THE PENSKE WAY : At First, They Laughed, but as Usual, He Has Last Laugh at Speedway

Nineteen years ago, Roger Penske arrived at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a wide-eyed 32-year-old car owner with a crew-cut Ivy League sports car driver named Mark Donohue.

The Captain and Mr. Nice, two clean-cut collegians, had come to take the Indianapolis 500 from the tough-talking, tobacco-chewing old-timers of Gasoline Alley, many of whom never finished high school.

“I remember they laughed at us when we arrived here,” Penske reminisced during a quiet moment the other day. “We were so naive, so inexperienced and so different. We cleaned our floors and polished the wheels and all wore clean uniforms and had crew cuts.

“The thing I remember most, though, is how everybody stood around and laughed when they saw what we were doing.”

No one is laughing now. Nor has anyone for a long time.

Penske, with the same spit and polish and attention to detail that was so unusual here in 1969, has dominated the Indianapolis 500 as has no other owner. His cars have won six times, including three of the last four, and next Sunday, in the 72nd running of the race, Penske will score another first.

Three of his drivers, all in state-of-the-art Penske PC-17s powered by Ilmor Chevrolet engines that he helped develop, will start in the front row--Rick Mears on the pole, Danny Sullivan in the middle and defending champion Al Unser on the outside.

“It’s a great accomplishment and gives the team a great deal of satisfaction,” Penske said. “But all it means is that we were fast enough to win the first race (for the pole), and now we have to work for what we really came here for. The race itself.”

Penske got his first win with Donohue in 1972 in a McLaren-Offenhauser. He got his later victories with Mears in 1979, Bobby Unser in 1981, Mears again in 1984, Sullivan in 1985 and Al Unser, Bobby’s brother, last year.

“Over the years it seems that, typically, the races you think you’re going to win, you don’t,” Penske said. “That happened in 1982 when we (Mears on the pole and Kevin Cogan second) sat in the front row with our PC-10. That really was the last time that we had a Penske chassis here that was super competitive.”

Mears, after setting track records in winning the pole, lost the closest race in Indianapolis history to Gordon Johncock, by .16 of a second. Cogan went out in a pace-lap accident.

“Then last year, after we’d had probably our sorriest year here, Al comes through and wins under the darndest circumstances. In fact, when I arrived for the first day this year, I saw Al and I said, ‘At least you’re doing better than last year. You’ve got a driving suit on.’ ”

Unser, although he was a 3-time 500 winner and the defending CART/PPG national champion, arrived here last year without a ride. All he had was his helmet and hope.

He turned down several rides that he considered longshots, then got his big chance when Danny Ongais crashed and was unable to drive. Penske plucked Unser from the crowd of unemployed drivers, and the Albuquerque veteran responded by qualifying an old car, a March-Cosworth, in the 20th position and driving it to his fourth win.

Mears and Sullivan, using the relatively untested Chevy engine, failed to finish.

“You know if you win Indianapolis that you can’t say you had a bad year,” Penske said. “But last year was trying because we couldn’t make the PC-16 (chassis) perform properly. We knew after a few days here that we had better cars back home, so we went and got them. It was as simple as that. There was no ego trip where we had to use our own stuff (Penske chassis). We wanted the cars that would best do the job.

“This year, from the first day we tested at Phoenix, we knew we had the right cars and I would say that I believe we’re going to be able to deliver some bacon here on race day.”

Penske’s optimism, heightened of course by his personal front row, revolves around driver experience and improved technology, specifically a new chassis and a tested engine.

“This is a tough, tough place and you can’t discount experience,” he said. “If you added up all the people on our team, we’ve got about 300 years of Indy experience, and that’s a significant factor.

“Look at the drivers. Al, Rick and Danny have all won the race once in the last four years, so you know they’re up to speed in the latest car technology. And the crew chiefs on each of the cars have all been in Victory Circle. Karl Kainhofer, who heads up our engine shop, was the crew chief on Donohue’s car the year he won in 1972.

