Concentration Is Key to Penske Team Success

Someone just asked me how I felt going to the Indianapolis 500 as the favorite to win the pole position and the race.

I had to tell her that the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. What anybody thinks about Rick Mears or the Penske team doesn’t affect how we operate at Indianapolis.

The secret to success, if it’s a secret, is to concentrate on getting the job done and put everything else aside. So, it wasn’t being cute answering that way. I really do ignore public opinion.

I learned a long time ago to put everything but winning out of my mind and concentrate on the job. That’s the philosophy of Penske Racing.

We do everything as a team, from planning, designing, testing and qualifying, to racing.

At Indianapolis, our game plan is to test the new Penske Pennzoil PC18-Chevrolet as soon as we can, find out how we compare with the other teams and start improving the car, step-by-step.

The process of testing the car is very tedious. It is a mental challenge to make the right moves so the carn can win the race. We try to get fast enough to win the pole position, too, because Indianapolis in May is really two races. First, there is the race to win the pole. Next, comes the race. The Penske team always tries to win them both.

Every day ends with a meeting to decide what to try the next day. Everybody contributes. Roger Penske has an amazing grasp of what the car is doing, but doesn’t dictate how we test. He asks questions and makes suggestions. When all the other people are heard from, the way we set up the car is more or less obvious to all of us.

Sitting in the meeting is our outstanding designer Nigel Benett. He has an overall understanding of the car down to every nut and bolt. Nigel listens to all of us and keeps an open mind until everybody is heard. That includes my teammate, Danny Sullivan; my engineer, Pete Gibbons; the chief mechanic, Richard Buck, and the team manager, Chuck Sprague.

Meanwhile, there are outside influences that we have to consider.

There’s the weather. We’ve been lucky in recent years and haven’t had day after day of rain shutting down the track. But that could happen again. Even on sunny days, there is the wind dictating how we drive the track.

There are heat and humidity. I don’t feel it inside the car because I have pretty good air conditioning with the air going by the open cockpit at 200 miles an hour. But heat robs power from the engine and makes the track slick in the corners where we need the best traction for safety as well as speed.

Concentrating on the job we have no time left in the day to contemplate thos questions everybody likes to ask.

I’ll say this. To go for a fourth Indianapolis 500 win is an honor. Only my other Penske teammate Al Unser and A.J. Foyt have done it. To go for two wins in a row is as tough a challenge as you can imagine. Al was the last to do it, back in 1970 and 1971, when I was driving sprint buggies at Ascot Park in California.

But, to answer the question -- no, I don’t think about it, not really. All of us on the Penske team are too busy getting ready. We are serious about winning the pole, and we want to win the race. We’ll let the statistics take care of themselves.