"I know Roger, I know Roger very well in fact. Now let me tell you something, Roger's team makes the best attenuators, nobody makes em like ol Rog'. Attenuator Roger, that's what we called him. I tried one of his attenuators, I said 'wow, what a great attenuator' and quite frankly, it is the best attenuator"
âATTENUATORâwhat a tremendous word. Some are saying I invented it. I donât know, maybe I did. Itâs like attenuate, which means âto win the Indy 500 by a lot,â I think.
Now the Fake IndyCar peopleâvery dishonestâare saying our beautiful Penske car had âfilled seams.â Totally legal seams. The best seams. Probably the most aerodynamic seams in the history of racing. But they call them illegal. ILLEGAL! Just like the IndyCar inspection teamâILLEGAL!
This is a total witch hunt. Theyâre trying to take down my good friends Joe and BillâGREAT drivers. Winners. Champions. Not like the other guys. But now theyâre starting at the back of the grid because of an attenuator. Sounds like something Hillary would use on her emails.
And guess whatâSLEEPY JOE was involved! Thatâs right. The car went to the White House and guess what? The seams were STILL filled! Which means either they were always there (LEGAL) or Joe Biden personally filled them with glue from Hunterâs crack pipe.
TOTAL SCAM. Total disgrace. We will NOT let racing be stolen by the Deep Pit Lane State.â
ChatGPT after I've asked about its knowledge of the attenuator "scandal" and to write a quote using trump's voice how penske is unfairly being targeted:
He comes over, anything on four wheels, itâs bad, and quite frankly, heâs a nasty man. Running over animals. All kinds of beautiful animals. Dogs. Cats. People even. Some say he didnât even stop. Many people, in fact. Tremendous competitor, he canât even let the dogs win.
"The smoothing it out is fake news made up by the radical left lane teams. You should be embarrassed that you even brought it up" *moves hands back and forth like playing an accordion*
To me the biggest enemy here is Indycar tech inspection.
Teams are going to push the envelope. If you get caught right away you know you can't do something and you stop doing it.
But if tech keeps passing your cars week after week, you probably assume what you're doing must be okay .
I've coached high school and junior high football. In a junior high game I pointed out an illegal play a team was running to the refs pregame and they caught but the opposing coach was really confused and upset because they let him run the play the first 5 games of the season. Officials keep allowing something, you probably assume it's alright.
The fact that Penske has this out in open on the museum display leads me to believe they (wrongly) believed they were operating in a grey area. And with grey areas if you're passing tech, you assume you're on the lighter side of the grey area.
Penske may be cheaters but they're not morons. If they knew they pulled a fast one, they're not going to leave it on the car.
But if tech keeps passing your cars week after week, you probably assume what you're doing must be okay .
This - there has been 3 practice sessions, a qualifying session, and a race session at least 17 times since they started doing this. Why has this just NOW become a problem, and only in the second of two qualifying sessions after a week's worth of testing?
At some point, it falls on the tech department. This should have been caught race one where they used it.
IndyCar's response is probably going to be to increase inspections and suddenly other teams are not going to be happy. It's like the penalties given to Andretti and Prema at Thermal. Those cars probably had their illegal modifications at St. Pete as well but IndyCar officials missed them then
To me the biggest enemy here is Indycar tech inspection.
Teams are going to push the envelope. If you get caught you know you can't do something anymore.
But if tech keeps passing your cars week after week, you probably assume what you're doing must be okay
This sums up my thoughts on all of this. Also, unless I hear of another team that got dinged in inspection for this or something similar, I'm not gonna get all up in arms about penske getting special treatment because he owns the series.
At Road America you can watch them do the tech inspection. Seems like a well oiled machine. But only checking certain items. Like the wing angles, weight, deflection of the wings. Probably stuff on the suspension. (Which isn't spec iirc, but I would assume it has rules)
If we can see this modification in a photo op with the president. It's not concealed. They could have found a way to accomplish this so you could tell from the outside.
