Overview
- IndyCar, which announced Tuesday, May 5, will allow Push to Pass on race restarts beginning with this weekend’s Indianapolis Motor Speedway road-course event and for all road and street races thereafter.
- Drivers may now use the system once their car crosses the alternate start-finish line under green, while the ban on passing before the restart line and existing time limits per push remain in place.
- Officiating kept the Long Beach results intact after finding the restart availability stemmed from a series software failure, with data showing 12 cars used about 89 total seconds and only one overtake that produced no lasting advantage.
- The review identified simultaneous CAN messages as the cause that blocked the disable command, and new code now queues one-at-a-time signals, which testing during the April 28–29 Indy 500 Open Test validated with zero errors.
- Rules now place responsibility on competitors to avoid Push to Pass during restricted periods, and added monitoring plus an extra software engineer will oversee messaging as the series expects the change to boost race strategy and passing opportunities.