After being disqualified from the first race of the 2024 IndyCar season earlier in the week, Josef Newgarden held a press conference to tell his side of the story on Friday morning.
The two-time series champion was deemed by IndyCar to have used his Push to Pass boost system at forbidden times during the race in St. Petersburg in early March.
The series took the major step of disqualifying Newgarden and his team-mate Scott McLaughlin from the race entirely, taking away two podium results, all points and prize money earned, and levying a fine on the team.
Team Penske responded to the penalty by stating that a software error on their part allowed use of the system during the first restart laps, and that it should not have been on the car.
Newgarden spoke to gathered media ahead of this weekend’s race at Barber Motorsports Park, with a determined attitude that belied his frustration at his situation.
“The tricky thing about this whole situation is I didn’t know I did anything wrong until Monday after Long Beach,” said Newgarden, stern look on his face. “It’s the first time I heard that I broke rules.
“The story that I know, which is the truth, is almost too convenient to be believable. So to answer your question, no, I didn’t leave St. Pete thinking we pulled something over on somebody. I didn’t know that we did something wrong until this week.
“I’ve been thinking about this non-stop for 48 hours. I woke up at 3AM this morning, I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I was like, ‘Man I got to be rested to go speak to these guys.’
“Yeah, the truth is easy. It’s so easy to just tell the truth. I wanted to do that today. I’ve left a little bit of room for this weekend. I’ve tried to, like, study and do my normal deal, so… I’m hoping I’m going to be ready to go.
“I want to deeply apologize to our fans, our partners, my teammates, the competitors that I race against, anybody that’s in our community.
“I’ve worked my entire career to hold myself to an incredibly high standard. Clearly I’ve fallen very short of that in this respect. Once again, I mean, I can’t overstate, it’s a difficult thing to wrestle with. It’s a very embarrassing process to go through. I hope we can find a way forward after this. That’s really all you can do after the fact.”
Newgarden, who was emotional while describing his thoughts, was pressed to provide details about his use of the Push to Pass system. His replies revealed that he believed the rules had changed ahead of this season to allow the extra use cases.
Not only did he consciously push the button on his steering wheel to activate the boost, he expected the system to work because he and his crew were operating under the belief it was now active on the first lap of the restart.
Newgarden explained that it was only him and his particular crew that were under this belief, and even his team-mates, which had the same software loaded and also had the technical ability to use the system on the first lap, knew that use of the boost was still forbidden until nearly a full lap after the restart.
“The key difference on the #2 car, which is important to understand, is that somehow, some way, we convinced ourselves that there was a rule change to restarts specifically with overtake usage,” said Newgarden.
“You say, ‘How do you come up with this? It’s never happened before.’ The only place that this got introduced was with the Thermal exhibition race. It’s the only time, in my time in IndyCar, where we’ve actually had a legitimate legal change of the push to pass system, where it’s going to be operable at a time other than at the alt start/finish line.
“It was going to be able to be used in qualifying, too. There was a lot of discussion about it. We genuinely believed and convinced ourselves that at St. Pete, the rule was now ‘You can use it immediately on restarts, you don’t have to wait till the alt start/finish line. It’s going to be available immediately.’
“I even wanted the team to remind me of this so I didn’t forget. Whenever you get something new as a driver, it’s like, ‘Please remind me. It’s easy for me to forget this stuff with everything going on inside the car.’
“I specifically asked for that, too. We all knew about that.
“The craziest part of the story is, the software issue that no one knew about just perpetuated that belief even further. Then you go through St. Pete, you go through Thermal, where it’s an actual change and everybody’s using it. Then you go to Long Beach, and it’s still in the car.”
Newgarden’s story differs slightly from Team Penske’s official statement earlier in the week, which made it appear like the main source of the problem was a specific piece of testing software should have been removed from the car ahead of the race.
Now it sounds like at least some in the team thought the change was purposeful, and even the driver expected to be able to use the boost during what has been a disallowed time frame.
With Newgarden being the de-facto face of the IndyCar Series for the past few years and one of the series’ most visible personalities, the paddock will be talking about the infractions for some time.