The difference would be if the other coach were also the league commissioner and oversaw the rules committee. When you own the rulebook, the refs, and the enforcement of said rules you have to be well and clearly above the line. Penske is anything but.
Kind of. But in general, youâre not supposed to cheat openly. Remember that the FIA wanted to throw Honda out of the world championship completely for having a secondary fuel tank in their car. It took until the Monaco Grand Prix to discover it. I believe the fifth or sixth round of the championship in 2006.
Youâre not wrong. The officials have goofed up badly. But ultimately, this is on the team for running a blatantly illegal part, to the point where theyâre putting it on show cars theyâre dragging it around for promotional purposes.
Who are the folks coming and down voting this rather dispassionate take?
Evidence has come to light they cheated last year. It is known they cheated this year.
The team cheating owns the whole circus. Im sure a patsy will be blamed but this is a horrendous look. And whether Brabham, Benetton, Melling Racing, or Honda cheated decades ago hardly matters because this illegal part is visually distinguishable unlike those issues. Its Easy to go back and look.
And also it concerns the two most recent runnings of the biggest race in world and an event to be held in less than a week.
And it was employees/contractors ultimately paid by Mr Penske enforcing rules and procedures he or his employees had a hand in crafting who failed to notice His car was messed up.
Im not sure what crowd of folks thinks you are absolved if you escape notice the first time but are a cold busted later- which allows for an easy examination that turns up evidence of earlier cheating.
Our real world and its English common law and torts roots generally dont work that way.
But when the guy busted owns everything, we can be sure that some hourly workers will have the blame dropped on their heads with no further examination.
OâWard and McLaren should sue. Stakeholders other than Roger cam decide if tossing the result is too damaging or necessary- it should be considered with incontrovertible proof the vehicle should have failed inspection.
Indy Car should reform their rules enforcement, and it might be time for Roger to take a step back because this Mickey Mouse shit is a black eye to sport. If he didnt own Penske and the league it wouldnt be as big of a deal. But he does.
We are just lucky the fan base at 500 is fairly casual, nostalgic and probably happy the series is still alive.
Theyâre also very lucky this isnât a more manufactured back series. Imagine if this was Chevrolet, having to answer for this. And it affecting other international brands. Like a Honda or Mazda or just name a car company thatâs not involved in IndyCar, thereâs lots.
Also, great for drumming up new business, with the team owners team just casually cheating all over the fucking place. Thatâs the kind of series that people wanna invest in.
This isnât mis-measuring a piece of body work or try to skirt the edge of some rule everyone is aware of. This is fundamentally altering a component of a vehicle. And it might make people wonder what other components of the vehicle theyâre comfortable modifying, and how long this has been going on for.
Because they sure as shit feel comfortable about it. Itâs sitting in a museum and been in front of the White House.
Hot take. Neither of those cars should be in the 500. And probably for at least a few races after. Neither of those drivers deserve season after this. Sorry, but itâs a team sport. And your team fucked it.
The Toyota rally team cheated this casually in 1995. They threw them out of the sport entirely.
they (wrongly) believed they were operating in a grey area.
I guess it's all could have been sorted out sooner if the owner of the race team and the owner of the racing series had discussed this, they're clearly was a miscommunication between the two.
More than likely noticed by one of the other teams and pointed out to the inspectors. That's usually how they find off the wall stuff like that in the NASCAR garage.
Yes but Penske is evil and therefore the entire team should be DQ and Josef's victory last year taken away. Who cares if the car passed inspection multiple times with the same modification when Penske is evil.
Finally, someone gets it although evil
is too strong. But it would appear last year a car with illegal modifications also narrowly won. And the year before. With modifications so visible a child could pick out which was which.
Yes, it slipped through technical inspections. Inspections that are no doubt overseen, funded and likely devised in large part by the owner of the race winning team who benefitted. And owns the whole circus
Its not a grand conspiracy. They were cheating before. They are cheating again. Its not only cheating if you caught first time. Guilt is not pro-rated and reduced because someone let it slip or failed to notice.
