Racing
John Oreovicz, Autos, Open-Wheel 9y

Penske already looking for No. 17

IRL, AutoRacing

INDIANAPOLIS -- Drivers get the glory in the Indianapolis 500, and four-time winners A.J. Foyt, Al Unser and Rick Mears set the gold standard.

Roger Penske isn't a driver -- he was many years ago, but that's a story for another day. But Penske's 16 victories at Indy as a team owner might hold just as much value in the history of Indianapolis Motor Speedway as the four-time winners do.

Penske has been coming to Indianapolis for 65 years, first attending the race as a boy with his father.

To say he was swept in by the 1950s grandeur of the Speedway when it was in its ascendancy under the guidance of then-owner Tony Hulman is an understatement; now, even after all his success worldwide as a businessman, Penske still holds Indianapolis and the 500 with a reverence equaled by few.

Penske Racing was a small but successful sports car racing team when it tackled Indy for the first time in 1969, fielding a Lola for Mark Donohue with a crew that consisted of chief mechanic Karl Kainhofer and a small group of mechanics.

By 1971 they were the class of the field, but victory proved elusive until the following year.

"I think the people at Indy thought we were the college guys with the crew haircuts and the polished wheels," Penske recalled. "We used to clean our garage out every night, and that was something people didn't understand.

"We brought some technology; we started to look at data. Mark was an engineer from Brown, and certainly that was part of it. But we were committed. We weren't out there to have fun -- we were there to go racing. I think at that point we started to bring the sport to a higher level."

No other racing team owner can match Penske's diverse record, which includes championships in Indy cars, stock cars and sports cars, and even a Formula One Grand Prix victory in a Penske chassis constructed by his own company.

But from the time he was rubbing elbows with the F1 jet set at Monaco in the '70s to the 21st century makeover of his NASCAR team that finally claimed a Cup Series championship, the Indianapolis 500 has always been Penske's top priority.

Penske may or may not have officially coined the phrase "Effort Equals Results," but no team owner puts more effort into or emphasis on Indianapolis than Penske does. His sterling reputation in the corporate world connects him with blue-chip sponsors that enable him to hire the very best drivers and personnel.

It's no wonder that Penske has been able to win the prize he covets the most more often than any other man.

Still, six years had passed since the last win, back in 2009 with Helio Castroneves.

Penske has waited that long between Indy victories only twice before: From that first win in '72 until the first of Mears' four wins for the team in 1979, then seven years again between Al Unser Jr.'s crushing performance in 1994 and Castroneves' first of three triumphs in 2001.

From 1995 to 2000, Penske wasn't a part of the Indianapolis field. His Penske-Mercedes cars didn't have the speed to qualify in '95, and the politics of the CART-IRL war kept him away until he broke ranks from CART and returned to the IRL-sanctioned 500 in '01.

Chip Ganassi Racing was the first CART team to return to Indianapolis, and Juan Pablo Montoya's victory for Ganassi at Indy in 2000 was undoubtedly the final push that Penske needed to take his team back to Indy.

Now Penske and an older, wiser, Montoya have joined forces, and the combination was unbeatable Sunday, when Montoya drove a masterful race to claim his second Indianapolis win.

This one, with a 15-lap shootout at the end between Montoya and his Penske teammate Will Power, was a classic to rival other memorable Penske wins. The battle for Mears' fourth win with Michael Andretti in 1991 comes to mind, or Danny Sullivan's famous "spin and win" from 1985.

But Penske's mind is already focused on No. 17.

"You can't look in your rearview mirror," he said. "Every year we're here. We've got a commitment to all our guys at the shop -- we want to win.

"For me, I come here for one reason, and that's to win," he added. "I want to come back as long as I can stand and be part of this group, have these kind of people work for us, and be teammates. To me, [Indianapolis] is just a great place to say, 'Hey, this is where we tee it up.'"

Penske is 78 years old, and he's been teeing it up as a team owner at Indy for 47 years. But the old Brickyard holds the same lure for him now that it did when he went there for the first time when he was 14.

"It's such a great place to run, just to race everybody," he said. "It's a place I've been since '51 with my dad, and then just to see what takes place here every year.

"You forget it till you walk out there on race day, look up and down the straightaway, and think, 'Geez, what am I doing here?'"

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