Team Penske ship coasting smoothly with pair of symbiotic drivers
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For Team Penske, an organization that combined to rake in 11 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series wins with a two-car effort last season, the logical focus for 2015 is continuity, or — in more plain-spoken terms — not fixing what isn’t broken. But that objective extends beyond mechanical aspects and manpower; it’s also about relationships.
The core of chemistry between full-time drivers Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano remains a touchstone for Team Penske as it tries to forge another deep run in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup playoffs. Keselowski enters his sixth full season with team owner Roger Penske, eager to qualify for the championship round after 2014’s near-miss. It’s a place that Logano, set for his third year at Penske, knows well after his first experience racing for the title in the Homestead-Miami Speedway finale last season.
While Penske saw the competitive nature of both drivers manifest itself in hard-nosed racing, Keselowski’s six victories and Logano’s five, he also saw a mutual reliance that benefited the team from within.
“I would say when you look at where the sport is today and how competitive it is, when you see guys that can race side-by-side, almost like brothers, and have that success is amazing,” Penske said during last week’s Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour. “They worked off each other’s notebooks, they looked at the data and quite honestly, spent time off the race track together, and I think they had high trust with each other. You saw that on the race track, and to me, that was a big piece of the success.”
The camaraderie between teammates, especially outside the race-track cocoon, hasn’t always been a constant on Penske’s driver roster. The current two-driver balance, however, seems to work — so much so that Keselowski was hesitant to pull back the curtain with details on his bond with Logano, out of fear that the resultant competitive edge might be lost.
Like any relationship, the pairing isn’t always cream and sugar, Keselowski said, but any hiccups in their communication have been minimal.
“Our teammate relationship has been phenomenal. Certainly, it’s had some highs and lows — sometimes one week apart — but I couldn’t be happier,” Keselowski said with a laugh. “He’s done a great job for the program, and he’s really taken us from having one car that’s performed and the second one that hasn’t, to having two consistent threats at Team Penske, and that’s a huge accomplishment for him and something we’re glad to have.”
For Logano, one of the biggest perks to joining the Penske fold in 2013 has been his exposure to fresh ideas. Working with Keselowski has produced some unorthodox lines of thinking, but it’s a path that’s helped Logano and the rest of the team expand its minds.
“Brad’s helped me a lot, kind of thinking outside the box,” Logano said. “He’s a little bit out there and he comes up with these different ideas that are like, ‘Why even think that way?’ That’s so different, and I love having that there at Team Penske. He’s thinking of something different than I’m thinking about, and I think that’s good. That pushes me to think that way. I think that’s one of the biggest things I’ve taken from him.”
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The rate at which Team Penske collected checkered flags in 2014, coupled with last year’s heartache at seeing championship goals fizzle, has redoubled the teammates’ appetite for more prosperity this season. But so has the knowledge that the team’s makeup will largely remain unchanged over the offseason.
If Team Penske can cash in on its continuity early with a season-opening victory in the Daytona 500 (Feb. 22, 1 p.m. ET, FOX), Keselowski said it could serve as a springboard to an even bigger surge.
“We have a tremendous amount of anticipation,” Keselowski said. “We’re returning all of our key people — in fact, we’ve added some more people — to be even better, so I see our team only growing. I look at Daytona with probably the most anticipation I’ve ever had, coming off a win (last fall) at Talladega, a very similar track, and I know our program has only gotten better. I want to win the Daytona 500 out of the gate, and I think we have the team to do it.”