Penske makes staff changes for Sonsio GP, 500 plans unclear
Team Penske is yet to announce who will fill-in for its four suspended IndyCar team members for the Indianapolis 500, but the team has rolled out its list for this weekend's Sonsio Grand Prix on the IMS road course -- including adding more to a veteran's plate and welcoming back a longtime Team Penske IndyCar regular.
David Faustino has been attached at the hip to Will Power for well over a decade, having served as the two-time IndyCar champ's race engineer since both joined Team Penske full-time in 2010 (with two additional years in the pair's pre-Penske days). Faustino has helped engineer Power to 40 of his 41 wins. This weekend, he adds being the strategist of the No. 12 to his resume, filling in for Ron Ruzewski, who is also Team Penske's IndyCar managing director.
Though not typical, Faustino holding the lead engineer and strategist roles on the No. 12 Chevy this weekend isn't unheard of. Arrow McLaren's Will Anderson has held both roles on Pato O'Ward's No. 5 Chevy entry since the start of 2023.
In place of Josef Newgarden's longtime strategist Tim Cindric, who also serves as president of Team Penske, Jon Bouslog, one of Penske's longestserving team members, slides over from his day-to-day shop-based role as Team Penske's special projects manager to call the shots on the No. 2 Chevy. Bouslog has been part of more than a dozen of Team Penske's 19 Indy 500 victories and called strategy for Scott McLaughlin during his rookie IndyCar season in 2021. He also recently served as the general manager of Penske's IMSA program.
To replace its two benched engineers -- Newgarden's race engineer Luke Mason and Power's data engineer Robbie Atkinson -- Team Penske has dug into its deep pool of engineers to fill a pair of gaps this weekend. Mason's replacement, Raul Prados, serves as a lead race engineer for Penske's Porsche sportscar program -- both wings of which are active this weekend at Spa (WEC) and Laguna Seca (IMSA). In his seven years at Team Penske, along with previous IndyCar experience, he also won an IMSA DPi title with the No. 7 Team Penske Acura entry in 2020 and grabbed a Rolex 24 overall win with the No. 7 Porsche Penske GTP car earlier this year.
Paulo Trentini Filho, the team's data engineer replacement for Atkinson this weekend, is more plug-and-play, having started this year in a lesser data engineer role on the No. 12 Chevy. He's been part of Team Penske's engineering corps for just over five years.
Atkinson and Mason were suspended for their roles in Team Penske's pushto-pass scandal uncovered last month that led to Newgarden and McLaughlin being disqualified retroactively by IndyCar from the St. Pete season-opener where the pair finished 1st and 3rd. All three Penske cars had illegal use of push-to-pass on starts and restarts because of a line of code that had been inserted into the drivers' setup profiles last August when hybrid testing ramped up.