We know about the rampant crime but we don’t care.  Indy cars have just announced a 2010 date at Sao Paolo.  We’re there.

We know that Roger Penske just voiced his opinion that Indy should not head aboad.  We respect Penske as one of the most knowledgeable racers in the world, and we see the Captain’s point: North America is Indy car’s core market, and the series has never done well on foreign soil save Surfer’s Paradise (anyone made a pilgrimage to the Lausitzring lately? I thought not….)  But for Brazil, well, exceptions can be made . . .

We love a country that has steadily supplied Indy cars with Brazilian hotshoes for 30 years.  We love Gil de Ferran, Emerson Fittipaldi, Cristiano da Matta, Helio Castroneves, and Tony Kanaan (we’re eh for Raul Boesel, Vitor Meira, and Christian Fittipaldi).  At times half the grid seems to consist of Brazilians.  I have met several aspiring Brazilian hotshoes who currently drive taxis in San Francisco.

We also love the Brazilian fans.   They rival the tifosi for sporting passion.  Was there a dry eye in the house when Felipe Massa won  at Interlagos, and then danced samba across the podium dressed in a Brazilian flag?  This is a country that turned out three million people for Ayrton Senna’s funeral. Imagine the party if Kanaan or Castroneves wins the race.

So, notwithstanding all the questions about Indy races outside of the United States, our sunscreen is packed in a clear plastic bag.  We are mixing caipirinhas and playing  Tom Jobim and Astrud Gilberto on the iPod.  We’ve got two tickets on Varig and have learned to say in Portugese the words “divertimento” (“fun”) and “injetor” (“gun”). 

Bom Dio.  They’re going Indy racing in Brazil, and we want to be there.

I hope you all enjoy this recounting of Karl’s hunt for that elusive professional racing championship.  If you enjoy this telling tale of a brand and a dream, please rate/comment and pay it forward by sharing it.

My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

If you have read Karl’s story this far, I thank you for your interest and hope you enjoyed the read.

If you have simply hit this page first in error, get up to date and start at the beginning suing the chapter links.

Being his championship winning year, I am spending the time to write this year well.

I will be posting 2009 in increments as the key sections are finalized.

More to come shortly, so please drop in for a read later in the week.

2003 – The Birth of a Brand

2004 – The Up-Start Crew

2005 – Building Upon a Dream

2006 – A Partnership of Sorts

2007 – A Hard Fought Year

2008 – A Change of Focus

2009 – A True Champion and Brand Leader

After the 2008 season, Karl had finalized his decision to focus solely on being Team Principal for Compass360 Racing. He would fill in for the occasional vacated seat and longer races, but planned on working behind the pit wall and along the paddock.

Fellow Grand-Am entrants Chip Ganassi, Roger Penske, Wayne Taylor and Kevin Buckler had all made the tough decision in their racing career to vacate their race seat. Each of them went on to become some of the most successful team owners and strategists the racing community has seen.

When you consider the success of these racing magnates, the power of resource alignment naturally leads to the betterment of the business. Karl once again showed wisdom in managing the growth of his team and the Compass360 brand.

The three-month off-season provided little time for deep reflection on the past season. Those few months were needed to implement the appropriate action plans to secure their long sought Street Tuner Championship. The old adage that planning for the next season starts the day after the last season ends is very true. Championships do not go to those who are ill planned and poorly prepared.

For the last two seasons, the team finished second in the Championship. Karl knew the team was capable of sustaining another championship hunt. Team Manager Ray Lee was working the team hard prepping for the season opener. The upcoming season would see Karl put together his best racing package to date.

The team had become so well known in the series that Karl was now able to fully leverage his Compass360 branding efforts. Compass360 Racing was now featuring its C360R branding predominantly. Loyal fans were begging for team stickers and driver autograph cards. Karl’s Compass360 swag was seen everywhere you looked. His brand recognition efforts proved very successful.

The cars returned to their fan-favourite colour scheme: Orange with Black racing stripes. Compass360 Racing retired their trusty Acura TSX after two successful seasons. Compass360 Racing had used the second half of the 2008 season to fully test their new Honda at the able hands of Christian Miller. They were now going to lead the Honda contingent in KONI Sports Car Challenge.

While Grand-Am competitors were testing down south, the team was doing their own testing north of the border. They spent their time testing at our local legendary track Mosport in the cool fall air. This provided for a more cost efficient test to analyze the performance of their new Honda Civic Si to last season’s Acura TSX.