“So, from a personnel standpoint, I think that you know we are strong. From the car standpoint, I can’t say enough about Nigel Bennett, who came to us last July to design the PC-17.”

Bennett was the chief designer for Lola and designed the 1987 model that Mario Andretti drove last year. When he left the British manufacturer last summer, Penske hired him to replace his own designer, Alan Jenkins.

“The big thing about Nigel is that he pulled the team together,” Penske said. “I guess you could call him the quarterback. He came in, took the people we had at the shop in Poole, England, and led them in the right direction. Obviously, we knew he could design a superior car because he had done the Lola, but his most important asset is his attitude as a team player.

“I can’t emphasize too strongly our team approach. I never feel it’s my team, it’s our team. I think that is best shown by our drivers. When Al won last year, the most excited guys in the pits were Rick and Danny, rooting for him.

“Last Sunday, when we qualified, first Al went out and got the pole and came in and told Danny and Rick about the changing track conditions. Then Danny went out and set a record and he came in and told Rick what to expect. You know what happened, Rick went out and got Danny’s record and the pole.

“You can’t ask for a better attitude than these three guys have. They have mutual respect for one another and they’re all willing to pitch in and help.”

On most multi-car teams, there is a designated No. 1 driver and he gets the best. The No. 2 and No. 3 drivers take what’s left. Not with Penske.

“I’ve said it to Al, I’ve said it to Rick and said it to Danny, that ‘If you ever think that you don’t know what’s on the other guy’s car, as far as the set-up is concerned, you get a hold of me and after the garage closes, we’ll go back and take your chief mechanic and we’ll take the car down,” he said. “You can measure it, so I want to be sure there’s no question that what’s available to one is available to the other.’

“The reason I like to run three cars is simple arithmetic. What happens with three people feeding in information, we can get three times, hopefully, as many answers. And, in a race, it helps the odds. For instance, I would say there are 10, maybe 12, cars capable of winning this year’s race. If three of them are ours, figure it out for yourself.”

If Penske’s cars are as nearly equal as possible, what happens when they’re out there, challenging one another for the checkered flag?

“On race day, it’s everybody to his own offense,” Penske said. “That doesn’t mean that they’ll all get the same results. Every driver sets his car up a little different. It’s kind of like holding a golf club. Every golfer doesn’t hold a club and swing it in the same way.

“Once the cars are set up, the drivers drive their own pattern. Obviously, I don’t want them to run over each other in the first 50 miles, but I can tell you this, that if two of those cars are running to win the race, it’s up to them.”

You can’t win unless you can complete 500 miles and one of the question marks is the reliability of the 3-year-old Ilmor Chevrolet power plant. In shorter races this year, 200 miles on the mile oval at Phoenix and 158 miles through the streets of Long Beach, it has been unbeatable. It has also been the fastest qualifying engine for all three Indy car races and next Sunday will be in the first five cars.

Mears won the Pocono 500 with one last year, prompting Penske to remark, “Five hundred miles (at Indianapolis) are no longer than 500 at Pocono.”

However, British-built Cosworths--basically Fords--have powered every Indy winner since 1978.

Penske’s part in the development of the new engine began in December of 1983, when he received a phone call from Paul Morgan and Mario Ilien in England.

“Morgan asked me if I’d be interested in building a racing engine,” Penske said. “I always say yes to questions like that, but then I asked them to give me the costs and how long it would take. Within three weeks, we’d put together Ilmor Engineering and they were breaking ground for a factory in Brixworth, England.

“As part of our agreement, I had the option to contact a world-class manufacturer to get involved. At the time I had no idea if it would be Chevrolet, or General Motors, or Ford, or what. I knew I wanted the option, though, because if the engine was going to be successful, I wanted an opportunity to market it.

