Why American racing's top dog is without equal

Roger Penske runs the most iconic and diverse motorsport team in American history, and since the last off-season he has also owned both IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Most remarkably, though, is that he is a regular Joe human - yet a G.I. Joe hero on the race track and in the boardroom.

Penske will consider a matter from all angles before making a decision but can form that 360-degree view swifter than most and his subsequent decision is usually the right one. He gets involved at all levels in his team, yet knows when to observe and listen without micro-managing, because he's already installed managers who emulate his conscientious style. He is an entrepreneur extraordinaire and is single-minded in his pursuit of success, but in this instance 'single-minded' does not mean determination driven by blind optimism: Roger Penske is the ultimate realist.

As one prominent member of a rival team recently put it, "I can't say I know Roger except to nod or shake his hand on pitlane if his team's done well - or if his team has let us do well! So I'm basing my opinion purely off what I've heard about him, and what I've seen him do for the sport.

"But what I like about RP is that, being in his position, he must have 50 opportunities a day to be a bastard - and he just isn't. That motto he has for the team - 'Effort equals results' - is good, but I'd say another one for him would be, 'Give 100%, be successful, but never be a dick about it'. The guy is a great leader and a great winner but not a sore loser. That deserves total respect.

"And let's face it," he concluded, "where would we be without him?"

That's been a common refrain since coronavirus first hit last year. Several of Penske's rival team owners spoke in November 2019 of the pleasure they derived from seeing Penske, then approaching his 83rd birthday, being able to take on his dream job as owner of IndyCar and Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Several months later, in between worries over their own teams' future as spring hastened to summer and their cars sat idle in race shops, they truly sympathised with him... while at the same time being hugely grateful that it was The Captain who was steering the IndyCar ship through uncharted territory.

So how did Roger Searle Penske, from Shaker Heights, Ohio, come to be held in such universal respect by the racing community? That has its roots in his team ownership and the swiftness with which he found success once he quit being a racing driver. In terms of sportscars, he was at the same level as 1959 Le Mans winner Roy Salvadori - very good - and with the right opportunities and full focus, he could even have been America's next-gen equivalent of Olivier Gendebien, who won the French classic four times.

But studying business at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania had left Penske with more than one ambition to achieve, and so aged 28 he summoned the self-restraint to give up the adrenaline rush of racing.

"I met a gentleman by the name of George McKean who was a Chevrolet dealer in west Philadelphia and after he lost his son tragically, he offered me a chance to work for him as general manager," Penske tells Autosport.

"Being a Porsche dealer, Audi dealer, Chevy dealer, I had access to the folks who sign off on racing programmes, and by then we had a track record of success that was meaningful" Roger Penske

"I agreed to come on board but said I wanted the opportunity to buy the business in two years. When it got to the point where I could do that, I went to General Motors with my proposal. They said, 'If you're going to be a Chevy dealer, you can't be a race driver'. So that was one reason for hanging up the helmet.

"Then I still needed $50,000 to buy this dealership, so I went to my Dad who was retired, and we drove to Pittsburgh so he could take the money from his savings. As we were driving home he said, 'If you lose this, I'll have to go back to work!' So those were the real reasons I focused on the business: I wasn't going to let my Dad down, and I was married with a family and had to provide for them with this dealership.

"I was out of racing for a year, and then a customer named Elmer Bradley from Sun Oil Company [Sunoco] came into the dealership to buy a Corvette, and I asked him, 'Why doesn't Sunoco sponsor a car in the Daytona 24 Hours?' And lo and behold, after a couple of conversations we decided to enter a Corvette at Daytona in 1966. So that was the link between the dealership and racing, and Sunoco became our sponsor for many years."

It's now a matter of legend that Penske's racing exploits as an entrant saw him grow and diversify with stunning rapidity. With Mark Donohue driving, Penske's Lola T70 and McLaren M6A won two USRRC titles, his Chevy Camaros dominated the Trans-Am championship in 1968 and 1969, and his Lola T70 Mk3B won the 1969 Daytona 24 Hours with Donohue and Chuck Parsons at the wheel.

In 1971, he ran the achingly gorgeous blue Ferrari 512M for Donohue and David Hobbs in four marquee sportscar races, but this was a rare instance when effort failed to equal results, despite the car's undoubted pace against the factory Porsche 917s. The switch from Chevy to AMC to run Javelins in the 1970 Trans-Am series Penske describes as "a huge challenge"- but probably only because it took until 1971 for the team to dominate!

