| | STILL IN THE LEAD | Penske: Still winning after all these years | |
|  | | CIA Stock Photo | It's true that Penske's employees are loyal, both on his race team and in his vast corporation. | | Mike Harris / ThatsRacin.com Getting sprayed with victory champagne is an occupational hazard for Roger Penske.
Over the nearly 40 years that "The Captain" has fielded cars in just about every major professional racing series, the wins have sometimes come in bunches and sometimes been far apart. The result, however, is that Penske's teams have accumulated 300 victories.
The latest came Sunday at the Milwaukee Mile, where Ryan Briscoe earned his first IndyCar victory and proved once again that Penske knows driving talent when he sees it.
This is the same Ryan Briscoe who washed out after a season with Chip Ganassi Racing in 2005, a year that ended with a huge crash at Chicagoland Speedway that broke both his shoulder blades and put the Australian youngster into rehabilitation for several months.
A year ago, Penske hired Briscoe to race in the Indianapolis 500 for his son Jay's satellite team, and the driver finished fifth. Briscoe also did well enough driving for Penske's Porsche sports car team in the American Le Mans Series last season that he was the choice to fill the IndyCar seat when three-time IRL champion Sam Hornish Jr. moved to NASCAR.
"We saw him as a good driver," Penske said. "Chip had him earlier and he got himself into trouble, maybe without the experience and (because of) the bad accident. We had him come back, had a good physical with him and he passed everything we needed."
The Milwaukee win was the first for Penske IndyCar team since Hornish won last June in Texas. But that doesn't mean the silver-haired entrepreneur has forgotten how to get to Victory Lane.
Briscoe and co-driver Sascha Maassen won three times in ALMS in 2007; Ryan Newman gave Penske his first Daytona 500 in February; and Romain Dumas, Timo Bernard and Emmanuel Collard combined to win the ALMS Sebring 12-Hour sports car race in March.
"You know, I think really it shows the amount of work that has been done by so many people on the team, so many good drivers, so many good pit crews, all the way back," Penske said. "I think about winning the first Trans-Am (race) and the first (of 14) at Indianapolis. It's pretty exciting."
Times haven't always been good in racing for the billionaire head of the 40,000-employee Penske Corporation.
After winning the Indy 500 in 1994 with Al Unser Jr., Penske's three-car team failed to qualify for the big race in 1995 — perhaps the biggest failure in his racing career.
"That one still hurts," Penske admitted during a recent conversation. "That's the biggest race for us, and not to make it was very hard on everybody on our team."
That was just the beginning of several years of struggle for his open-wheel team, which was then racing in the CART series. The low point was 1999, when rookie Gonzalo Rodriguez was killed during practice at Laguna Seca raceway and budding star Greg Moore, who had signed to race for Penske in 2000, died in a crash at the season-finale in Fontana, Calif.
There have been more disappointments in NASCAR, where his team has accumulated 58 wins but has yet to win a championship.
Still, Penske has seen far more success than most team owners would ever dream about.
"Driving for Roger, or just working for him, is a privilege," said longtime driver and now team consultant Rick Mears. "He treats everybody the same and anybody who works for him knows he will give you the tools to win. And, as a driver, you know that you have a shot at winning just about every time you get on the track in a Team Penske car."
It's true that Penske's employees are loyal, both on his race team and in his vast corporation. Many have stayed with the company for decades.
"We have tried to pick the right people and we have a homogenous group of guys working together," Penske said. "To me, if Penske Racing wins a race, everybody wins in our company.
"One fact is that we attract sponsors that commit to us more than one year at a time, so we can make commitments to our team members and go out and really attract young people who maybe have a career ... in racing. We can help them build up through he team."
Penske pointed out some of the people holding to jobs on his race teams began their careers polishing wheels or driving the team trucks.
"The people within the company, they are loyal and we take care of them and we will do anything for them to support them in time of adversity," he noted.
And Penske and his employees are all likely to be celebrating more wins in the future
| | Posted June 05, 2008 , 6:40 pm EST
Last Updated June 06, 2008 , 10:19 pm EST | | | | | | |