“I called up GM and told them that with their involvement in racing, and with an image to uphold, that it would look funny some day if they had the pace car at Indy and a Porsche or a Ferrari won the race. They responded by having the key management at Chevrolet contact us. I had 50% of the original deal with Ilmor so I gave Chevrolet half of mine, so now there is 25% for Chevrolet, 25% for Penske and 25% each for Morgan and Ilien.”

Chevrolet rewarded Penske by inducting him into its motorsports hall of fame two weeks ago. He joined such racing luminaries as Bill France, Junior Johnson, Wally Parks, Jim Hall, Ed Iskenderian and Vic Edelbrock.

“Somebody once said the way to get the most out of a victory is to follow it up with an even bigger victory, and that seems to be Roger’s credo,” Chevy General Manager Robert Burger said at the induction dinner. “There’s no end in sight, no mountain too tall, no track too fast. To know Roger Penske is to know what guts, grit and gusto can accomplish.”

If Penske hadn’t been such a remarkable businessman, right out of Lehigh University, class of ‘59, he might have been doing the driving himself.

In 1962, he won the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix at Riverside, driving a controversial super lightweight car he created himself from a wrecked Formula One Cooper-Climax. He also won at Laguna Seca, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas Tourist Trophy races and was named sports car driver of the year by The Times.

“I had a chance to drive here in 1964,” he said. “Clint Brawner asked if I wanted to take the driver’s test in his front-engine car. It happened to be the one that Andretti took his test in that year. But I had business commitments and I had a family and I felt I couldn’t continue racing, so I turned it down.

“I had known for a long time, since I was 13 and came here with my dad in 1951 and saw Lee Wallard win, that I’d be with a car here in some capacity. I remember my dad taking my picture alongside one of the cars that year. At the time I thought I would be here as a race driver, but it’s been very satisfying for me the way it has worked out.”

Donohue, the late engineer-driver with whom Penske formed his first racing team in 1966, used to say that the reason for Penske’s success was that he had the “unfair advantage.” By that, he meant the detail, the preparation, the lengths to which Penske would go to achieve victory.

For instance, in 1986, when the team was first using the new Chevrolet engine, Penske ordered night testing to speed up the program. Mears drove the car around the parking lot of Penske Cadillac in Downey, Calif., with only the lights of parked cars for illumination.

Before a race at the Meadowlands, Penske was not satisfied with the way his cars were running so he had Mears and Sullivan shake them down at a short track in Belmar, N.J., at dawn--on race day.

A few years ago, frustrated by an Indianapolis rule that no cars can test during the final week before the race, except for one short practice period on Thursday, Penske trucked his cars out of the speedway and took them to a neighborhood mall parking lot where his crew practiced pit stops.

Penske’s “unfair advantage” extends beyond the racing world, too. He has put together a massive transportation and automotive empire that did more than $1.1 billion in business last year.

Most visible are Hertz Penske Truck Leasing, Inc., and the retail automobile sales group that sells close to 35,000 cars and trucks. Included are Longo Toyota in El Monte, Calif., the world’s largest auto dealership of any kind, and Penske Cadillac in Downey, the third largest Cadillac dealership in the United States. He also owns the largest, formerly Potamkin Cadillac, in New York City.

His most recent acquisition is Detroit Diesel Corp., which will design, manufacture and market diesel engines worldwide.

“Racing is a motivating force for me, something that I relate back into my business every day,” Penske said. “It’s that you never get ahead. I mean, it’s a continuing challenge and I guess that’s what I like about it.

“There’s a set of rules, there’s a competition, there’s a track and you have to find your own ability to excel. That gives me personal insight, a certain satisfaction.

“I guess I’m through the champagne throwing stage, but to me the bottom line is that winning develops a tremendous morale factor within our company, right down to the girls answering the phone at our companies.

“I’ve heard people say that I don’t show a lot of emotion, but there’s a lot of emotionalism inside, believe me, and I’m as excited as anyone when we win a race.”

If one of his cars wins next Sunday, it will be Penske’s 50th Indy car win since Donohue won the Pocono 500 in 1971.