Courtesy C360R

Mosport tests all aspects of a cars capabilities making ideal for testing. From its fast uphill backstraight to its long sweeping corners through its blind downhills, Mosport is to be respected. Your car needs to pay respect to Mosport to earn respect itself.

Located in the Mosport-triangle, rain made its inclement appearance. This gave the team additional testing under wet conditions. Daytona would have been red flagged and canceled under this instructional downpour.

Upcoming, and very talented, Matt Bell tested with the team during the off-season. Matt is also an aspiring Industrial Designer on various project cars. He would go on to sign with Turner Motorsports in Grand Sport. Matt would be paired with BMW racing legend Bill Auberlen. The racing community was about to hear alot about Mr. Matt Bell in 2009.

(Karl’s Blog)

The new C360R Honda Civic Si would be launched under the Honda banner in Las Vegas. The #76 four-door Honda Civic Si showcased the new 2009-spec at SEMA. This beautiful Honda was parked right next to IRL beauty Danica Patrick (well her Indycar ). Karl’s branding efforts had taken Compass360 to the premiere automotive insider event.

Courtesy C360r

The Subaru Legacy of the ICY/Phoenix team was also featured at SEMA. ICY is short for “inner city youth”. The team runs a program that helps troubled teens gain real life pit and mechanical experience. They would be competing against C360R as the Subaru Road Racing Team.

ICY/Phoenix and Compass360 Racing went as far back as Karl’s debut season. Karl had even Co-Driven with their Team Principal in the past. In Karl’s debut season, they had graciously lent out space in their trailers and garages on numerous occasions. The renewed on track competition would warrant different tactics in 2009.

(Karl’s Blog)

After a troubling and aborted 2008 season, Travis “T-Walk” Walker re-signed with C360R for another attempt for the top step. Naturally gifted, Travis had raced with the team every since 2005. Travis knew that there was only one team in the paddock that fully supported him. He returned home once again to C360R. Travis would be the first of many great driver announcements for C360R.

Matt Pritiko rejoined C360R having spent 2008 competing against them. Matt had originally driven for the team in 2007. In that rookie season, he finished 15th with four top-ten finishes. Those statistics were eerily similar to Karl’s first full season.

Thanks in part to the increased opportunities brought upon by the NASCAR purchase of Grand-Am, Matt Pritiko secured a test in the Arca/ReMax series. This ladder series has propelled numerous young racers to the ranks of NASCAR stardom. Matt wanted to impress everyone this season and take his career to the next level.

Impressed by last year’s Compass360 Racing Honda, Christian Miller joined the team for another season. Despite his great year in 2008, he failed to reach the podium. Christian’s strong performance was often hampered by inconsistent driver pairings. Karl wanted to find Christian a Co-Driver that would help him get that elusive podium this year.

(Travis Walker, Matt Pritiko, Christian Miller Announcements)

With a line-up of C360R alumni in place, Karl sought to bring in new blood to balance the team. Although veterans with the team, Matt, Travis and Christian were far from being veterans of the series. Neither driver had earned a win in the series let alone a Championship. Karl once again searched the paddock to add Championship winning drivers to compliment his line-up.

The paddock took note when Karl announced that multi-Champion Randy Pobst would join C360R for a partial 2009 season. Randy Pobst had won the SPEED World Challenge GT Championship in 2003, 2007 and in 2008.

In the Grand-Am series, Randy Pobst was a two-time class winner of the 24 Hours of Daytona (2001 and 2006). His first Rolex 24hr win coincided with my first visit to the Daytona classic.

In 2003, Karl had asked Randy to autograph his helmet like many other aspiring racers. Only six years later, Karl was now asking Randy to sign a contract with Compass360 Racing.

Courtesy C360R

(Randy Pobst Announcement)

Going into Daytona, C360R would be fielding three Honda Civic Si. The #74 would be helmed by veteran Randy Pobst and rising star Christian Miller. Randy had raced against Christian Miller in the World Challenge Touring series. This year however, Christian and Randy would be Co-Drivers. Christian could hardly believe how his 2009 season was lining up to become.

