Inside Penske's record 19th Indy win: 'Last 2 laps, I forgot about being a track owner'
INDIANAPOLIS – Sunday morning, after the cannon blast had brought the 300 acres of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to life and before Josef Newgarden burst through the front-stretch fence to celebrate his Indianapolis 500 victory with more than 330,000 of his closest friends, Roger Penske stood at his parking spot and pondered.
The ‘18’ placard zip-tied to the metal fencing denoting his parking spot had stood remained unmoved for years, ever since IMS president Doug Boles decided the track needed to use the number signifying the track owner’s 500 victories, instead of his initials, to mark his spot.
The ‘RP’s were always getting stolen, and Roger didn’t like them anyways.
And so from then on, 18 would be Penske’s calling card at the speedway. His golf cart? It had an ‘18’ slapped on the side. His code name on the radio, not unlike that of sitting U.S. presidents, was simply ‘18’ whenever the boss was on the premises. And the only way you could move around the entire IMS facility, completely unchecked and unbothered, was if you wore an ’18’ lanyard around your neck.
In 2021, for the 105th running of the 500, Penske handed out 105 ’18’ badges for his first 500 with anything more than vital personnel on-site. This May, it was 107.
But even if he might not publicly admit it, his team’s 500 drought was wearing on him in some way. It had been four years — three 500-mile races at IMS without a win — since Simon Pagenaud’s exuberant celebration in Victory Lane in 2019, and that was before Tony George quietly approached Penske on the grid at Laguna Seca that September to begin laying the foundation for the several-hundred-million-dollar acquisition. Before the COVID-19 pandemic that shifted the 2020 500 to August and barred fans from entering the gates. Before the $50 million renovation that has taken place over a little more than three years.
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Only four other times had Team Penske gone winless that long in the 500, and most of them were fairly unique circumstances: 1969-71 (before they won their first); 1973-78 (before they won their second); 1995-2000 (which included the race they didn’t qualify and five others they didn’t attend during The Split); and 2010-14.
And so on Sunday morning, Penske stood with his son Greg, the CEO of Penske Motor Group and of late part of his inner-circle assisting with Penske Entertainment’s many projects, and a few other key executives as they surveyed IMS’s grounds beginning to fill up like a pool. Win or lose, the younger Penske told IndyStar, his father’s mind was made up. The ‘18’ needed to go. Someone mentioned ‘1909’ to signify IMS’s founding year, or perhaps ‘20’, Penske’s long-stated goal for 500 wins.
Penske didn’t like that, because No. 19 hadn’t been secured yet.
“I know ‘19’ has to happen, or I might not get another shot,” Team Penske president Tim Cindric joked Friday evening during his IMS Museum Hall of Fame induction speech, with his boss sitting near the front of the ballroom. “I think back to 2001 when Helio (Castroneves) won as a rookie, and I was thinking, ‘Is this real or not?’ And I looked at Roger and said, ‘I know you’ve done this a lot, but it’s a new deal for me.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve never finished 1-2 here, but I want 20.’
“And we’re still trying to get there, RP. We’ll get there.”
'He wants to win. That's just who he is'
It took less than 48 hours for Cindric to get closer to making good on that promise, after Newgarden overtook race leader and defending 500-winner Marcus Ericsson on the run into Turn 3 on Lap 200 after the third of three late red-flag restarts. As the No. 2 Chevy wove up and down the front stretch, trying to hold off one last dive from Ericsson, Penske raised his right fist, as if he could some way push Newgarden across the Yard of Bricks himself, as a small group watched atop the Pagoda lookout balcony.
And when his driver took the checkered flag, Penske was swarmed by his son, two fists raised high with a fanatical grin, and Penske Corp, president Bud Denker, who couldn’t stop jumping with joy.
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“I think the last two laps, I forgot about being a track owner and just said, ‘Go for it!’” Penske said. “After you’ve been on your face for three or four years here in qualifying, I can tell you it was nice to see. We won nine races last year, won the championship, and yet we qualified in the back-half of the (500) field (in 2022).
“The guys had worked so hard, and there’s guys that had had better ideas than us. We’ve just got to figure out how to find out what that magic is so we can be out front from the beginning.”
Since Penske closed on the deal to purchase the track and the IndyCar series from the Hulman-George family on Jan. 6, 2020, he’s watched 500s from the very top of the Pagoda, fitted with a timing and scoring monitor and a screen to watch the race broadcast. He also has a radio, which he uses to switch back and forth between the chatter of his three drivers and their spotters and strategists, but he has no way of talking back. It’s the compromise he’s made to ensure the survival — and now, fund the facelift — of the track where he’s cemented his legacy as one of motor racing’s titans.
But in the tense moments of Sunday, when he would’ve been on the timing stand back in 2019, calling strategy, it can be a tough role to fill. For a man who can never sit still and who, at 86, loves nothing more than walking the grounds of IMS with president Doug Boles and vice president of facilities Tyrone Garrison, those few hours of the race were the time four years ago where his genius shined. Today, it’s the only four hours where he has nothing to do but be a fan, like he was when he first visited with his father back in 1951.
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“Does he stand on the roof and root for his team? 100%. He wants to win. That’s just who he is, but he does take a hands-off approach to it,” Boles said. “We can tell on event days, like qualifying weekend, you can always tell he couldn’t say or do anything but he was thinking ‘We’re not going fast enough.’
“And there are sometimes you go, ‘Ohhh, I think I’ll ask him that tomorrow.’ He absolutely wants to win, so for us to be able to celebrate who he is and what he’s done and have some fun with it, it’s really special.”
The work for No. 20 starts now
And so, moments after Newgarden took the checkered flag, Kyle Knight’s mission began. The man who runs IMS’s graphics shop outside Turn 3 was stationed in the building throughout race day, and when Newgarden sealed Team Penske’s record 19th 500 win, he grabbed the small sign that had been sitting on a shelf for two years, hopped in his golf cart and put the pedal to the floor.
“I started back in 2021, and I printed the first (19), but we just didn’t talk about it much because of the superstition of racing,” Garrison said. “I just printed it, put it on a shelf, and we’d mostly forgotten about it, but it was ready to go.”
Weaving through hordes of fans in the infield and on the Brickyard Crossing Golf Course consumed by drunken revelry, Knight finally made it to the media center parking lot. Quietly, he snipped the zip ties labeling Penske’s parking spot, snagged the ‘18’, and then pulled out an identical one with ’19’ printed on it, affixed it to the post, and drove off without anyone the wiser. He spent the rest of the early evening trying to hunt down Penske’s golf cart, to no avail. He’d return to the track Monday morning by 6 to ensure the ‘18’ could be stripped away for his boss’s new moniker.
“I think that’s the one connection we have to his history,” Garrison said of Penske.
Unbeknownst to the Team Penske president, Cindric was being addressed up on the fourth floor of the media center, while sitting next to Penske, and was asked about the parking spot down below.
“I hope (the change) is already done. I think that group was on that when the flag flew,” Cindric said.
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Of course, he was right. ‘Penske Perfect’, after all, is contagious.
“It’s going to be good to start looking at 19s around here. So glad we could be part of it. I apologize it’s taken four years..."
Said Greg Penske: “It’s like a home game for him, and he hadn’t won a race with us as the home team for the 500 yet. Racing makes you humble, and you lose more than you win, but we hadn’t won in a couple years. To come back and see Josef and the team put that together was super special.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indy 500: How IMS celebrated Roger Penske's record 19th win
