Since the 2025 IndyCar season began, and even in the months building up to it, speculation over Will Power's future with Team Penske has been at the forefront of silly season discussion. Now 12 races into the 17-race season, with the calendar set to wrap up in under a month and a half, nothing has been publicly resolved.
Power is a two-time series champion and former Indy 500 winner who holds IndyCar's all-time poles record and sits fourth on the all-time wins list. He is Penske's only series champion this decade and was the only one of the team's three drivers mathematically in last year's title battle with Alex Palou after the Nashville Superspeedway season finale got underway.
Oh, and sitting in an eighth place tie, he is still the team's top driver in the championship standings in what has been an overall disastrous season for the team in ways that nobody could have predicted coming into the year.
But the 44-year-old Australian is still without a deal to compete past next month, and taking a deeper dive into the numbers, that probably does not bode well for him.
Team Penske are not a team known for making driver changes (like, say, Arrow McLaren, which at one point last year had made more full-time driver swaps within 15 months than Penske had within the last 15 years).
They have not adjusted their lineup since after the 2021 season. In 2021, they expanded to four cars for Scott McLaughlin, but they dropped Simon Pagenaud for 2022. Prior to that semi-swap, they hadn't made an actual driver swap since replacing Juan Pablo Montoya with Josef Newgarden in 2017.
But there is something more to be said for Newgarden replacing Montoya here.
Montoya tied for the 2015 series championship, losing out to Scott Dixon on a wins tiebreaker. He won the 2015 Indy 500, and he was a 2016 race winner en route to an eighth place finish in the championship. In fact, he won races in all three years he was with the team from 2014 to 2016. But that wasn't enough to retain his seat for 2017, and that was when Penske ran four cars.
Back to Power. Power may be the team's top driver in the championship, but he has led a total of four laps this year, just two years after his first winless campaign. Just three drivers have spent less time at the front than he has: Nolan Siegel, Jacob Abel, and Rinus VeeKay.
Two of those drivers had never before competed full-time. Two of them are considered "pay drivers". And two of them drive for Dale Coyne Racing, a team that hadn't finished in the top 10 for two years until VeeKay's arrival.
Newgarden has led 331 laps, even amid a dismal 14th place campaign in the championship. McLaughlin has led 105, which trails only Newgarden and the two drivers who have combined for 10 out of 12 wins (Palou and Kyle Kirkwood).
Power may have the results to keep him ahead of his teammates in points, but he is simply no longer a frontrunner. And top 10 finishes are simply not the Penske Perfect standard.
The real question becomes who replaces him. The obvious answer seems to be David Malukas, who, despite showing his inexperience on more than one occasion this year, is only seven points behind him in the standings.
It was said that Roger Penske himself helped facilitate Malukas' A.J. Foyt Enterprises ride for 2025, and while he is still only 23 years old, he is coming off of a runner-up finish in the Indy 500 just one year after watching the race as a spectator. And yes, he has actually tested for Penske before.
He may not have proven himself in quite the way Newgarden did with Sarah Fisher and Ed Carpenter from 2012 to 2016 before he launched himself into the Penske ride in which he won two of the next three championships, but there is still probably nobody more ready to make the jump than he is if he gets the opportunity.
Santino Ferrucci, who is level with Malukas at 10th in points, should be considered, but that ship appears to have sailed for at least another year. He has established himself as the modern face of the Foyt team, and the Penske alliance is certainly helping him as he gets closer and closer to his first win. That said, he was Newgarden's standby driver in 2022 after his Iowa injury, so you can never say never.
Given Team Penske's ongoing struggles as a team, which reached a new low at an Iowa Speedway track where they usually sweep the doubleheader, it would not be surprising to see this decision get pushed back past the end of the season. But by then, Power may have driven his final race behind the wheel of the No. 12 Chevrolet.