The #75 packed an equally balanced combo of Peter Schwartzott and Bo Roach. Peter had been racing against and with Randy Pobst since the early 1990’s. As Co-Drivers, Peter and Randy won an unbreakable record of four consecutive Walkins Glen 24 Hour endurance wins. Both were quite familiar with the Honda platform and would bring much experience to the team.

Matt Pritiko and Travis Walker would pilot the Honda Civic Si #76. Both drivers had previously left to compete for other teams. Both knew that C360R felt more like home. Both drivers had something to prove to themselves and the rest of the field.

(Karl’s Blog)

At the Canadian Motorsports Expo, Karl delivered a presentation on the power of motorsport branding and marketing. He would relive his experiences connecting sponsors with their fans and turn them into engaged customers. There are a lot of business lessons to be learned from racing. Strong business acumen make for strong business partnerships. Matt and Travis were on hand to sign autographs and promote the series. Karl knew the importance of driver engagement when dealing with corporate sponsors.

Karl would temp fate and return to the wintery hills of Ontario a mere month before Daytona. In 2005, Karl failed to race at Daytona due to an accident while skiing. This year, he hoped to avoid a repeat performance by sticking to his snowboard. Even this rare moment of quiet during the off season, was spent bonding with his C360R teammates.

(Karl’s Blog)

Fresh From Florida 200 (January 22 – 23, 2009)

With a strong driver line-up and a thirst for a Daytona podium, C360R was ready for the season opener. Sadly, I skipped the 2009 Rolex 24 at Daytona due to a work conflict. I had to contend with staying home and watch the Compass360 brand now being broadcasted in High Definition.

The Toronto Star sent John Larson to cover the Daytona race. Their newspaper coverage featured all three Compass360 Racing cars predominantly. Karl was once again seeing great brand awareness through his promoting efforts.

Courtesy C360R

The team made full use of their three Honda Civic Si on the high banks of Daytona. In practice, Randy posted the fastest time proving his knowledge of the Honda platform. The three C360R cars used their collective draft to slingshot past the competition. The three C360R Honda Civic Si qualified in numerical order. The 74 qualified 4th, the #75 behind in 5th, and remarkably the #76 in 6th.

Andrew Aquilante claimed pole position with his Subaru Legacy. The Subaru Road Racing team threw down the gauntlet early to C360R. 2009 would prove to be a battleground between Honda and Subaru.

The Daytona race saw plenty of action. Cars in packs of five were battling for position. Every corner and every lap saw cars moving up and down the leaderboard.

Travis and Randy were duking it out in the front as the laps were winding down. The raw talent of Travis against the matured champion of Randy Pobst. Last year, Travis was edged out by another multi-champion Peter Cunningham. Travis had hopefully learned from that experience.

On Lap 50, Travis Walker in the #76 Honda Civic took the lead. The next eighteen laps saw Travis losing and regaining the lead multiple times. This made for great television coverage with the last 20 minutes of the race prominently displaying the Compass360 brand.

Courtesy C360R

With only 10 minutes left in the race, Randy pitted his misfiring Honda Civic. The new Honda was suffering from debut nerves having been raced hard and up front all race. After a quick splash of fuel, Randy returned to the track.

Leading the race, Travis was passed by the Subaru on the apron. This questionable pass dropped Travis further back in the tight field. Subaru Road Racing would finish second with Travis close behind.

Travis retook the third step of the podium at Daytona for the second year in a row. Matt Pritiko finally earned his podium finish on his return to the team.

Bo Roach and Peter Schwartzott finished in the top 10 in the #75. Randy and Christian eventually finished in twelfth having seen their podium vanish within reach.

Matt Bell went on to win in Grand Sport proving his decision to continue and race with Turner Motorsport seemed wise. Past Compass360 drivers Ken Wilden and Billy Johnson, now also running in GS, finished third and fourth at Daytona.

(2009 Fresh From Florida 200 Results and Blog)

Skunk2 had been technical partners with Compass360 Racing for a few years now. As their business partnership grew, so did their friendship with its founder Dave Hsu. Skunk2 would promote C360R heavily on their upgraded website. Skunk2 also featured C360R in numerous of their promotional videos. Once again, Karl was seeing great returns and cross-promotion of his branding efforts.

Matt Pritiko’s podium at Daytona caught the eye of Inside Track Magazine. They nominated Matt for their Up-and-Coming Road Racers of the Year award. His Co-Driver Travis Walker had won that very award back in 2006.

