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‘What a cheap way to hire Michael Cannon’: Inside Team Penske’s Indy 500 qualifying rise

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‘What a cheap way to hire Michael Cannon’: Inside Team Penske’s Indy 500 qualifying rise

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INDIANAPOLIS – Four weeks away from the pressure-packed moments of Indianapolis 500 qualifying weekend Will Power and Scott Dixon were beginning to have some premonitions.

During separate press conferences across separate days at the podium in the Long Beach media center, both made bold and somewhat surprising predictions that would upend the pecking order for the run to pole – and potentially a large chunk of the grid, too.

And they were right.

For Power, he knew we’d heard him and Josef Newgarden push this same story for a half-decade, about how Team Penske had grinded over the offseason in pursuit of speed, balance and consistency for the most pressure-packed pair of days on the calendar, Indy 500 qualifying. In 2021, 2022 and 2023, those visions of bounce-back performances had fallen flat.

“But this year, I don’t think we’ve left anything on the table. I know I’ve said that for the last five years, but I haven’t said we’d be on pole. I’ve said we had a good shot,” Power told reporters April 20. “This year, I really feel like we’ve put everything together. We’ll see. I feel like one of our cars have a great shot at pole – if not, all on the front row.”

During Day 1 of qualifying Saturday, Penske’s trio of Chevy-powered machines were far-and-away the fastest at IMS, as three of just four cars that topped 233 mph on four-lap average – with a comfortable cushion on Arrow McLaren’s Alexander Rossi (4th).

The next day on the stage, Dixon was tempering expectations. For three years, Chip Ganassi Racing had been the class of the field when it came to speeds over 10 miles at the Racing Capital of the World. A year ago, the race for pole was quite literally an engine manufacturer – eight Chevy-powered cars from three different teams – vs. Chip Ganassi’s four entries.

Ganassi took the top spot for the third year running.

And yet, Dixon was in Long Beach, more than three weeks before the start of 500 practice, basically begging for rain – reasoning that the less other teams could run, the less they’d be able to catch up.

This week, Dixon got his rain but, at least on qualifying performance, large chunks of the field sped past Ganassi anyways.

“In losing some of our engineers like we have over the past couple years, there’s definitely other teams that have a pretty good idea of what we do,” said Dixon, in an understated, but not entirely shielded reference to his ex-race engineer Michael Cannon’s exit to AJ Foyt Racing for the start of 2023. Ahead of this season, Foyt launched a technical alliance with Team Penske.

“That will help some other teams.”

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‘What a cheap way to hire Michael Cannon’

So, just how linked are these two teams’ fortunes?

An overwhelming majority of the paddock not working directly for Roger Penske point to Cannon. Dixon’s championship-winning race engineer from 2020 helped CGR break a decade-long drought at the 500 two years ago then took Foyt from qualifying 22nd, 27th, 30th and DNQ in 2021 and 17th, 28th and 29th for the 500 in 2022 to 4th and 11th 12 months later.

Though none wished to air their beliefs publicly, three rival team officials said this about Cannon having an influence on Penske starting 12th, 14th and 17th a year ago to being favorites to sweep the front row Sunday:

‘100%.’

‘No doubt.’

‘No question.’

Colton Herta flatly said it Friday, after Penske’s speed was on display following Fast Friday action.

“Yeah, I mean, what a cheap way to hire (Michael) Cannon, right? Get a deal with Foyt, and you get all your Speedway secrets for free?” the Andretti Global driver quipped before walking things back just a hair. “I don’t know. It probably helped a little bit, but I don’t know.

“You expect them to be very good here, right? And they were in 2019, 2018, but it just seemed like they got into a little bit of a hurtful spot once the aeroscreen came on. They were always fast in race. It was just outright speed they were missing, which was strange.”

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Penske drivers push back

Depending on the Team Penske driver you ask, you’ll get varying levels of ‘polite’ to ‘frank’ frustration at the idea their team’s hard offseason work isn’t the source of this year’s improvement.

Scott McLaughlin, at times the most measured of the group, hinted at a win-win type of partnership. “This is a partnership that worked for both parties, and we learned a few things and they learned a few things, and here we are today,” McLaughlin said. “Everyone had the opportunity to do the same time, but I back my team leaders to make the right decisions at the right times, and they did this time.”

