An outstanding Sports Car driver in his own right, Roger Penske (February 20, 1937) took that experience and built one of the most successful teams – Penske Racing – in the history of motorsports. But Penske is also one of the most innovative and successful businessmen in the world with his primary focus on automobile dealerships and commercial trucks and trucking.
Encouraged by his corporate executive father to become an entrepreneur, the Cleveland, Ohio, teenager bought old cars, fixed them up and sold them at a profit. And during a 10-year period he did this operation more than 30 times.
In 1958, Penske made his first professional start at the old Marlboro Motor Raceway in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, in an old Bob Holbert Porsche RS. Then the 1959 graduate of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Management won the 1960 Sports Car Club of America F-Modified title in a Porsche RSK.
After attaining DuPont sponsorship in 1961, Penske won his first professional race on the old 1.5-mile Vineland (N.J.) Speedway road course in his red No. 6 Telar Special “Birdcage” Maserati. He then he won three consecutive SCCA national events on his way to becoming the D-Modified National Champion and was named by ‘Sports Illustrated” as its “SCCA Driver of the Year.”
Penske also won two additional SCCA D-Modified national titles in 1962 & 1963 and his other driving honors include winning 1961’s Kimberly Cup as the SCCA’s Most Improved Driver and being a three-time winner (1960 & 1962-1963) of the SCCA’s President’s Cup for his “driving ability, competitiveness and success in the National Championship Runoffs.”
In 1962 Penske made international headlines when he won the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix at Riverside (Calif.) International Raceway and two other major races in California and Puerto Rico with his cutting-edge red aluminum-bodied open-cockpit No. 6 Zerex Special Sports Car – a machine that he built from a wrecked Cooper-Climax T53 Formula-1 race car.
He also won the final USAC Road Racing Championship in 1962 and was victorious in the 1963 NASCAR Pacific Coast Late Model Riverside 250 in a Ray Nichels’ black No. 02 Pontiac Catalina.
Penske then closed-out his driving career in 1964 with the unprecedented feat of winning all three races at Nassau’s Speed Weeks in the Bahamas using Jim Hall’s Charrapals (Governor’s Trophy & Nassau Trophy races) and his own Grand Sport Corvette Roadster (Tourist Trophy).
With race-car driving now behind him Penske concentrated on running his first Chevrolet dealership in Philadelphia, and through hard work and with a well-thought-out business plan his Penske Automotive Group developed into the second largest dealership group in the world.
However, racing was never far from Penske’s mind and in 1969 he hired EMPA Hall of Famer Mark Donohue to be Penske Racing’s driver. And with Donohue in the cockpit of the blue and yellow No. 66 Sunoco McLaren-Offy, the then-Reading, Pennsylvania-based team won the first of its 15 Indianapolis 500s (as of 2011) in 1972.
Team Penske has also won 16 Indianapolis 500 poles and its impressive overall success in “Indy car racing” can be seen by its record of 159 victories, 203 pole positions and 12 national championships all through the 2011 season.
Penske’s Chevrolet Camaros and AMC Javelins were three-time (1967-1968 & 1971) Trans-Am Series Champions with Donohue at the wheel. And in 1972-1973, when Penske Racing did the primary testing for Porche’s cutting-edge 917 Sports Car, Donohue won all but one race in the 1973 CanAm Racing Series.
Penske began his foray in NASCAR’s Cup Series as a team owner in 1972 with Donohue in a factory-backed red, white and blue American Motors Matador. He then ran a part-time schedule with a variety of drivers until the team went full-time in 1976 with EMPA Hall of Famer Bobby Allison. But after that, Penske left NASCAR in 1977, although he did field a car for Rusty Wallace in two 1980 races.
Penske Racing South returned to NASCAR’s Cup Series in 1991 with Wallace driving its famed black No. 2 Miller Genuine Draft Pontiac Grand Prix known as “Midnight.”
Then, in 2008, Ryan Newman won the Daytona 500 in the blue and white No. 12 Alltel Dodge and teammate Kurt Busch finished second in the blue No. 2 Miller Lite Dodge, and this was the first time Penske Racing won a restrictor-plate race in NASCAR. And Brad Keselowski added to Penske Racing the 2010 Nationwide Series Championship while driving the black, white and red No. 22 Discount Tire Dodge.
Penske Racing is involved in IndyCar, NASCAR and Sports Car racing and it is located in a 424,000-square-foot building on 105 acres of land in Mooresville, North Carolina.
This massive structure – which is outfitted with over one million tons (250,000 pieces) of imported Italian marble – used to be the Matsushita air conditioning plant and it has allowed Penske to consolidate all of his teams under one roof and to give them all the necessary parts, pieces and equipment to compete at the highest level, including a state-of-the-art wind tunnel.
A well-respected man in the corporate world who once owned the 2-mile Michigan and California Speedways and the old one-mile Nazareth (Pa.) Speedway, Roger Penske never does anything in a second-rate manner and he has provided winning cars for a who’s who of racing’s best drivers. As a result, his teams have many victories and champion