The Ford Racing Mustang Challenge approached Karl and Compass360 to assist with their branding efforts. They were impressed by Karl’s work on and off the racing circuit. Sanctioned by Grand American Road Racing Association, the series was co-developed by Ford Racing and Miller Motorsport Parks to promote the new FR500S. Compass360 redesigned and provided video coverage for their new website. Compass360 was now a series partner with Grand-Am.

(Karl’s Blog)

Homestead-Miami Speedway (March 13 – 15, 2009)

Homestead-Miami Speedway marked their 2009 inaugural event as the “Grand-Am’s Fan Appreciation Weekend.” The KONI Sports Car Challenge headlined the weekend.

Dominican Touring Car Champion Jose Leroux replaced Peter Schwartzott. He would join Bo Roach in the #75 Honda Civic Si. Jose had won the DTS Championship in a Civic crowning his Honda experience.

The rivalry between Honda and Subaru followed the teams to Homestead. Christian Miller in the #74 Civic Si lost his pole position by just 3/1000th of a second. Andrew Aquilante once again claimed pole position with his Subaru Legacy.

Courtesy C360R

Matt Pritiko qualifed the #76 in seventh with Jose Leroux right behind him on the grid in ninth. All three C360R Honda Civic Si would start the race in the top ten.

On Lap 5, the ABS locked up on Andrew Aquilante. Falling back with a flat spotted tire, Christian passed the Subaru for the lead. Christian posted the fastest lap in the first thirty minutes of the race. Christian held the lead until Lap 42. Pitting under a caution, he handed the lead over to the sister car of Jose Leroux.

Travis having taken over from Matt Pritiko in the #76 was fighting hard. Matt had brought the car up to fifth, putting Travis in very good position. The Canadian duo were eying another podium finish.

With only 30 minutes left in the race, the Honda started falling back on the leaderboard. A trip to the pits revealed water spraying under the hood. The car was overheating from mechanical failure. Their quest for a second podium was met instead with a DNF.

Randy Pobst, now behind the wheel of the #74, took the lead on Lap 60. Tom Long had been clawing his way up the field. Tom had just posted the fastest lap of the race in his Freedom Autosport Mazda MX-5. Randy was now holding him off with only a 0.307 second lead over second-place Tom.

Tom Long and Randy Pobst put on an epic battle for the fans in Miami. They were running nose to tail with each one diving into the corners to pass the other. They swapped for the lead seven times in the last hour of the race.

Randy Pobst crossed the finish line one final time and took the checkered flag. Tom Long was 0.129 seconds behind him finishing in second place. Grand-Am had not disappointed their fans on this their Fan Appreciation Weekend.

Christian Miller would get to see his first podium with C360R. More importantly, he stood on the top step and won his first professional race. Randy finally won another race in KONI Challenge after a six year drought. The driver pairing of Randy Pobst and Christian Miller proved to be a winning gambit.

Courtesy C360R

(2009 Homestead-Miami Speedway Results, #76 Blog and #74 Blog)

If you have read Karl’s story this far, I thank you for your interest and hope you enjoyed the read.

If you have simply hit this page first in error, get up to date and start at the beginning using the chapter links above.

Being his championship winning year, I am spending the time to write this year well.

I will be posting 2009 in increments as the key sections are finalized.

More to come shortly, so please drop in for a read later in the week.

2009 Grand-Am KONI Sports Car Challenge Trophies and Contributions

• Driver Championship – C360R Driver Christian Miller
• Team Championship – Compass360 Racing (C360R)
• Manufacturer’s Championship – Honda (C360R responsible for 100% of Honda’s points)
• 3rd in Driver Championship – C360R Driver Randy Pobst (9 time professional racing champion)
• 3rd in Team Championship – Compass360 Racing (only team in series history to finish first and third)

By Jerry White
2 October 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/satu-o02.shtml

General Motors announced plans to shut down its Saturn brand after a deal with former racecar driver and Detroit billionaire Roger Penske unexpectedly collapsed Wednesday. The decision will lead to the closure of 350 dealerships across the US and the elimination of 13,000 dealership jobs, along with the positions of thousands of production workers.

In May, the owner of Penske Automotive, one of the largest car dealership networks in the world, with 150 franchises in the US and 160 others internationally, announced his intention to buy the Saturn brand from the automaker. Penske planned on only distributing, not manufacturing, Saturn vehicles, and said a completion of the deal would hinge on finding an international automaker to take over production from GM by 2011.

