 7 Team Penske Acura in 2020 and previously captured an overall Rolex 24 victory with the No. 7 Porsche Penske GTP car Year.

Paulo Trentini Filho, the team’s data engineer who replaces Atkinson this weekend, is more plug-and-play, having started in a lesser data engineer role in the No. 12 Chevy this year. He has been part of Team Penske’s engineering corps for just over five years.

Roger Penske:“A proper investigation” led to suspensions for four IndyCar teams, including the Indy 500

Atkinson and Mason were suspended for their roles in the Team Penske push-to-pass scandal, which was uncovered last month and resulted in IndyCar’s Newgarden and McLaughlin being retroactively disqualified from the season opener in St. Pete, where the pair finished 1st . and took 3rd place. All three Penske cars experienced illegal use of push-to-pass features during starts and restarts due to a line of code that was inserted into drivers’ setup profiles last August when hybrid testing began.

According to the team, this profiling software only made its way into the software that Team Penske uses on race weekends shortly before the inaugural St. Pete race in March, when the coding was introduced that allowed the team to use push-to-pass widely For testing purposes, the driver was copied and pasted into the 2024 setup profiles. At St. Pete, Newgarden used the overtaking maneuver three times (for a total of 9 seconds) when the rest of the non-Penske field had no access to it. McLaughlin used it once for 1.9 seconds and Power never pressed the button under normal circumstances.

According to an internal review by Penske Corp.’s general counsel. It was discovered that Atkinson had inserted the coding into the team’s testing software back in August and then forgotten to make the change to bring the cars up to legal standard. Although not fully stated, it was suggested that Mason’s deficiencies were due to Newgarden and others in the No. 2 car believing that the push-to-pass rules for starts and restarts had been changed in the offseason Allowing drivers to press the button at any point in the race was green. That belief then fueled Newgard’s ignorance that he had broken the rules in St. Pete until the code was discovered during Sunday morning warmups in Long Beach. Others in the paddock have also pleaded that Mason, and perhaps other Penske and Chevy engineers, should have noticed the anomalies in Newgarden’s data during or shortly after the St. Pete weekend.

More:Penske President Cindric was allowed to assume NASCAR, IMSA and WEC duties during the IndyCar suspension

During their suspensions, which extend to the checkered flag for the May 500 race on May 26, the four members of the Penske IndyCar team are not allowed on the track or Indianapolis and are prohibited from any contact with team members while the cars are in use Training, qualifying or racing are on the track. In separate conversations, Penske and a team spokesman both declined to say that Cindric, Ruzewski, Mason and Atkinson would be barred from any contact with the team, seemingly opening the door for them to continue attending end-of-day debriefings and other team meetings.

Theoretically, the two engineers could also work remotely on projects for their respective IndyCar operations while away from the track, although this was not explicitly mentioned. A team spokesman said Cindric will be allowed to continue his traditional duties as team president across Penske’s NASCAR, IMSA and WEC programs – including potentially participating in all five events in that series through May 26.

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