INDIANAPOLIS -- Perhaps more than any other year in recent memory, it's Team Penske vs. the rest at the Indianapolis 500.
In the midst of celebrating his 50th anniversary in motorsports, Roger Penske arrives at the 100th running of the historic race stocked like never before.
Penske's four-car IndyCar Series team is hitting its stride at the most important time of the year for the 78-year-old business magnate. He was spellbound by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from the first time he set foot in the place as a teenage spectator in 1951.
All these years later, Team Penske's wins at Indianapolis have become almost as much of an Indy tradition as the victor's milk and the Borg-Warner Trophy.
"I guess you'd have to say if you looked at the record -- 16 Indy wins -- there's not much close to it," Penske said.
Penske arrived in Gasoline Alley in 1969 with Mark Donohue as his driver and a three-year plan to win the race for sponsor Sunoco. He was off by a year, as Donohue didn't take the laurels until 1972. But that breakout victory for a team already known for its success in sports car racing (not to mention its meticulous level of preparation and presentation) thrust Roger Penske into the public spotlight -- as a businessman and a racing team owner.
Overall, Team Penske has collected 16 Indianapolis 500 victories, the most recent coming just last year by the hands of Juan Pablo Montoya.
In terms of drivers, Penske holds four aces. Montoya is the defending champion and a two-time Indianapolis winner. Helio Castroneves is the only three-time Indy winner in the field. Simon Pagenaud is the hottest driver in the IndyCar Series, riding a three-race win streak, and Will Power is the most accomplished active driver who hasn't yet won on the Indianapolis oval.
Penske is no doubt pleased with the way the 2016 season has unfolded so far, with Pagenaud holding a commanding 76-point lead over Chip Ganassi Racing's Scott Dixon in the championship. But Penske admits that he and his team have been keeping their eye on the big prize that lies ahead on May 29.
"I don't want to say it's everything," Penske said of the effort that is going into winning the 100th running. "As a company, we've been working on those cars for months. I think the team is going to be strong. But it's about not making mistakes there to win.
"Our focus is certainly going to be on the 500, for sure," he added. "But it's not just us. Ganassi and Michael [Andretti of Andretti Autosport] and all the other teams are going to be pushing, for sure. Dixon has been good everywhere, and he's the guy we need to beat every weekend."
Penske and Chip Ganassi each run four-car teams in the IndyCar Series, but that's where the similarities end. Ganassi expanded to that level first, but whereas Penske fields four championship-caliber drivers, Ganassi's title hopes are pinned on Dixon, with support from 2004 IndyCar Series champion Tony Kanaan, Charlie Kimball and rookie Max Chilton.
"We have to do a much better job than we did last year," Penske admitted. "We won Indy, which I guess if you win that, you'd take nothing else, to be honest with you.
"We had 12 poles so we clearly had the speed, but with the rules and the way the pits are closed, it caught us a couple times."
But as always with Penske, the talk comes back to Indy. It's a long race and anything can happen, but it's hard to imagine any driver/team combination that has more ability on paper to prevail.
Even Penske admits as much.
"Pagenaud really picked up the speed last year at Indy," he said. "He was probably the fastest there from the two-thirds point until he ran into the back of another car.
"I've got the grandfather's club with Helio and Juan -- both 40 years old -- but both those guys want it," he continued. "You see it every weekend. There's no tougher guy on the racetrack than Montoya when he gets in the car, I can tell you. If there's a car ahead of him he's going to figure out how to pass him. Helio is very hungry for it, for sure, and so are we for him.
"One of our guys needs to be going for five, and Montoya might beat [Castroneves] to it."
Established in sports cars and Indy cars by the mid-1970s, Penske expanded into NASCAR and made a short-lived (but successful) venture into Formula One. Now, with the exception of his recently acquired Australian V8 Supercar team, all of Penske's racing operations work from under the same roof in Mooresville, North Carolina. His worldwide business empire totals more than 35,000 employees, a large-scale version of the racing team.
With that kind of corporate responsibility on his shoulders, Penske understandably has less time for racing than he used to. "I don't go to the tests anymore," he says.
But he has built his business empire the same way he built the racing team: by hiring the right people and knowing when and what to delegate. And that's allowed him to maintain a strong presence in the racing program, which he calls his "golf game or fishing trip."
"I go to the shop. I'm communicating with the guys on the race team every day, whether it's five minutes or an hour," Penske said. "But I delegate it. I know the things I have to be involved in and I know the things I don't have to. We've got guys who have been with us for 20 or 30 years who know what to do."
Penske's trips to Indianapolis with his father as a fan might have sparked his deep personal relationship with Indianapolis Motor Speedway. But every time he has gone to IMS as a competitor since 1969, it's always been about business.
Nearly half a century removed from the first time he did it, winning Indy still means a lot to Roger Penske's bottom line.
"Winning Indy with a Chevy [Ilmor] engine for the first time, winning it with a Honda engine, winning with Toyota and Mercedes, those were extremely important," he said. "When you sit down and put together a program with a manufacturer and you deliver on it, those are the times that matter to us.
"Not just at the race track -- in business, those have really helped us a lot."