The deal fell apart after the Renault-Nissan Alliance decided Wednesday not to proceed with plans to supply the vehicles for Saturn, a source told the Detroit News. Renault’s South Korean subsidiary Samsung was expected to produce the vehicles. Without naming the company, Penske Automotive Group said the board of directors at the manufacturer had rejected the deal.

Responding to the news, Fritz Henderson, GM chief executive officer, said in a statement, “This is very disappointing news and comes after months of hard work by hundreds of dedicated employees and Saturn retailers who tried to make the new Saturn a reality.”

Asked whether GM would seek another buyer, Thomas Pyden, a GM spokesman, told the Detroit Free Press, “I guess never say never, but our focus now is on implementing the wind-down agreements and working with our Saturn retailers to be as transparent and cooperative as possible through the process.”

The Detroit News reported that GM said it would give dealers money to gradually shutter their stores and sell remaining inventory before the franchise agreements expire at the end of October 2010. Saturn dealers came to an arrangement this year with GM that allowed their franchise agreements to expire, a GM spokesman told the newspaper.

Saturn dealers, who were expecting word of a final deal, were devastated. “Wow, I’m, like, in shock,” Stuart Lasser, who owns three Saturn outlets in New Jersey, told the Detroit News. “We’ve been hanging in there literally eight to ten months, waiting for this to happen, and now it’s not happening.”

With the US car market shrinking from 16 million units for most of the decade to an expected 9.3 million this year—and Saturn on track to sell fewer than 100,000 cars, down from 286,000 in 1994–there were few buyers. “In Mr. Penske’s view,” the New York Times reported at the time, “Saturn is a potential jewel to be plucked from the scrap heap of GM’s bankruptcy.”

The sell-off of Saturn was part of the forced restructuring of GM ordered by the Obama administration to drastically reduce the size of the 100-year-old company and restore it to profitability for investors. Under the terms of the plan, GM will close 14 plants and eliminate 21,000 of its remaining 62,000 hourly workers by the end of next year. In addition, the company is closing 2,300 dealerships nationwide, which will affect another 100,000 workers.

With the help of the United Auto Workers, the “new GM” that has emerged from bankruptcy will be freed from paying retiree health care obligations and will see its employees, once among the highest paid industrial workers in the world, transformed into a cheap labor work force.

The Detroit News reported that “sources close to the negotiations said some members of GM’s board were concerned that the deal would create a competitor to the US automaker’s remaining mass market car brands.” With the company majority-owned by the US government, it is possible that the Obama administration torpedoed the deal in order to protect the US auto market from additional foreign competition.

GM established Saturn as a separate division in 1990 to compete with smaller, more fuel-efficient imports from Japan. It was marketed as a “different kind of car company,” with a brand new manufacturing facility distant from Detroit. The production plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee boasted a “flexible” labor agreement with the UAW.

The concessions-laden contract signed by the UAW was based on “Buy American” nationalism and the corporatist outlook of “labor-management partnership.” Saturn was promoted as a model for similar agreements with the Detroit auto makers, which were used to suppress any resistance by workers to the destruction of jobs, working conditions and living standards.

The UAW argued that “outmoded” labor relations were making US car companies uncompetitive. On this basis, the union transformed itself into a direct tool of the corporations and the government. In return for its services, it has been given a substantial ownership stake in the restructured auto companies.

The shutdown of Saturn will have devastating social consequences. The town of Spring Hill, Tennessee, about 35 miles south of Nashville, saw its population jump more than 1,600 percent in the almost 20 years since GM built the first Saturn there in June 1990.

In June 2009, the 2,500 workers at the plant—which once employed 7,000–were told the factory would close November 25. Another 500 workers at the distribution center there now face the same fate. The Spring Hill plant provides local governments with about $2 million a year, local newspapers say.

Thousands of workers building Saturn models elsewhere in North America and Europe also face potential job cuts.

* The mid-size Saturn Aura is built at GM’s Fairfax plant in Kansas City, Kansas.

* The small crossover Saturn Vue is made in Ramos Arizpe, Mexico.

* The full-size SUV Saturn Outlook is built in the Delta Township Assembly plant near Lansing, Michigan.

