Criticism of the NTT IndyCar Series’ race control has been a long-held tradition of drivers, team owners, media members and fans as far back as one can remember. However, there are races where race control doesn’t play a noticeable part, and such was the case for Sunday’s (July 7) Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio.
Of the 27 drivers that competed in the 80-lap race around the 13-turn, 2.258-mile road course near Lexington, Ohio, 26 of them managed to escape the wrath of the race stewards until Josef Newgarden made his second pit stop on Lap 62.
The crew for the No. 2 Team Penske Chevrolet performed a flawless pit stop, but shortly after exiting the pits, race strategist Tim Cindric told the two-time Indianapolis 500 winner that he was caught speeding on pit road and had to do a drive-thru penalty.
Newgarden was confused over the radio, but IndyCar said that he was going 46.33 mph at the beginning of pit road when the pit road speed limit is only 45 mph.
Newgarden asked the team to check with race control about the penalty. In the meantime, the two-time IndyCar Series champion went around the track to complete another lap. Because Newgarden completed another lap on track instead of heading to his pit box the lap the penalty was announced, race control increased the penalty to be a stop-and-go penalty.
But that wasn’t all for the Hendersonville, Tennessee native. While going into the pits to serve his stop-and-go, race control found that Newgarden sped going into the pits again.
The speed on pit entry? Exactly 46.33 mph, the same as it was on his last pit stop. Even drivers the caliber of the IndyCar field can’t be that precise.
Newgarden said it was a software issue that led to those speeding penalties, adamant that he was safely pressing the pit road speed limiter before the pit road speeds were in effect.
“Something changed,” he told Frontstretch. “We were plenty safe on our procedure, it just looks like it overshoots. I don’t know what caused it. We don’t know what caused it. But it’s some sort of software issue because the speed was identical both speeding penalties.
“So for some reason it changed from the first two and started overshooting. I’m not sure what happened… We’ll try and diagnose it and understand for the future so it doesn’t happen again.”
After serving the drive-thru for his second pit road speeding penalty, Newgarden ended the race without incident, finishing in 25th place, one lap down to race winner Pato O’Ward.
The race broadcast mentioned the penalties after Newgarden served them, but there wasn’t any follow-up from anyone on the TV side of things about why these penalties happened.
There’s always an ability for NBC to play back lengthy sections of driver’s radio on the broadcast. Listening to Newgarden’s radio after the penalties was eye-opening about how fast the team diagnosed what was wrong, so a follow-up with the audio and an interview would have been a good bit of supplementary content for post-race analysis since the race ended so quickly.
Either way, Newgarden’s got a large mountain to climb in the championship, and trying to make up 73 points on Alex Palou won’t be easy in the second half of the season.
About the author
Christopher DeHarde has covered IndyCar racing and the Road to Indy for various outlets since 2014. In addition to open wheel racing, DeHarde has also covered IMSA and various short track racing events around Indiana. Originally from New Orleans, DeHarde moved to the Indianapolis area in 2017 to further pursue a career as a motorsports writer.
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If anyone knows about faulty software, its Newgarden.
Well, he’s got 3 wins in the next 4 races coming up, and very possibly 2 more wins right before the final race, so I don’t think he’s in too bad of shape being only 73 points out.