IndyCar Officiating Announces More Transparency In Penalty Reports

IndyCar Post-Event Reports

IndyCar Officiating post-event reports will summarize the officiating activity from each race event and will include penalties imposed under the NTT IndyCar Series rulebook and findings from technical inspections before and after qualifying and races.

Post-event reports will be posted and made public during the week following an event at https://noticeboard.indycarofficiating.org.

Examples of content that will be summarized in the post-event report:

• Race Recaps
• In-race penalties imposed – for example, passing under yellow, emergency service in a closed pit or pit lane speed violations
• Incident reviews referred to the stewards and concluded with no further action

• Practice Recaps

• In-practice penalties imposed – for example, pit lane speed violations, causing a yellow or red flag or entering the wrong pit box
• Technical inspection findings from qualifying and races
• What was inspected and the extent and subject matter
• Explanation of any infraction and its resulting penalty-level classification
• Summary of technical or procedural distinction, where relevant

Technical Penalty Guidelines

To ensure consistency across events, post-event reports will include the classification of technical penalties based on the nature of the infraction via three levels:

• Infraction Level 1

• A single-dimensional non-compliance, such as a height or size measurement outside tolerance, typically arising from wear, damage or assembly failure with no finding of altered component location or improper conduct.

• Infraction Level 2

• A more significant compliance failure, such as an out-of-tolerance aerodynamic angle, driver or car weight, fuel-system or safety equipment matter, where the configuration is outside specification but does not involve modification of a spec part.

• Infraction Level 3

• Modification of a spec part, regardless of which assembly or subsystem it belongs to, or the installation of unapproved or altered components – a departure from the car’s approved specification.

Associated penalties begin with point assessments and fines at Level 1 and rise to disqualification and suspensions at Level 3. Specific monetary fines, point assessments and other consequences imposed within a given infraction level remain at the sole discretion of IndyCar Officiating.

“We have moved quickly but meticulously in applying this next step in greater officiating transparency,” Elkins said. “Our goals include increased consistency and clarity as these reports look to provide an additional resource toward structure and process. We look forward to implementing this next phase beginning at WWT Raceway.”

Post-event reports for INDY NXT by Firestone events will begin later this summer.

“What I view as some of the unfair criticism that’s happened over the years, I think is an aspect of many people not understanding how the decisions were made and framework they’re made in,” Nair said. “The philosophical debate that we had together with the total officiating team was that providing more information and providing detail is actually going to show that these decisions actually were really seriously considered and had very good judgment behind them.

“You can’t take judgment out of this, whether it’s on the racing, regulation side or the technical side but within the rule books that we have and the guidelines that we follow the track record of judgment is extremely high in my view.

“The more we communicate that and show that transparently I think the more credibility that the team is going to have.”

IndyCar Officiating is making the important step in providing far more transparency to how the races are officiating and why penalties are assessed during IndyCar races. That should provide far more credibility to the high-speed racing series.