* The compact Saturn Astra is mainly produced at GM’s European Opel division plants in Antwerp, Belgium and Bochum, Germany. Smaller volumes are also produced in São Caetano do Sul, Brazil; Port Elizabeth, South Africa; Gliwice, Poland; Togliatti, Russia; Zaporoshje, Ukraine; and Ellesmere Port, England.

The collapse of the Saturn deal takes place as US auto sales once again plummet, following the brief uptick resulting from the government-subsidized “cash for clunkers” program.

Last month, GM sales fell 45 percent as compared to September 2008. Chrysler sales fell 42 percent. Ford was down 7 percent since this time last year, but a staggering 37 percent from August, when the “cash for clunkers” program was in full swing. Japanese automaker Honda saw its sales fall 20 percent.

Aaron Bragman, an industry analyst with IHS Global Insight, told the Detroit Free Press that Penske’s failure to line up a manufacturer could be telling “as to what the world thinks of the prospects for the US market.” Potential investors could be looking at the US market and seeing “far more growth opportunities” in places such as Brazil, China or elsewhere in Asia, he said.

A new report suggested that global auto sales could start to rebound in 2010, but it would take at least five years for sales to return to previous levels in the US, Europe and Japan. Citing the loss of household wealth and the economic insecurity facing young workers and those nearing retirement, CSM Worldwide reported, “The U.S. market is not going to rebound as it has in the past,” when vehicle sales could expand by 4 million or 5 million from the lowest point in the cycle to the highest.”

Greeting the liquidation of Saturn, Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Newmark wrote on his blog: “Welcome to the new, frugal America … The sad truth is that the US car market simply can’t support Saturn. And we will find out soon enough that it can’t support Chrysler, either.”

GM to close Saturn after Penske ends purchase talks due to uncertainty over future product

By Tom Krisher and Kimberly S. Johnson, AP Auto Writers

DETROIT (AP) — For those who expected General Motors’ once-funky Saturn brand to live on with a new owner, Wednesday brought a sad twist. Saturn, once billed as a different kind of car company, appears as dead as Pontiac and Oldsmobile.

At the brand’s 350 remaining dealers around the country, there were high hopes that a deal would be announced for GM to sell the brand to former race car driver and auto industry magnate Roger Penske.

Instead, Penske Automotive Group Inc. announced it is walking away from the deal, unable to find a manufacturer to make Saturn cars when GM stops producing models sometime after the end of 2011. GM then announced it would stop making Saturns and soon would close down the brand, just like it did with Oldsmobile in 2004 and soon will do with Pontiac.

Back to the Future II DeLorean Vehicle

The day’s events mean an almost certain end to Saturn, a brand that was set up in 1990 to fight growing Japanese imports. Instead of celebrating a rebirth, the announcements sent dealers scrambling for ways to stay open and preserve about 13,000 jobs.

“I find this hard to believe,” said Carl Galeana, owner of two Saturn dealerships in suburban Detroit. “Everyone’s been saying we’re right at the goal line.”

Although GM and Penske reached a tentative agreement to sell the brand in June, the deal collapsed Wednesday after Penske was told by an unidentified manufacturer that its board had rejected a deal to make cars for the new Saturn.

Star Wars Clone Wars Corporate Alliance Snail Tank Vehicle

“It was a stunning turn of events,” said GM spokesman Tom Pyden, who added that most of the details between GM and Penske had been worked out and both sides expected to announce this week that the deal had been closed.

GM had agreed to keep building three Saturn models even beyond 2011, but after that, Penske had to come up with its own products made by another manufacturer.

Penske spokesman Anthony Pordon said there is little if any chance that the talks could be reopened. Without another supplier in place before the deal was signed, Penske couldn’t run the risk of taking on Saturn, Pordon said.

It takes several years to design new vehicles or engineer foreign vehicles to meet U.S. standards. Penske would risk having no products to sell once the GM contract expired.

Dealers speculated that Penske was talking with French automaker Renault or a Chinese automaker, but Pordon wouldn’t confirm either.

G.I. Joe Vamp Vehicle with Clutch Action Figure

Penske’s purchase price was never disclosed, and he will not have to pay a termination fee, Pyden said.

GM will stop making Saturns as soon as possible, but no layoffs are expected, said spokeswoman Sherrie Childers Arb. Saturns are made at plants in Kansas City, Kan.; Delta Township, Mich., near Lansing and Ramos Arizpe, Mexico.

