Congrats to Pato O'Ward on winning the Indycar season opener at St Pete. AKA JoNew and Scotty Mac DQ'ed...

[Bball]

Newgarden had his win stripped from him after Indycar officials became aware of a software irregularity in the Penske cars at the LB warmup. This led to an investigation that showed the numbers 2 and 3 cars had and used P2P on restarts. P2P is not supposed to even be AVAILABLE on starts/restarts. Cindric says it was leftover from Hybrid testing. But that begs the question, how did they know to use it?
Will Power was docked 10 points for having disallowed software, BUT not DQ'ed because he apparently didn't use it on starts/restarts. The wording I saw is kind of weird... because it was more along the lines of saying he didn't gain an advantage from it.

The fact that St. Pete was a month ago makes this seem 'odd' as far as timing goes. But we have to remember, Long Beach was only the 2nd actual points paying race this past weekend. IF Indycar had a more normal schedule where the first race was followed within a week or two by the second official race, then allegedly this would've been caught sooner and not seemed so much like strange timing.

[Bball]

So, piecing things in the media together. There was a technical glitch that knocked out P2P on all cars during Long Beach warmups. Except it didn't affect the Penske cars. This led to questions and an investigation that showed cars #2 and #3 used P2P on starts/restarts during the St. Pete race. Technically, P2P isn't even supposed to work at those points and is prohibited by the rules. Penske's team claims they'd ran different software for the Hybrid testing and 'simply' forgot to change it back.

Scotty Mac claims he used P2P just once, out of habit, at a time it would've been prohibited (but shouldn't have worked anyway). JoNew has a presser this weekend and hasn't spoken about this yet. Will Power says he never used P2P during any of the prohibited times, and this seems to be backed up by Indycar 'only' punishing him for having the wrong software in the car during the race. No punishment for using it. He was not DQ'ed.

There are people watching old footage now to see in-car looks of Penske cars to see if there were other times/races when the button was pressed when it should not have been. If what I've read is accurate, the Penske cars don't have the same flashing LED indication to note P2P is activated that other cars have.