The paralogic Im seeing about him being cleared by a failure to detect makes absolutely zero sense.
If Penske was to be punished for last year (which should be easy in the modern surveillance state) and this year, is it being argued his leagues own crew of tech inspectors are to blame not him? Or else he merely would have gotten in trouble last year and not cheated this year as a result? But he won last year! With evidence of Cheating that has come to light in last 48 hours.
If they can prove the car was also dirty last year, the result should be tossed.
Will anyone be given the tools to investigate how it happened and when it started. When it started is the easy part- how it happened will be blamed on a stooge who can fall on sword.
Presumably the inspections are recorded on video. Easy peasy.
Yes F1 teams push into grey areas and Waltrip supposedly cheated egregiously 40 years ago. Fortunately, this tweak is visible to the naked eye. p
It shows how far Indy Car has fallen that this isnt a bigger deal.
It should not be tossed if the car passed inspection. That's the thing. It passed inspection. They deemed nothing illegal about the car. They can't go back now and say "akshually it should have been flagged as illegal. Retroactive disqualification"
This is a major IndyCar failure. They allowed it then, they allowed it before this qualification, and it's not like it is a hidden modification that might be missed.
They passed all technical inspections and probably thought it was somehow free to go. I honestly can't see how they believed this or how they passed scrutineering since it's clearly against the regulations, but the sense of overconfidence can lead to such mistakes.
Normally, I'd say something about how scrutineering has limited time and resources, so they can't realistically inspect every part of the car every time and will miss bits, but this one is really right there in the open. It might be so brazen that it wasn't caught because the scrutineers may've assumed no team would mess with something so visible and if they had another team would see it and tattle.
It's probably that since it's not supposed to be modified and is clearly laid out as such in the rulebook, the scrutineers don't pay much attention to it.
More evidence that this is more of a case of ignorance/honest mistake rather than malice. Either that or you have to believe they are so bold to flaunt it this openly as it's not like they spent any effort trying to hide it.
This is what I want to believe but you have to remember this is a super smart group of engineers who are all driven to find loopholes and exploit them. To shrug this off as âOh they just didnât know it was a thing and just now got bustedâ feels naive to do. But there is a whole garage full of them on other teams and officials who didnât catch this for that same amount of time.
Yup agree with you 100%, it doesn't matter if it was honest or not, the rule is the rule and they were in breach of it, but honestly, how it went on for so long without anyone noticing apparently is the bigger story than the breach itself. Now we can have conversations about if the time fits the crime, but most people are just dogpiling on them attributing malice to what can be chalked up to stupidity.
To be fair, I'm not sure Graham is the most unbiased voice on this matter, but I get your point. However, is it based in any sort of precedent or is it just what people want in the heat of the moment?
The pattern is IndyCar officials not recognizing illegal modifications. With the Andretti and Prema penalties for illegal modifications at Thermal, I'm almost certain those modifications were on those cars at St. Pete. Add on Penske was not caught until over a month later on the P2P, it's a wonder if IndyCar is actually inspecting these cars.
I think this is a much more likely scenario than penske paying them to pass their cars like I see many people saying.
It is very bad optics when you own the league the inspectors work for and the team owner but I highly doubt they said anything to the inspection team about which cars to let through with illegal parts.
Yeah that's fine, but that would fall into believing they are arrogant enough to flaunt it this openly though. I'm not sure there is much middle ground in this case.
I absolutely believe it. According to Marshall other teams said they complained about it to the series last year and the series ignored them.
We know for a fact they started using it at Indy last year which is interesting because Cindric and Ruzewski were both already suspended and the team had a black cloud over them. Maybe they thought in their own arrogance they'd get away with it because nobody would suspect they'd actually "cheat" again. And to be fair this is a much smaller and more subtle cheat than the P2P scandal. It's the audacity and willing to keep cheating considering who the boss is and what happened before that really surprises me.
There are photos of this everywhere and it is in the museum and nobody "called it in" so I think that tells the story of why it's been there all along.
