Roger Penske Q&A

"My basic interest in getting involved with tracks was to have our teams race. As we saw the United States Auto Club and other sanctioning bodies not really being successful a number of years ago, that spawned CART. As part of that, a number of us put our necks on the line and went over and rented the tracks at Trenton and Pocono. We flew down here and basically found a track that was upside down. The bank was going to sell the remnants of whatever was left here to cover some receivables and loans that hadn't been paid. Rick Mears and I flew in on a helicopter from Pocono and thought, 'This could be terrific.'

"The track has always been a fast one-mile track. It's tricky, with the bump in the downhill run into Turn 2. But I think we've been able to sustain some pretty good racing. The issue from the Nazareth perspective is that maybe we were too lenient with CART. We had to move our date around. If you had to move the Indianapolis 500 or the Daytona 500 around, you'd learn that date equity is so important. I think CART strategically made a mistake when they kept moving the date. To me, until there is a better venue in the northeast, I think we all need to get behind this event and this track. We have to get our sponsors behind it and the media. I'm rooting for the CART board to take a look at this strategically. I don't think the decision has been made, even if Nazareth isn't on the schedule next year. You have a new management team that has to make a decision. There are a lot of things up in the air. We went to Texas last week to a new venue and we didn't race."



"The issue with Nazareth has always been where to stick it on the schedule. The new management needs to determine if CART is going to be run for the benefit of the car owners or the drivers or the shareholders, and obviously, the shareholders want to see some fans in the stands and they want to see consistency. NASCAR has a leg up on us because they run at the same tracks, some of which aren't the greatest. We made a lot of progress at Nazareth, but when you're always on a banana peel wondering whether you¹re going to make it, that's a different story."



"I think we could be the race before the Indy 500. You don't want to come off a bunch of road courses. We used to run at Phoenix and Trenton before going on to Indy, and that was a great test program for the drivers. By the time they got to Indy they had been running on tight ovals. I'd like to see Nazareth kick off May. The weather is good here in May. I always say it isn't over till it's over, and this isn't over. This is a track that supported the organization (CART) from the beginning. It's a permanent race track that will be here as long as it attracts fans. It's in a top ADI market, and from an advertising perspective, it's in a key market. Those are the three reasons we should be here."



"It's great that there are places like Mexico that want to pay the purses, but we have sponsors that want to run in marketplaces where their products are available. That's one thing we have to realize. I certainly advocate an amount of outside racing - a race in Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the North American pole, which would include Canada and a race in Mexico. But I think if we start to expand our schedule and become an international series, people like Target or even our own sponsor start to look at whether we conflict with international initiatives in marketing or sales throughout the world."



"From a track owner's perspective, our mission was obvious. That was to consolidate with the number one in the industry, which we did with International Speedway Corp. Their results are outstanding. They have a great team, they have some of the great tracks in the world, and a very solid financial basis. So we feel very comfortable that we associated ourselves and have a significant interest in that organization.

"From a racing perspective, we've used racing as a common thread over the years in all of our companies. It shows technology, it shows teamwork, it shows performance and it's good for customer entertainment. We talk about the value that racing provides on a daily, weekly monthly and yearly basis, and I think that's a real plus for us. We built our business around racing from the time that we started our relationship with Sunoco. Overall, we try to run our budget on a zero basis, meaning that from purses, from sponsors and from things like building and selling parts that we¹re on a break-even basis or better. We've had to support it in the lean times, but it's been worth it since it's been such a key to our success."



"I still say that, and I would say it today and tomorrow. There is not enough room; there are not enough sponsors. From a track perspective, we need to get more fans. We've broken the open wheel game by having two series and both series have suffered. It's great to write about a conflict between a couple of drivers or teams, but I think when you start hacking away at the core of the sport, we all lose. The fans lose and the sponsors lose.

"I'm an advocate of seeing it come together. As I've said before, Tony George holds the key, because he has Indianapolis. That's the Masters or the Super Bowl, and people want to run there. There's a real opportunity now as CART creates a new rules package for getting the engine rules together. We build new cars every year, and in fact we change the cars throughout the season. So I don't see that as a huge factor. But to design a new engine that goes from turbocharged to normally aspirated takes a lot of time and development. I think if we get the engines close together we might have some crossover, and we could maybe have three 500-mile races where the teams from both series could run.

"So I see the engine rules coming together, there are a lot of good drivers and sponsors in both series, but what we need to do is take the best of the best and make one solid series with a good secondary series like you have in NASCAR. That way you can pick the Greg Rays and the Tony Stewarts and the Ryan Newmans that come up through the support series where they learn the tracks and the rules. It's tough when you go to see a sponsor and the first thing they ask you is if you're going to run at the Indy 500. Our sponsor has said the same thing, and fortunately, the tobacco legislation is such that we can run there."



"There might have been at a meeting I didn't attend. Right from the early stages, we needed a group of car owners that would stay together because we could see that there was no continuity from the sanctioning body. They were worrying about midget races, sprint races, championship races, stock car races and Indy. We wanted to say, 'Let's take the focus in one direction, specifically open wheel, Indy-type vehicles.'

"As we got more successful and were able to build the CART series, the only thing that was missing was that we were never able to get the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to put its arms around it or vice versa. We could never get to the dance together, and I think that's what's kept this thing apart. Tony George has done a good job hanging in there. He's brought a lot of teams to Indy; they've been taken care of and given a lot of support. The point is, what have we done to the sport? His race will always go on. He's done a great job with the facility, and the Brickyard 400 and the Formula 1 race. But we need to think about running 365 days a year. That was one of the reasons USAC was started, back in the early days with Tony Hulman, to find a way to keep the guys running.

"So I think as the business aspect becomes more important, the cost of building tracks and cars, the safety issues, we're going to have to have a very strong series to compete anywhere. We're going to have to have good sponsors, safety, drivers, tracks et cetera, and you can't have that with a fragmented business. It just doesn't work. There is no business case that I've ever been involved with where a fragmented product can succeed in the marketplace."



"We're going to Indianapolis because we want to, and I hope that all the bad blood or whatever you want to call it that was in the air five or six years ago has gone away. We're going in there with an open mind, thinking that it's a great race. We've been treated well, and I'm sure we'll be treated well during the month. I think that the fact that people do see that the CART teams bring some value ­ not that we bring a big sponsor, but that we bring some value to the open wheel sport ­ so why not take that value and add it to what they already have?"