Newgarden seatbelt issue unrelated to Power’s at Nashville, Penske says

Team Penske believes the cause of Josef Newgarden’s seatbelt problems at Long Beach was unrelated to the issues experienced by teammate Will Power at the final race of 2024 in Nashville.

Power pitted twice at the championship decider to have a lap belt reconnected to the central buckle which locks the six-point Schroth harness together across his waist. On Sunday, Newgarden also pitted twice -- and ultimately retired from the race -- when the shoulder belts, lap belts and anti-submarine belts on his Simpson harness came undone.

“At the moment, it seems like two different scenarios,” Penske IndyCar managing director Ron Ruzewski told RACER. “We understand what happened to the Schroth belts in Nashville. That ultimately was on us, related to some debris that was in the locking mechanism. The belts Josef’s always run are Simpson belts. The best we can figure at the moment is that with the new (larger diameter) steering wheel, and a slightly different seating position, that he hit the buckle in the (Turn 11) hairpin, as simple as that. That’s what he's believing.

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“The belts moved up on his waist a little bit, just because his seating position is slightly different. But there's nothing obvious. And all of them popped free. In Will's case, it was just one belt. It's even more odd here, which would tell you that it wasn't a buckle problem because all of them popped, so it leans itself more towards the buckle release being hit.”

Racing harness manufacturers use a variety of methods for releasing belts from the buckle; the most common in the tight confines of an open-wheel cockpit is a lever that sits atop the buckle. When strapping the driver into the car, the six belts clip into the buckle, and to undo the belts, the lever is twisted -- just like turning a handle on a door, which pulls the bolt out of the groove in the wall -- and allows the belts to be released.

With all of Newgarden’s belts being freed from the buckle, the level being unintentionally struck and twisted while performing the fast steering input in Turn 11 is certainly plausible, but the odd timing of it happening for the first time in the middle of Sunday’s race, rather than during the many trips through Turn 11 on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning’s warmup session, is hard to explain.

Searching for a solution to prevent the belts from being released by an errant hit to the lever by a hand, forearm, or elbow is a priority for the team.

“We're gonna be proactive with IndyCar and ourselves,” Ruzewski added. “So we’ll look at what options are there for this moving forward.”