IndyCar insider reveals how Roger Penske's success is driven by Jonathan Diuguid's leadership

Roger Penske, the billionaire who owns Team Penske and Porsche Penske Motorsport on the racing side, won the Indy 500 and the GTP category in the IMSA series. IndyCar Insider Marshall Pruett explained how Jonathan Diuguid was responsible for success in both IndyCar and IMSA.

Jonathan Diuguid is the managing director of the Porsche Penske Motorsport team. After the push to pass controversy at Penske led to suspensions at the IndyCar team, former IndyCar engineer Diuguid was brought in as a substitute, as he won the Indy 500 with Josef Newgarden.

Marshall Pruett is a former IndyCar engineer turned reporter. Talking about Diuguid’s crucial role in Roger Penske’s success, he said,

“So Jonathan, long time Indy car race engineer for Team Penske, working with Helio Castroneves and others was promoted to, I don't remember his official title, but just call it Boss of the Porsche Penske Motorsport Initiative from the team side," Pruett said. (50:05 onwards)

“The actual Porsche Penske motorsport team that is overseen by our guy Jonathan Diuguid. Winning Rolex 24, winning as we mentioned, GTP title, hypercar title, overseeing all of that,’ he mentioned. "And thanks to our friends at Team Penske and their IndyCar push to pass cheating scandal which led Roger Penske to suspend Team Penske president Tim Cindric, race engineer for Josef Newgarden's car data assistant, race engineer, also the managing director of the team.”

The use of the push-to-pass system, which provides an extra horsepower boost for a limited time is disabled for the starts and restarts in IndyCar. However, Penske reportedly installed a system that bypassed this restriction.

As this scandal was caught, Roger Penske suspended multiple high-profile names for three weeks, which included the Indy 500 weekend. Nonetheless, despite now having his regular strategist, Tim Cindric, Josef Newgarden won back-to-back Indy 500 in 2024 and brought glory to Roger Penske's team, making it the 20th Indy 500 win for Team Penske.

“They had to draft in some folks for the month of May, the Indy 500 And with no immediate endurance sports car racing to oversee, good old Jonathan Diuguid was brought in to be race engineer for Josef Newgarden, who won the Indianapolis 500,” Pruett concluded.

Penske also won the IMSA championship in the GTP in partnership with Porsche. The two Porsche Penske Motorsport entries i.e. #7 and #6 finished first and second respectively in the Grand Touring Prototype Team championship with the Porsche 963 models.

Josef Newgarden participated in the first round at the Daytona 24 Hours and won that race with Porsche Penske Motorsport. However, success was not limited to these series as Roger Penske's NASCAR team also won the championship in the stock car world with Joey Logano.

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“Always encouraging”: Josef Newgarden on the potential of Roger Penske's team

Despite winning the Indy 500, Josef Newgarden had a subpar year driving the No.2 Chevrolet as he finished the championship in 8th. However, the two-time IndyCar champion isn't worried about Roger Penske’s team’s progress and suggested that the team is yet to find the ceiling of performance.

Speaking on the Pit Pass Indy podcast on December 25, 2024, he said,

“We've yet to reach our potential, which is always encouraging. When you sort of hit your ceiling, you worry about where else you can go. I think we're pretty far away from where our ceiling is located at. That gives me great energy and hope for 2025, and we're already knee-deep in the details trying to figure out where we can be a little bit stronger,” Newgarden said (30:08 onwards).

The other full-time drivers for Roger Penske's team finished ahead of Newgarden with Scott McLaughlin 3rd in the championship and Will Power 4th.