Winningnest owner at IMS yet to have driver win Brickyard 400
SPEEDWAY, Ind. — There are very few racing achievements still left on Roger Penske’s to-do list.
But Sunday’s Jeff Kyle 400 at the Brickyard represents a rare opportunity for Penske to accomplish one of the greatest feats in auto racing. A victory by one of his drivers Brad Keselowski or Joey Logano would give the legendary team owner the motorsports “triple crown” — also counting wins in the Daytona 500 (Logano) and Indianapolis 500 (Juan Pablo Montoya) earlier this year.
Of course a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series win at Indianapolis Motor Speedway would be special, triple crown or not.
Penske is the winningest Indianapolis Motor Speedway team owner (16 Indy 500 victories) in history but has amazingly been 0-fer at the track when it comes to NASCAR’s Brickyard 400.
Three times Penske was a runner-up with Hall of Fame driver Rusty Wallace (1995, 2000 and 2002), but the closest he’s been lately is Logano’s fifth place last season.
“Anytime we hear Indy coming up we start getting the calls from Roger,” Logano said Friday between practice sessions at Indy.
“We really want to win this race. This is the one on his bucket list that he hasn’t gotten yet and we talk about it a lot. It would be very special to give him a Brickyard 400, along with the Indy 500 he won earlier this year up here and the Daytona 500 we won earlier, too. So this could be quite the trifecta if we could make it happen.”
Keselowski actually delivered Penske his first NASCAR win on the famed Indy 2.5-miler — a 1-2 finish with then teammate Sam Hornish Jr. — in the inaugural XFINITY Series race in 2012.
Ironically, Penske was travelling and unable to attend the event — something Keselowski vowed to tease him about at the time.
The significance of Keselowski’s day was not lost on him.
“The Brickyard means so much to all of us as race car drivers and to the sport in general, and it transcends three different forms of auto racing, whether it’s IndyCar in the United States, F1 and their history here, and then obviously with stock cars and their initial time here to the current date, from ’94 on, it transcends into a special victory or a special place to race I should probably say,” Keselowski said during his winner’s press conference.
Racing’s “triple crown” has only been achieved one time — in 2010 by Chip Ganassi, Penske’s longtime and well-respected rival in both NASCAR and IndyCar series. And it’s obviously very seldom even a possibility with the difficulty of winning both the Daytona and Indy 500-mile races.
Keselowski’s No. 2 Miller Lite Ford was second fastest in Friday’s second practice — the most promising of the two cars. Logano’s No. 22 Shell Pennzoil Ford finished 14th in the final practice, preparing for Saturday’s pole qualifying.
Both drivers were optimistic about their chances on Sunday. Motivation won’t be a problem.
“I don’t think you need any more incentive besides giving Roger Penske another win at Indy,” Logano said. “You want to add your name to the list of guys that have won here for him. Every time I walk into the shop the first thing you see is all these Indy 500 trophies and the helmets that they wore when they won that race and the picture.
“We all want to come up here and give our best effort and try to execute the race the best we know how to and build the fastest cars we know how to before we get there, but we do that every week.
We do that for every single race track, but there’s just a little bit added for this one. It’s like going down to Daytona. You really wan to win the Daytona 500 because it’s one of the biggest races of the year. This is the same story, but it’s even a little bit more special I think for Team Penske than it is for everyone else.”