Scan-Dal in Formula E: DS Penske defends itself against allegations

DS Penske defends itself late against allegations of fraud

On the Saturday of the race, DS Penske failed to comment on the controversial incident for a long time. The result was violent comments, especially in social media, which accused the team of fraud and put forward a tangible data scandal, assuming that DS Penske had stolen masses of data from the competition.

“Okay, if we get a penalty for it. But being treated like the biggest scammers…”, the former Formula 1 driver Vergne said indignantly after the race Motorsport-Magazin.com. “Our fans and sponsors read the news and don’t understand exactly what happened. It’s not good.”

Motorsport-Magazin.com knows from DS Penske circles: Shortly after the announcement of the penalty, the team had prepared a statement to provide clarification from their own point of view. In it, the racing team argued that it was not illegal to collect the serial numbers on the tires of all cars. Also that it is not true and not possible to download data from opposing cars. However, this finalized letter (see end of article) was never published, so fans had to wait until after the end of the race to hear both sides.

Did Jay Penske prevent the statement from being released?

The reason for this is said to have been that team boss Jay Penske didn’t move for a long time to release the statement for publication. Surprisingly, the American, whose Dragon/Penske team had teamed up with manufacturer DS Automobiles before the season, was not even present at his own home race in Portland. “He was probably busy elsewhere,” said several DS employees Motorsport-Magazin.com with an irritated tone in his voice.

The exact reasons for Penske’s absence are not known, but on the part of DS there are doubts about the usefulness of the cooperation with the US entrepreneur, who has already attracted attention several times with weird decisions in Formula E. The Penske operations team is said to have been responsible for the scan incident in Portland, which is why factory partner DS Automobiles waited to publish the statement in order to get the green light from the absent team boss Jay Penske.

And that despite the fact that Jean-Marc Finot, the motorsport vice president of the powerful Stellantis group, which includes DS Automobiles, was an absolute manager on site. One can certainly speak of a communication debacle in this delicate matter.

DS: Incomprehension about harsh stewards words

Team officials admitted that DS Penske had violated the Sporting and Technical Regulations several times by installing an RFID scanner in the pit lane. Such ignorance of the regulations causes a lot of misunderstanding in view of the concentrated Formula E experience within the entire team.

What displeased some DS people was the clear wording of the stewards, who argued with a “significant and unfair advantage”. That was a subjective assessment that had no place in an official steward’s judgment and that unnecessarily dramatized the actual events, according to DS circles.

While Penske insisted in his post-race press release that the RFID scanner was used “to collect information strictly limited to the tire serial number” and that this information was “usually collected by teams with a simple camera” ( by photographers; ed.), the team had violated the regulations in one way or another in several instances: No equipment may remain in the pit lane or fast lane (Article 23.11), competitors may not install any equipment in the pit lane (Article 30.25), all telemetry is prohibited (Article 8.9) and any breach of fairness is prohibited (Article 12.2.1.l).

More guesswork about RFID data

The competition continues to differ as to exactly which data DS Penske collected using the scanner. So far, no team manager has wanted to make an official statement. While some behind closed doors in conversation with Motorsport-Magazin.com believed that it was actually just about reading the tire barcodes and that DS Penske had been well served with a “yellow card”, others believed that it was not possible to check which data was tapped exactly.

If DS Penske had been able to prove that they had collected further data on tire pressures or temperatures apart from the pure tire barcodes, the penalty imposed (25,000 euros plus starts from the pit lane) would probably have been far too mild. In this case, it should at least have been an exclusion from the current competition – that would have been the perfect outcome for a huge scandal that Formula E would probably be only too happy to do without…

Incidentally, according to the International Sporting Code of the FIA ​​​​and the Sporting Regulations of Formula E, it was not possible to challenge the corresponding judgment of the sports stewards. This officially closed the case. Otherwise, would the opposing teams have escalated the incident with a wave of protests against the FIA ​​verdict? The ‘Scan-Dal’ should not have been shelved by DS and Penske internally or by the competition for a long time.

Motorsport-Magazin.com is the official, but never published statement by DS Penske, which should be communicated shortly after the punishment became known. DS Penske spoke, among other things, of a “simple reading device” that MSMinformation is said to have cost only a few hundred euros. RFID scanners are becoming the standard in the tire industry. However, it depends heavily on the programming of the reading device and the ‘tags’ installed in the tires, which data can be read out and when.