PLUS: When Penske built the world's fastest Ferrari

Penske also started to dip a toe in NASCAR waters at this time, too. But most significant was that RP had also started cherry-picking Indycar races from 1968 through 1970, first running an Eagle and then Lolas, the highlight being a runner-up finish in the 1970 Indianapolis 500.

From a simple car-dealer-enters-race-car-in-big-race situation in January 1966, things had gotten very complex at dizzying speed - or so it seems from the outside. But Penske regards these projects as taking the right opportunities and making them successful.

"I knew the Chevy folks so the Camaro deal made sense from their perspective, but I wanted to run in sportscars too, and I set up the Can-Am team in sort of partnership with Donohue. Then with our success, I was called up by Porsche and we helped develop the 917/10 and 917/30 for Can-Am, and we won pretty much everything."

From looking like an astute opportunist who knew how to persuade the grey suits that they should go racing, Penske had so swiftly established a reputation of trustworthiness and high quality that the suits came looking for him, and saw their faith rewarded.

"Yes, being a Porsche dealer, Audi dealer, Chevy dealer, I had access to the folks who sign off on racing programmes, and by then we had a track record of success that was meaningful," he says.

Penske loved the Indianapolis 500 above all other events, ever since attending in 1951 and watching Lee Wallard win. Twenty years later, RP had watched his own McLaren dominate the first quarter of the 500 in the hands of Donohue before retiring with transmission failure.

They would bounce back five weeks later to score their first two Indycar wins, and the following year, 1972, they bagged the Indy 500 too.

PLUS: The McLaren that rendered its Indy rivals obsolete

Yet Penske's ambition stretched wider still. Having entered Donohue in the Canadian Grand Prix in 1971 (they finished third on their Formula 1 debut with a McLaren!) an idea started germinating - owning a UK facility and entering F1 full-time. So in 1973, the same year he moved his American race shop from Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, 50 miles northwest to Reading, Penske also bought the Poole, Dorset-based race shop of Formula 5000 ace Graham McRae.

"This investment made sense because in Reading, we were running not just IndyCar but also an IROC programme, Can-Am, a little bit of NASCAR... it was almost too much," says Penske.

"I liked Formula 1, but it didn't give us the leverage with the OEMs and the customer base over here. If Mark had still been with us, we may have continued a little longer, but this was more of a business decision" Roger Penske

The UK arm of Penske Racing took shape, with Heinz Hofer installed as team manager, Karl Kainhofer - who Roger knew since his Porsche racing days 15 years earlier - as engine-builder/mechanic and Geoff Ferris ("very talented guy") as designer/engineer. Over the course of 1974, the team's first 'home-build' design, the Penske PC1, took shape and towards the end of season, made its debut.

It was by no means an unmitigated success and so mid-1975, the team switched to a March. Donohue scored a fifth place at Silverstone, but a month later he died after a heavy shunt at the Osterreichring due to a suspected tyre deflation.

Despite the loss of his close friend and team talisman, Penske continued in F1 for the 1976 season with John Watson driving the team's impressive new PC4. This combination would win - ironically at the Osterreichring - and finish fifth in the championship, but F1's appeal had waned.

"I liked Formula 1, but it didn't give us the leverage with the OEMs and the customer base over here," says Penske, "because at the same time, we were building our transportation business. If Mark had still been with us, we may have continued a little longer, but this was more of a business decision.

"But we now had a facility in the UK where we could build our own Indycars. We wanted to be independent; we didn't want to just take a car off the shelf from McLaren or whoever. So we ran our own car [PC5] from part way through 1977 [having started the season with McLaren M24s] and it was fairly good, and then the 1978 car [PC6] gave us a competitive advantage."

Tom Sneva won the USAC drivers' crown both years - Penske Racing's first titles in open-wheel racing - despite scoring zero race wins in the second! The other car, shared by F1-focused Mario Andretti and relative novice Rick Mears, produced four victories. Suddenly, Penske was producing winning cars of its own and had a new star in the cockpit. Mears would score three series championships and 29 wins, including four Indy 500s.