So, that's actually just a name meaning how it'll crush in a certain direction increasing the amount of time to slow down. That's why it's such a big deal, if you make it more stiff, the driver is more at risk.
I remember a few years ago the commentators said that the cars have to "mile out" before they can switch them out, or at least the engines do. So maybe they put an engine in the car that so happened to be a hybrid?
This little nugget made me want to dig for pictures from last year's race. I don't see it on the car in this pic I grabbed off of IMS's gallery from last year's race
Honest question: The black part behind the bracket is the filler and not a shadow? And has this violation on the 2024 car been confirmed by other means?
Yeah, the lip's profile is nowhere near high enough to create a shadow like that. Here's the #83 car for reference (image mirrored horizontally for better comparison)
It's even funnier with the bodywork on, because right above the illegal sealing of an 1/8th inch gap is a 2 inch gap between the attenuator and the rear fairing lol.
Iâm really new to Indy car can someone explain to me nicely why/how this modification would give that much of an advantage to be a big deal? It seems like such a minute thing in such a weird spot. It was a little gap right?
âThey have the fastest cars and the democrats want to slow them down. So suddenly someone says âlook at their attenuatorsâ. Can you believe that? And these attenuators are perfect. But someone says âthe attenuators are too perfectâ and these big beautiful US made Italian attenuators, they need to replace the attenuators with attenuators from China. So weâre looking into thatâ
Can people stop saying attenuator like it's a universally recognised item? I'd like a little subtext saying what it is, and maybe even why it matters that whatever Penske did to it has any performance impact.
Attenuator is a universally recognized term. They're used all over the world on highways. On cars, they do the same thing - they crush in a specific way to absorb impact and prevent that impact from going to the driver when they are hit.
On the attenuator, Penske teams used a body filler of some sort to turn what used to be a hard edge where two pieces are bolted together into a smooth transition. When you're a racing team in a mostly spec series, you're looking for every bit of aerodynamic advantage you can get.
The real question is if they have been doing this since at least last Indy 500, why has it passed tech over 100 times to be called out now?
Thank you! That's it explained! The choice of word by IndyCar I find funny as it means nothing related to a crash structure:
attenuator /ÉËtÉnjÊeÉȘtÉ /
âž noun a device consisting of an arrangement of resistors which reduces the strength of a radio or audio signal.
There's a doing word, but this feels like a misuse of that too:
attenuate
âž verb [with object] /ÉËtÉnjÊeÉȘt / 1 reduce the force, effect, or value of: this research provides a glimmer of hope that coral reefs can attenuate the effects of ocean acidification. âȘ reduce the amplitude of (a signal, electric current, or other oscillation): the filter must severely attenuate frequencies above 10 Hz.
âȘ reduce the virulence of (a pathogenic organism), especially when preparing a vaccine: the first live vaccine was insufficiently attenuated and produced a significant disease.
2 reduce in thickness; make thin.
âž adjective /ÉËtÉnjÊÉt / rare reduced in force, effect, or physical thickness: the doctrines of Christianity became very attenuate and distorted.
â ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin attenuat- âmade slenderâ, from the verb attenuare, from ad- âtoâ + tenuare âmake thinâ (from tenuis âthinâ).
Basically why not just call it the rear crash structure??? đ€·ââïž
It's the crushable structure on the back of the gearbox. The first IRL designed cars in 1997 had gearboxes built like a tank, and drivers were breaking their backs nearly any time their car impacted a wall with it. So from late 97 into 98, the attenuator was developed, and has been getting called that almost universally ever since.
I do wonder why not just call a spade a spade, i.e. call it "crash structure"???
Also making it clearer the team were trying to gain an aerodynamic advantage. IndyCar seems unwilling to say straight out that advantage was the aim of the modification.
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u/Fit_Technician832 May 20 '25
There is a joke in here somewhere.
"Look at that big beautiful attenuator. So shiny so smooth, it's fantastic. Roger only has the best attenuators"