Competitive entrepreneur Roger Penske brought racing to new level

Roger Penske wasn't even old enough to drive the day his father rolled their '49 Ford off Georgetown Road, past the gray-colored gates and into the infield at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

"I remember having terrible seats -- the worst seats in the track. I don't even think I could see the cars go by," he said.

How the view has changed.

These days, Penske is the 72-year-old race-team and track owner, corporate entrepreneur, financial mogul, do-everything, be-everything Indy legend. He is a man who, many say, brought the corporate world to racing -- and brought racing to a new level.

"Roger is just a competitor," said Rick Mears, Penske's three-time CART champion and four-time Indy winner. "But above all else, he loves running the Indy 500. He loves winning."

In that vein, Penske has few equals. In many ways, he was born to run.

He won his first race at an SCCA Regional at Lime Rock, Conn., driving an F-Modified Porsche RS. Two seasons later, he was named Sports Illustrated's SCCA Driver of the Year. More titles would follow: a U.S. Auto Club road-racing title, a NASCAR Grand National series race, then five races driving a Chaparral Corvette GS in 1964. Penske was becoming one of America's most successful young racers.

Then, amazingly, he called it quits.

He wanted to pursue the business end of things.

With Team Penske formed, and racing a key element of his overall business plan, he found early success with driver Mark Donahue, winning two consecutive United States Road Racing Championship titles and three SCCA Trans-Am championships.

After three years, Penske and Donahue moved into open-wheel Indy-style racing.

A flood of titles followed in every series possible, but Indy became his hallmark. His stable of drivers became champions: Foyt, Mears, Sullivan, Unser, Fittipaldi, Mansell.

Between 1977 and 1983, Team Penske won the Champ-car points title in six of seven seasons. Over a decade, beginning in 1984, he drank from Victory Lane in Indianapolis seven more times. His teams were referred to as the "New York Yankees" of racing. He was unstoppable.

By 1995, however, it all came to a screeching halt.

The free fall of the sport's greatest franchise began a season before a split with the new rival Indy Racing League that split North American open-wheel racing right down the middle. In '95, a year after starting 1-2-3 and getting Indy victory number 10 from Al Unser Jr., Penske would walk away from the speedway empty-handed.

"Probably the longest walk of my life," Penske said of his failed qualification at Indy in 1995 with Unser and Emerson Fittipaldi -- winners of four of the previous six Indy events.

And Penske, who decided to stick with CART, which could no longer race at Indy since that was now the IRL's turf, was about to endure the hardest time of his life.

A year later, Fittipaldi was seriously injured in a crash and retired. In '99, on his own with CART, Penske and Unser split, a difficult end to a partnership that earned Penske two Indy victories and one of his record seven CART titles. But when rookie driver Gonzalo Rodriguez was killed practicing in Laguna Seca, Calif., then Canadian Greg Moore (who had agreed to race for Penske in 2000) died during the final race of '99, everything was crumbling.

Fifty-four times Penske's cars went to the track and came home without a win.

"My life seemed to be sliding somewhere I had never known," Penske said. "Those were a few years I wanted to forget."

But, just as suddenly, it all made sense again.

Willing to race under the IRL's rules to get back into the Indy 500, Penske was once again champion, taking the 2001 Indy 500 with Helio Castroneves' first-place finish and Gil de Ferran's second.

It was a record 11th Indy title for the man whose drivers up to that point had won 11 Champ-car championships, more than 110 races and 130 poles.

To those who knew him well, the move to IRL was hardly a surprise. To those who had to race against him, it was a scary proposition.

More victories followed, in open-wheel racing, American Le Mans endurance racing and NASCAR as Penske's driver Ryan Newman won the 2008 Daytona 500, arguably NASCAR's most prestigious event.

It would have been hard to predict at the time Penske hung up his driving suit of what would happen down the road, but it was a life choice that has undoubtedly brought him more challenges, more victories and ultimately more success.

Jason Stein is a feature writer with Wheelbase Communications. He can be reached on the Web at www.wheelbase.ws/mailbag.html. Wheelbase Communications supplies automotive news and features to newspapers across North America.