From 1979 - the year of Mears' first 500 win (Penske's second) and first championship (Penske's third) - the team switched from becoming one of the best to becoming an Indy car powerhouse, as 16 championships and 18 Indy 500 wins will attest. Through the 1980s and 1990s the team would usually run cars of its own creation, be they from the pen of Ferris or the similarly brilliant Nigel Bennett, but should a car prove to be an irredeemable warthog, Penske was not averse to switching to a customer chassis, be it from March or Lola, and then 'Penske-fying' it.

In 2000, with Tim Cindric now installed as team president, Penske switched to Reynard, customised the chassis so much that they were nicknamed 'Renskes' and followed up two winless seasons with consecutive championships for Gil de Ferran.

PLUS: How Penske ended its longest drought

As IndyCar moved toward spec Dallara chassis, Penske could no longer justify the expense of his Nick Goozee-managed facility in Poole, and closed it in 2009. The days were long gone when loose series restrictions allowed for radical engineering smarts, or when Penske could find a loophole in the Indy 500 regs and emerge in May with a stock-block Mercedes-powered 'Beast' to demolish the opposition, as in 1994. Ask Penske if he misses that era in Indycar racing, and Roger the realist emerges once more.

"It's about economics," he says, "because technology ran over all of us. Aerodynamic advances, mechanical advances, the simulation work - they're all expensive, so for all teams to be able to compete for wins or podiums, they all need similar funding and there's just not enough sponsorship out there anymore.

"And you can no longer make up for a sponsorship shortfall with investment from OEMs. Manufacturers today look at what products are selling on the highway and then see if your sport can offer benefits in technical advancements.

"NASCAR is recognising the hard economics of this, too and are shifting priorities for the sake of the teams. They see that to engage fans, you need close competition like in IndyCar, but you can do that while also saving on costs. Some of the basic parts on the Gen2 car will be common to all - pieces that don't make a positive difference to the racing - so we can buy them at the lowest cost.

"I applaud that philosophy because the people in the stands don't care if you're spending $20million or $5million on your car: they're looking to cheer on the driver and the team and they just want great racing. So adopt reliable common components at low cost, then the rest is up to the teams to come up with the best car, best set-ups and best drivers. Even with tight restrictions, you still see the cream rise to the top."

"Our investment in the series and the Speedway has given [teams] confidence that we're in it for the long haul. Hopefully it also gives companies outside IndyCar some confidence in our stability, so we can get a third manufacturer and more big sponsors" Roger Penske

This appreciation of what's necessary to keep the less well-funded teams in the hunt is why in-fighting between team owners morphed into solidarity and a 'rising tide floats all boats' outlook. It started with Jay Frye becoming competitions director in 2015 (he's now IndyCar president), and has continued under Penske's stewardship.

He explains: "In business, if you think as an individual, it's bad for the company. I've always run the business not by exclusion but by inclusion. In racing, it's the same thing: having a broader perspective is vital, and that's manifesting itself now in IndyCar. I want to see everyone included.

"When it's time to go racing, I want to win, but only if everyone's on an equal footing, working to the same rules. The integrity of the sport is the responsibility of everyone and I feel IndyCar team owners understand that, just as they understand working together for the health of the sport."

More in 2020 than ever before?

"Yes, as you know, it's been very tough to execute 14 races during this pandemic. I was not expecting, on 6 January when we closed the purchase [on the series and IMS], that we wouldn't have 300,000 people at the Speedway in May. This is an unprecedented time. But being in this business for over 50 years, I've had other big disappointments: Indy qualifying in 1995, walking down pitlane after not making the show - that was tough medicine to swallow.

"This is a big bump in the road, it hits a little more in the pocket book, but to your point, yes, it's helped bring the teams even closer together. I think our investment in the series and the Speedway has given them confidence that we're in it for the long haul. Hopefully it also gives companies outside IndyCar some confidence in our stability, so we can get a third manufacturer and more big sponsors."

This interview has focused very much on IndyCar because he's now an even bigger figure within US open-wheel racing than he was prior to the takeover. But one can't overlook his six-year involvement with Dick Johnson Racing in Australian Supercars, which has now ended after huge success with Scott McLaughlin. In IMSA, Penske dominated LMP2 with the wonderful Porsche RS Spyder in 2006 through to 2008, and ran the Acura ARX-05s to championship glory in 2019 (and may retain those crowns this year, even though the partnership will dissolve at season's end).

