IndyCar’s independent officiating board is off to a slow start

Nowhere in my motorsports travels have I seen a wider gulf between old and new fans than IndyCar. The determined negativity of the old fans around me is exhausting. It makes it difficult for me to explain that I agree that conflicts of interest are holding back the sport in the Penske Entertainment era, because I also believe that Roger Penske single-handedly saved IndyCar by taking it over, and that there is literally no one on Earth who is more qualified to perform the smell test of whether something is or is not IndyCar.

Putting Doug Boles in charge of the series was the first sign of long-term internal harmony, to me. Doug is the guy responsible for the greatest motor race on Earth — the thing nobody around IndyCar will ever mess with — and putting the whole series under his purview is a powerful firewall. The thing is, he can’t directly handle everything both up in the suites and down on the track at the same time, so it’s important to watch how he organizes his troops.

Last year, regulation and officiating were the most obvious things to shore up, and spinning off an independent structure for that was a smart first step. Appointing overseers for it with NASCAR and FIA experience was a smart second step. Now, the issue is, the season is here, the actual officials on staff are essentially the same, and they’ve still been unable to hire a boss for them. But Raj Nair shrewdly went out in the midst of a bad news cycle and rattled off a lot of very specific observations about where the series is at with officiating, and that made me trust that they’re at least thinking correctly about what to do next.