BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Reigning Indianapolis 500 champion Josef Newgarden blinked back tears Friday as he accepted blame for manipulating the push-to-pass system in his season-opening IndyCar win that has since been stripped, calling it an embarrassment and acknowledging that he may have a long road ahead in winning back the respect of his peers.
During an emotional 25-minute news conference at Barber Motorsports Park ahead of this weekend's race, the two-time series champion insisted he is “not a liar” and didn't intentionally break the rules. It was his first public comment since IndyCar took away his March 10 victory at St. Petersburg, Florida — the first disqualification by the series in 29 years.
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“I want to deeply apologize to our fans, our partners, my teammates, the competitors that I race against,” Newgarden said. “Anybody that’s in our community. I’ve worked my entire career to hold myself to a very high standard and clearly I’ve fallen very short of that in this respect. It’s a difficult thing to wrestle with. It’s a very embarrassing thing to go through.”
Newgarden said stripping his win was “absolutely” the right decision by the open-wheel series whose owner, Roger Penske, also runs Newgarden's team and is one of the giants in motorsports. The decision has thrown IndyCar into turmoil as it prepares for next month's showcase Indianapolis 500.
“It’s crushing. I’m going to look back on it, too, and say I don’t want that win on my books, either,” Newgarden said, his voice wavering. “I’m glad they’re taking it away. If it was tainted, I don’t want to be near it. Unfortunately it is. I can’t reverse that in time. It’s good what’s happened.”
Team Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin, who finished third, also was disqualified while fourth-place finisher Will Power was docked 10 points though he wasn't accused of any wrongdoing. The Penske drivers were fined $25,000 because the manipulated systems were on all three cars.
The team has maintained that the push-to-pass system on its three Chevrolets was used in a test session and then mistakenly not replaced before the season began. It remained on the cars for three races, until it was discovered last weekend just before the race at Long Beach, California.
IndyCar President Jay Frye said the series will begin locking a logging unit on cars immediately after qualifying, blocking teams from making any changes in push-to-pass before a race.
“It’s very hard to police intent or to evaluate intent,” Frye said. “So at the end of the day it is about data. It’s on us. We didn’t catch it at St. Pete. We’ve put mechanisms in place we think should prevent it from happening again.”
Mark Miles, CEO of IndyCar and Penske Entertainment, said there was no conflict with Penske as series boss.
“What was really important to us was there was never any question of any interference,” Miles said. “We could be objective and handle the data in the same way we would have handled it for any other team.”
IndyCar prohibits the use of the system on starts and restarts and the button isn’t supposed to work on those occasions. Onboard videos clearly show Newgarden using push-to-pass to gain position on at least one restart at St. Petersburg.
Newgarden said he believed the restart rule implemented with the Thermal race in March extended into the season so push-to-pass could be used “immediately on restarts."
”You guys can call me every name in the book, you can call me incompetent, call me an idiot ... call me stupid, whatever you want to call me, but I’m not a liar," Newgarden said. “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.”
The issue was discovered Sunday in California when a glitch knocked push-to-pass out on all cars except the three Penske entries. IndyCar ordered the team to correct the systems before the race.
Penske, Newgarden said, “did not take it well. I was interrogated at first.”
“I've not met somebody with higher integrity than that man, and I mean that,” Newgarden said. Team Penske President Tim Cindric, who has denied any intentional wrongdoing, declined a request for an interview Friday.
Newgarden, featured on the season opener of “100 Days to Indy” airing Friday night, said he didn't know he had broken the rules until Monday, the day after the manipulated systems were discovered at Long Beach. He choked back tears several times when addressing the incident, including when asked what he has to do to regain the trust of his competitors.
“I don’t know how you do that,” Newgarden said. "I don’t know that anybody’s going to believe what I’ve told you here today. And that’s OK. It’s a crazy set of circumstances to try to wrestle with. It’s certainly not going to come with words. I’ll just try and earn it through action.”
Andretti Global driver Colton Herta, who moved up to third at St. Pete with the disqualifications, said he isn't buying that Newgarden didn't realize he was breaking the rules.
"That’s wrong. If he thought that, why didn’t he push it at the start?" Herta said. “He didn’t push it at the start. He pushed it on the restarts. You would think when everybody is stacked up the most, you would push it. So that’s a lie.”
Pato O'Ward, the Arrow McLaren driver who wound up getting the win at St. Pete, said Newgarden could not have acted alone.
“I can guarantee you, it’s not just Josef in this,” O'Ward said. “Obviously what he did was wrong, but I truly feel like him taking the fall for something that he needs a team of people to help with -- he can’t do it alone -- I think it’s a bit unfair to him.”
Gavin Ward, in his first year as team principal for Arrow McLaren, said the team messed up, not just Newgarden. Ward was a race engineer for Team Penske and held that role for Newgarden in the driver's 2019 IndyCar championship run and his runner-up finishes in 2020 and 2021.
Ward said team officials know when a driver presses overtake.
“It’s a flag on everybody’s monitoring,” he said. “Everybody knows when you use the overtake. You telling me none of them realized that was not in the rules? Everybody had the wrong read of it?”
It was the first time the series has disqualified a race winner since Al Unser Jr. at Portland in 1995 over the height of the car's chassis from the ground, a decision that Unser — who was driving for Penske at the time — successfully appealed.
“For this to happen to Team Penske is an eye-opener," Unser told NBC Sports. “In NASCAR, you got to race the rulebook, right? I mean, everybody cheats at NASCAR; it’s just all about getting caught. But in IndyCar, they don’t. This is highly irregular."
Late Friday, Newgarden topped a practice session with a top lap of 1 minute, 6.7045 seconds, just ahead of O'Ward (1:06.7875), and called it “best medicine in the world" to try and move forward.
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AP IndyCar: https://apnews.com/hub/indycar