Nor is Penske done with European sportscars: he wants to return to Le Mans once the ACO/WEC rules are clarified, "because long distance racing is part of our heritage". But there are a couple of vital topics that must be discussed as one senses they have a greater degree of permanence in the Penske portfolio. One is race organisation/track ownership; the other, his NASCAR squad.

After first entering the stock car fray in 1972, Penske Racing achieved its first win thanks to Donohue (yes, the man could win in pretty much anything) driving an AMC Matador to glory at Riverside in 1973. Bobby Allison would score four more wins for the team over the next couple of years but Penske's NASCAR efforts came to a halt in 1980. Then, 11 years later, the team was revived as Penske Racing South, a Mooresville, North Carolina-based arm of the company running a car for Rusty Wallace.

"Initially it wasn't going to be full-time," reveals Penske. "Then Don Miller [of Miller Brewing Company] said he could put a deal together. Miller was already a sponsor of ours in Indycars, so we decided to build a small shop in Mooresville and we went on to have great success."

Indeed: the brilliant Arnold, Missouri-born Wallace would produce 37 wins for the team that initially ran Pontiacs, then Fords (a period in which it expanded to two cars) and then Dodges. And the Mooresville facility kept growing until the entire Penske race operation moved there in 2007, in order to have all the engineering talent, equipment and engine shop on one site, and the windtunnel close by.

Penske won the Daytona 500 in 2008 with Ryan Newman, the Nationwide Series championship with Brad Keselowski in 2010 and finally the Cup title with Keselowski in 2012. Dodge then pulled out of NASCAR, since when Penske has run Fords, with Keselowski's team-mate Joey Logano clinching the Daytona 500 in 2015 and the series title in 2018.

With regards to tracks, Penske's ownership of Michigan Speedway, North Carolina Speedway and construction and ownership of California Speedway (Fontana) are now sepia-tinged pages in motorsport history books, but his involvement in the Detroit Grand Prix on Belle Isle is ongoing, because Penske loves Motown.

"I came here when we bought Detroit Diesel back in 1988," he explains, "but I had a Chevy dealership here since 1968 or 1969. It's the home of the Big Three [GM, Ford, Fiat Chrysler] and I've had high connections with all of them. My wife Cathy and I like the Midwest, my kids grew up here, the headquarters of Penske Corporation is here - and logistically, being in the middle of the country and having a plane, I can go anywhere pretty quickly. This is a perfect place to live.

"I helped run the Superbowl here in 2006, and after that a sort of renaissance took place, and people were asking me what else we could do. I said, 'Let's redo the Belle Isle Grand Prix' [which had run from 1992-2001], and because we had partnerships in other areas, we had the opportunity to get them on board. Since then, it's brought $35-$40m economic benefit each year to the area and showcased the city on television and I feel it is a keystone in our schedule."

Perhaps that is the true indicator of status; the manufacturers approach him, rather than vice versa. Penske was the man who set the template for that in racing by being so successful so rapidly, diversely and comprehensively

Roger Penske's remarkable journey doubtless still has highlights to come. The power of his brand is perhaps best illustrated by how automotive manufacturers set aside their rivalries in order to be involved with Penske. His isn't the only team to have this allure - see Ganassi and Andretti - but he was the first to do so with global reach.

In 2020, for example, Penske Dallara-Chevrolets in IndyCar ran against Honda/HPD, while in IMSA Penske-run Acura/HPD cars ran against GM (Cadillac), and in NASCAR and Supercars, Penske Fords competed against GM... Yet Penske says these aren't anomalies.

"It's like successful auto dealers - I can be a Chevy dealer in one town, a Ford dealer in the next town," he explains. "Look, usually companies seek us out because they want to be with a proven winning organisation, even though we can't guarantee anything. But the OEMs accept our other partnerships when they come to us. Then we look at each programme and judge it on its own merits."

So perhaps that is the true indicator of status; the manufacturers approach him, rather than vice versa. Penske was the man who set the template for that in racing by being so successful so rapidly, diversely and comprehensively.

Roger Penske is a game-changer because he helped change the game into a sustainable professional business while never losing his passion for competition nor his appreciation of the word 'sport' within 'motorsport'. There is truly no one like him.