Power, the 2018 500 winner still in search of his first IMS oval pole, and Newgarden, the defending 500 winner, were far more assertive: the gains have come strictly in-house, with Power assuring his provisional pole run Saturday morning simply came off what Newgarden’s team found yesterday. Newgarden himself said he was running a setup from 12 months prior – before the relationship with Foyt began.

“(The technical alliance) is a little bit of it, but it’s our whole team. (Foyt and Cannon) just confirmed some stuff,” Power said.

So, drivers who claim Cannon is your secret are wrong?

“It’s not that, I can tell you that,” Power said. “It’s not that.”

Said Newgarden, when asked about Cannon’s influence on Penske’s performance on Fast Friday that continued on into Day 1 of qualifying: “I’ll say this; I’m using my exact setup from last year. We had a great, amazing car last year – one of the best I’ve ever driven around here.”

Moments later, Santino Ferrucci, the 500 wunderkind who in five starts with four different teams has five top-10s in the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, was asked his perspective on the smarts of Foyt’s technical director flowing into the pair of Chevy teams’ technical alliance. When told of the Penske drivers’ reluctance to give more credit to the engineer he first worked with at Dale Coyne Racing, Ferrucci snapped.

“They’re full of (expletive),” he said.

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Penske’s advantage: IndyCar pushrod rule change

As much 500 qualifying speed as Penske may have found over the last 12 months, an offseason rule change regulating a crucial part may have brought the field back to Power, Newgarden and McLaughlin, too — by as much as 0.5 mph.

“(IndyCar) took away a little bit of speed with something. There’s an updated part, but people were using an old part,” Power said in April. “If they wanted to break the (qualifying record), they’d run the older part. But we didn’t use it last year.”

That part, Power revealed Saturday after posting his four-lap run of 233.758 mph that finished more than 0.4 mph clear of 2nd-place McLaughlin (233.332 mph), was the pushrod. Essentially, Power explained, he believed other teams had been using old pushrods despite newer, more durable pushrods coming on the market.

The newer ones came with more drag.

“Every car but mine in the Fast 12 last year had that (old pushrod), so all those cars now took that 0.5 mph hit (this year),” Power said.

This year, Power and Newgarden explained, IndyCar had tightened the regulations around the pushrod specs.

“I don’t think anyone’s parts were illegal necessarily. It sounds like other teams were using old parts from 10-12-year-old cars, and we certainly were not in that camp,” said Newgarden, who continues to go out of his way to assert Team Penske’s ethics in the wake of the team’s push-to-pass scandal. “It looks like IndyCar changed that, from a safety standpoint, where they mandated you can’t use that spec anymore.

“I don’t know it’s something we had been looking for, but the irony of all this is we work really hard to stay within the rules, so if there’s anything out there that’s gray, we typically don’t touch it. That’s how we operate.”

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Ganassi prioritizes race car over qualifying in rainy week

So where does that leave the three-time defending 500 polesitters who will have a day off Sunday when it comes to on-track action?

As team manager Taylor Kiel explains, this week’s rain may have been more its downfall than its savior.

“It’s just a culmination of missing a bunch of track time,” Kiel said of the team that will start May 26’s 500 14th, 16th, 18th 21st and 27th – including five-time 500 polesitter Dixon’s worst start in the race of his career (21st). “It forced us to make decisions – whether to focus on our race cars or our qualifying simulations. We were surprised by the relative lack of pace we had, but we also made that conscious effort to make the race cars better.”

They are confident they’ve done that – particularly Palou, who started on pole a year ago and carved his way up from 27th after contact in pitlane around the halfway point back up 4th by the checkered flag. The year prior had been Dixon’s race to lose entering the final stop, before the 2008 500 winner sped on pitlane. During the race’s first run of green flag pitstops, Palou stayed out a hair too long and got burned by it. Dixon fell victim to that in 2021.

All that’s to say, when you look at where Newgarden started a year ago (17th) and what little Ganassi has to show for its three consecutive 500 poles, maybe CGR’s struggles will matter very little – as long as they’re once again in the hunt with 10 laps to go in a week.

“It’s been tough. After my pole last year, you expect maybe not to be on pole, but fighting for it, and we weren’t this year,” Palou said Saturday, adding that he feels no concern in CGR’s lack of straight-line pace having any material effect on his race day prospects.

“We know on race day we’re going to be much better than we are now.”

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