Chip Ganassi Racing’s Mike Hull has been working inside IndyCar for over three decades, and serves as CGR’s managing director.
Hull is respected up and down the paddock for his opinions, and he took an opportunity ahead of Fast Friday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway to give his thoughts on the recent Team Penske Push to Pass bypass cheat.
Once the series discovered the infraction, IndyCar levied heavy penalties on all three Team Penske drivers a few weeks ago. Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin were stripped of their results at St. Pete, taking away a win and a podium respectively.
Monetary fines were also handed out, and IndyCar was forced to standardize the ECU of all teams in order to prevent further bypassing of systems that keep the competition fair.
Nearly all drivers have been asked their opinions on the situation over the past couple events, but Hull was given a chance to offer his viewpoint on Friday morning.
“Yeah, it’s hard not to respond to that,’ said Hull when asked if he was satisfied with Team Penske’s position currently.
“At the same time I think the reality is that what we’ve done for a long time here is we’ve worked really, really hard to concentrate on our program. We get the most out of it.
“I’m not going to try to give you some political answer here. Were we satisfied with what happened? Absolutely not. No way. Was it handled correctly? That depends on who receives the serve.
“But this is the Indianapolis 500, and we want to win this race. The less time we spend thinking about that ping-pong match, the better off we are as a team.
“Hopefully everybody learned from that. Hopefully the sanctioning body learned from that. Hopefully they do something about it going forward to make us all better.
“It’s amazing to me in this day and age that that happened. I’ll leave it at that.”
Separately from the penalties levied by IndyCar, Team Penske suspended four prominent engineers and managers from IndyCar activities for two races, including the upcoming Indy 500.
Newgarden and Power are operating throughout the crucial weeks at IMS with team members serving dual roles, which is surely stretching the team’s functions.
As more and more opinions are related, it is apparent that not everyone in the paddock is satisfied with the situation even after the penalties have been served.
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