For Penske, Road to Indy Starts in Phoenix

The last time Roger Penske took his race cars to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, neither qualified for the 500.

That was 1995. Since then, the Indy Racing League-Championship Auto Racing Teams tug of war over open-wheel racing has kept him away.

This year’s 500 is not until May 27, but for Penske and his drivers, Gil de Ferran and Helio Castroneves, the road back to Indy started this weekend at Phoenix International Speedway. The team is in an IRL mode, complete to wearing the rival sanctioning body’s logo on their shirts.

“For now, and at Indy, we’re part of the Indy Racing League,” said Penske, a charter founder of CART.

De Ferran, the defending CART champion, qualified fifth and Castroneves 17th Saturday for today’s Pennzoil Copper World Indy 200, but it was only part of the Captain’s Indy reconnaissance.

“The reason we came here was to learn the differences between the IRL and our series, to get the drivers ready, to get them confident around the other drivers, learn the colors of the cars and to evaluate our strategy for the 500,” Penske said. “These are the same cars we’ll run at Indy. All we want out of Sunday’s race is to run good, get a handle on the cars and the competition so that all we’ll need when we get to the Speedway is to make a few tweaks and be ready.

“We need to be ready right off the bat so we can qualify that first weekend.”

Indy pole qualifying is May 12, with “bump day” for last-minute qualifiers May 20, a weekend Penske’s team will be in Japan for a CART race.

That 1995 experience, coming a year after Al Unser Jr. had won a 10th Indy 500 for Penske, is still gnawing on the 62-year-old business tycoon-race team owner.

“It was like winning the Masters and then not making the cut,” he said of the year when Unser Jr. and Emerson Fittipaldi failed to make the 33-car starting field. “It was one of my tougher days in racing, to have all the success there and then you don’t qualify.”

De Ferran, a Paris-born Brazilian who brought Penske his 10th national championship last year, said that the Dallara/Oldsmobile he is driving will be better in the race than it was in qualifying.

“I wasn’t 100% pleased with my qualifying effort,” he said. “It’s been a very steep learning curve for me. I was a little slow getting up to speed. I think I’m going to go a little bit faster tomorrow.”

For his return to Indy, Penske purchased four Dallaras for $299,000 each, plus some $91,000 engines. His CART crew of about 25 is doing the same jobs on the Dallaras it does on the Reynards.

“I don’t think there’s any distraction from our CART effort to run here. I think that our guys raced last week [in Mexico] is good because this won’t be their first race. And this is an oval race, which will get them in gear for Nazareth [a CART race May 6]. So I think it’s all positives.

“That Brazil went away was a real benefit to us because that was one event that we would have had to shoehorn in between the other races.”

The Brazil race, scheduled for next Sunday, was canceled last month by race promoters.

The Penske cars in Phoenix are black with red lettering and are sponsored by Penske Auto Centers, but at Indianapolis they will be back in their familiar red and white Marlboro colors.

Although both the IRL Dallara and the CART Reynard are open-wheel, single-seat, open-cockpit cars, the significant differences are in the engines. The IRL Olds engines are normally aspirated 3.5-liter V8s, which means they do not use turbochargers and produce about 650 horsepower. The CART Honda V8 used by Penske cars are 2.65 liters with a new turbocharger boost limit of 37 inches, producing more than 800 horsepower.

“They’re quite different,” de Ferran said of the two cars. “These cars have a lot more downforce. The car behaves quite differently.”

Penske said the team tested both IRL and CART cars at the same time in Phoenix and found the IRL lap speeds about three-tenths quicker than the CART laps on the mile circuit.

“The IRL car has more downforce and less horsepower so we were quicker through the corners and slower down the straightaways. The CART cars were quicker down the straight and slower in the corner.”

At Indianapolis, however, with its long five-eights mile straightaways, the CART horsepower would be overpowering.

“I am a strong advocate for one common engine. A common engine formula would be terrific.”

De Ferran set an all-time closed course record of 241.428 mph last year at California Speedway. The IRL record at Indianapolis is 237.498 mph by Arie Luyendyk in 1996, but that was with a turbocharged engine. In 1997 the IRL mandated non-turbo powerplants and since then the fastest Indy lap has been 225.179, also by Luyendyk, in 1999.

Greg Ray qualified for today’s pole with a 177.663-mph lap in John Menard’s Dallara/Olds.