Penske Team Is Riding Out Dark Days

You don’t have to know a camshaft from a bell crank to know Roger Penske and Marlboro Team Penske. His cars have won 99 races since 1971, 10 of them Indianapolis 500s. He has had some of history’s fastest cars piloted by some of history’s finest drivers, legends such as Mario Andretti, Rick Mears, Bobby Unser and the Al Unsers--Sr. and Jr.

“Break up Penske.”

People in auto racing used to say that like baseball people say “Break up the Yankees.”

I say “used to” because no one in the sport talks much about Penske these days except to ask whatever happened to him. If anyone ever seemed recession-proof, he was the guy. But, as evidenced by the fact that his team hasn’t won a CART race in almost three years, he wasn’t. That’s the problem with dynasties. The only place to go is down.

If I had a simple answer for what happened to Penske, they’d change the name to Marlboro Team Harvey. The cars weren’t performing as they once did. Neither were some of his people. Other teams caught up. There was some bad luck. The answer is never simple.

The easiest thing for Penske to do when preparing for 2000 was to overhaul the cars.

It wasn’t as easy to change the people.

But Penske knew where to start.

At the top.

He demoted himself.

Recognizing that he could no longer devote the time necessary to his $10-billion multinational transportation and automotive empire and remain competitive on the track, he called Team Rahal manager Tim Cindric, who at 31 is half Penske’s age, and hired him as president of Penske Racing. Although Penske would still be in the pits on race day, Cindric would be responsible for the day-to-day operations.

After Unser Jr. decided to defect to the Indy Racing League series--”neither of us delivered what the other expected in the last two years,” Penske said--two new drivers were recruited for this season, Brazilian Gil de Ferran and Canadian Greg Moore.

One day last fall, Penske and Moore flew in the company jet from Detroit to Cindric’s hometown, Columbus, Ohio, picked him up and proceeded to corporate offices in Reading, Pa., where they met De Ferran and team consultant Rick Mears for a get-acquainted session.

De Ferran said it was impossible to tell whether he or Moore was more excited about the opportunity to drive for Penske.

“We were both kind of jumping up and down,” De Ferran said. “Being in this position, driving for the most illustrious team in racing history, it’s like you’ve arrived.”

Afterward, they went to dinner.

Optimism flowed.

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Moore had one more race to drive for Team Forsythe, on Oct. 31 in the Marlboro 500 at the California Speedway in Fontana.

It was his last race.

He got caught in turbulence coming out of the second turn on the 10th lap and lost control of the car, which slid across the infield and crashed into an inside retaining wall.

“It was the most horrifying crash I’ve ever seen in front of me,” driver Alex Barron said. “The car exploded in a thousand pieces.”

Seven laps before, the racing gods had smiled on another driver, Richie Hearn. His car hit the wall at almost exactly the same place and he walked away.

Moore, 24, died on impact.

About 24 hours earlier, he had been riding his motor scooter in the speedway paddock when he was hit by a truck. If he had been lucky, he would have been more seriously injured. Instead, he suffered only a broken finger. It prevented him from qualifying, but, after watching him drive a few practice laps, doctors cleared him.

He wanted to race. That’s what racers do.

After the late Jim Hurtubise badly burned his hands in an accident, he ordered the surgeon to fix them in a permanently curved position so that he could grip a steering wheel. Or, as the puckish Hurtubise said later, “I told [doctors] to make them so I could hold a beer can. . . . But I knew that if I could hold a beer can, I could hold a steering wheel.”

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“You think it can’t get any worse,” Mears said. “Then you realize, ‘Yes it can,’ and it did.”

Penske hired a temporary driver last year for his third car, rookie Gonzalo Rodriguez, who was killed in a practice accident in Laguna Seca Raceway in September. Five weeks later, Moore was dead.

“Unfortunately, that’s the nature of this business,” Mears said. “It’s happened in the past, and, God forbid, it will probably happen in the future. But you never look at the last lap. You look at the next lap.”

No one knows that better than Penske, who lost his best friend and first driver, Mark Donohue, in a racing accident in 1975. But these tragedies get harder to take over time, not easier.

“Greg was going to be a very, very formidable presence in the future,” Penske said from his office this week in Detroit. “I believe he would have become an icon for our team. I really had to step back this time and say, ‘Have I had enough?’ ”

“But what keeps you going is that you have a commitment to people who work for you, who are counting on you to provide them with their livelihoods. The other thing is that, knowing how excited Greg was about our plans for this year, he would have wanted to see us moving up on the food chain.”

Is Penske’s team, which makes its next start with two cars Sunday in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, ready to do that?

Or will it continue to operate under a dark cloud?

Results so far, in very un-Penske-like equipment, have been mixed.

The team has ditched its trademark chassis, aptly named the Penske, as well as its traditional power plant, the Ilmor Mercedes, for Honda-powerered Reynards, which have won the last four CART championships.

In the first race of the year, the Marlboro Grand Prix of Miami at Homestead, Fla., De Ferran qualified on the pole and led for 41 laps. He might have won if he hadn’t caught an untimely yellow flag while emerging from a pit stop. He finished sixth.

Last week, at Nazareth, Pa., De Ferran and Penske’s other driver, Helio Castro-Neves, both qualified in the top five. Then the race was snowed out. At least they know that won’t happen in Long Beach.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.

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THE FACTS

WHAT

Long Beach Grand Prix

WHERE

Downtown Long Beach

WHEN

1 p.m. Sunday

TELEVISION

ESPN (delay, 2 p.m.)

DEFENDING CHAMPION

Juan Montoya

OTHER RACES

Toyota Pro-Celebrity Race

Saturday, 12:45 p.m.

Toyota Atlantic Race

Saturday, 3:15 p.m.

Dayton Indy Lights Race

Sunday, 10:15 a.m.

Trans-Am Race

Sunday, 3:45 p.m.

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MOTORS COLUMN

Despite negative perceptions, the influx of foreign drivers on the CART circuit is a godsend for a sport that would probably be hurting badly without them. Page 5