I grew up in the South, way deep south, which means open-wheel automobile racing has always been a little suspect to me. Stock cars built in the good old USA slamming into each other every corner was auto racing. Tracks were small ovals either paved or dirt and the fence wouldn’t save you if a Chevelle climbed the wall just right. Stock car racing was total immersion. Saturday night, roasted peanuts, greasy pizza, burning rubber and beer will transport me right back to Hialeah Speedway in the late 1960s. For a young punk it was a glorious way to pass a hot Florida evening.
Yankees raced open-wheel. Yankees to me were any people that lived north of Fort Lauderdale. I couldn’t tell the difference between Indy cars and Formula One cars and truthfully, I still can’t. The open wheel cars raced far away from the crowd: almost nothing ever hit you at an Indy car race.
Roger Penske was a successful Indy car team owner before he started renting big yellow moving vans and he has a multibrand luxury car dealership with a small museum attached. I had time to kill so I wandered over to the museum with a southern-chip-on-my-shoulder, cocky, dirt oval attitude: Show me what you got, Big Daddy.
The museum is small, all on one floor with a gift shop and a lunch counter a floor above the display cars. Turns out Penske won the Indy 500 more frequently than you would assume and the 500-mile winners in the museum are the actual race cars tidied up for display.
The first engine on your left as you enter the place is Mercedes-Benz 500/265E. Right off the bat with the foreign car stuff, you know? This sweet looking 3-1/2 liter V-8 put out 1024 horsepower at the relatively low RPM of 9,800. The first time out this engine won the pole and the Indy 500 in 1994 with Al Unser behind the wheel. The Mercedes 500 was the first car to pull off this stunt so I guess they got it right the first time.
Mark Donohue won the 1972 Indy 500 in this Drake-Offenhauser powered McLaren M16B. With a 4-speed transmission the car burned through methanol 75 gallons at a time. The car averaged 191 miles an hour for the race, which is about 91 miles an hour faster than the cars on my beloved dirt ovals.
Rick Mears of off-road racing fame won the 1984 Indy 500 in a Penske-March car powered by a Cosworth-Ford. Averaging 207 miles per hour I’m guessing the Cosworth fairly sipped fuel from its 40-gallon methanol supply. Or, maybe the pit crew was really fast. When you’re circling in top gear all the time you don’t need more than the four speeds the March transmission provided.
Now we’re getting somewhere: a Chevy 2.65 liter V-8 pumping out 720 horsepower at 10,700 RPM. This engine won the 1991 Indy 500 with Rick Mears behind the wheel again. This engine went on to win 72 races.
I find it hard to believe that these tiny, multi-plate clutches can hold up for 500 miles pushing 200 miles per hour. The things aren’t much bigger than a motorcycle clutch. Maybe I’m wrong? Is this an accessory drive?
Penske didn’t just run teams, he raced real cars like I like. This Pontiac super-duty 421 cubic-inch beast won the 1963 Riverside 250 with Penske behind the wheel. A Borg Warner T10 handled the shifts, Monroe Regal Ride absorbed the bumps and a Carter AFB mixed the fuel/air. I guarantee the bodywork was not this nice in 1963.
Joey Logano won the 2015 Daytona 500 with this Penske-chassis Ford Fusion. The 358 cubic-inch Ford put 775 horsepower to the famed Daytona high banks.
The photos above show an unusual Lola T-152, 4-wheel drive Penske car from 1969. It’s plenty potent with 850 horsepower squeezed from the Drake-Offenhauser engine at only 9000 RPM. That big hair drier on the side must have made lots of boost. This car also lugged around 75 gallons of methanol.
There are more cars and engines at the Penske museum but I’m leaving them out so you’ll have to visit the museum to see them all. Penske even built a small racetrack for Mini Coopers behind the museum but that area has been taken over as a parking lot by the dealerships. Land Rover enthusiasts have a couple of artificial hills to practice on but the lady who runs the museum said that they don’t use those hills any more.
I came away from my visit impressed by Penske’s many racing successes. He’s not just a rental truck guy. I’ll go as far as to say if Penske raced at Hialeah Speedway back in the late 1960s he would have probably banged fenders with the best of them and carried many golden trophies somewhere north of Fort Lauderdale. Where the Yankees are from.
The Penske Racing Museum is located at 7125 E Chauncey Lane in Phoenix, Arizona.
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As a young kid I used to watch NASCAR in the sixties with my family when it was on Wide World of Sports. My favorite was #22… Fireball Roberts (probably because he had the coolest name). Those were real cars. Jump to the mid nineties.. I was working in Indiana when my foreman asked if I’d ever seen the Indy 500. I told him no. He surprised me a couple days later with tickets for the Indy 500 time trials claiming it was better than the race day because there’s less crowd, the cars run their fastest times and there’s no lines at the men’s room. So Otto, Barry and myself went armed with sunblock a cooler full of beer. We sat in the mostly empty grandstand in Otto’s favorite place and each cracked open a beer. Soon enough, along comes a single Indy car (or whatever it is) on its time trial run. It was fast. Otto says “no, he’s just lapping the pits, wait til he comes around again”. And when he did I got a chill down my spine. That car came around so fast rounding the corner with its big open wheels four inches from the concrete walls at 240 MPH. First, all you hear is the sound of air sliced by its aerodynamic surfaces, like a jet, then finally the sound of its engine after its long gone by. We watched this all day long, one at a time. It never got tiresome. I left with a newfound respect for Indy drivers (or whatever they are).