“Those plants produce products for other brands, and we think we can increase volume on those products that will meet market demand,” Childers Arb said.

Saturn owners can still go to their dealers for service. They will also be able to go to a certified GM dealer once Saturn dealerships close, GM said.

Stephen Spivey, senior auto analyst for Frost and Sullivan, said he was surprised Penske had no alternative plan for a manufacturer.

“There are lots of car companies in the world. I’m surprised they had all their eggs in one basket,” he said, adding that other companies may still be interested in the dealership network.

Penske, who could not be reached for comment, said in a June interview that foreign automakers would be key to making Saturn succeed, but they would have to match GM’s quality standards before Saturn’s dealer network would distribute their products.

Bloomfield Hills-based Penske Automotive owns the second-largest U.S. automobile dealer chain. The company also distributes Daimler AG’s Smart subcompacts in the U.S. and has race teams in the IndyCar, NASCAR and Grand-Am series.

Galeana said he’s heard nothing yet from GM or Saturn, but if the plan is to phase out the brand and cut the products, he’ll have to come up with other options.

“I assumed if you’re at the goal line, those things would have been figured out,” he said Wednesday. “We’re going to try to put some plan Bs in place at this point.”

Galeana said he’s concerned for his employees and still hopes the deal can be resurrected.

“It’s tough out there, but we’ll keep fighting. That’s all we can do.”

GM Chairman Roger Smith first unveiled the Saturn brand in November 1983. But the project was slow to develop and the brand did not officially launch until 1990. It featured the iconic tag-line “a different kind of car company” and people were attracted by its low-key showrooms and no-haggle pricing.

GM’s hope was that Saturn, with its dent-free plastic panels, would attract younger buyers with smaller, hipper cars. It built a new plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., devoted to Saturn vehicles.

Despite a cult-like following that drew thousands to annual reunions in Spring Hill, the brand never made money, although the company has never disclosed how much it invested or lost. The Tennessee factory stopped making Saturns in 2007. Although it was retooled to make Chevrolet crossovers, it’s now scheduled to close. A parts plant in Spring Hill will stay open in the short term, but its future was unclear.

As GM focused more on high-profit pickup trucks and SUVs, Saturn began to languish in the late 1990s. Then in 2006, car buyers began to find Saturn’s new models more appealing. But after a good year in 2007, sales dropped last year as the U.S. car market withered. Through August, Saturn sales were down 60 percent from the first eight months of last year.

GM has been trying to sell Saturn since earlier this year as part of its turnaround plan.

AP Auto Writer Bree Fowler in New York contributed to this report.

It is funny the things that you can remember from your middle school sicnece class.  If memory serves ( like an edition of the Iron Chef) Saturn is the 2nd largest planet that is 6 planets away from the Sun.

Saturn is also the name of a car company.

The Saturn Car Company can only wish that they were that big and powerful, like the planet.  For now, it looks as though they are done.

The Associated Press September 30, 2009, 6:08PM ET text size: TT

GM to shut down Saturn after Penske walks away

By KIMBERLY S. JOHNSON and TOM KRISHER
DETROIT

General Motors Co. said Wednesday it would shut down its Saturn division after an agreement to sell it to Penske Automotive Group Inc. fell apart.

The Bloomfield, Michigan dealership headed by auto racing magnate Roger Penske walked away after it was unable to find a manufacturer to supply vehicles to it after a contract with GM runs out in 2011.

A tentative deal for Saturn was announced on June 5. Penske was to get Saturn’s 371 dealers and promised to retain the 13,000 Saturn employees. The proposed price was never disclosed.

This marks an ignominious end for the brand that was supposed to revolutionize the way small cars were built and sold in America. GM Chairman Roger Smith first unveiled Saturn in November 1983, but the project was slow to develop and the brand did not officially launch until 1990. GM put more effort into making higher-profit SUVs and Saturn languished, never making money.

What happened to Total Confidence?  I guess Penske didn’t have it in Saturn.  Now, what do dealers do with the cars?  If you were trying to trade one of these models in, do you take it?  Or, do you rip them off with what you give them for it?

They just buried dude in the backyard...hilarious movie...

Sales did spring up in 2006 and 2007 when gas prices rose, but then plunged along with other segments of the market last year. GM put the unit on the block this year as it battled the financial crisis that caused it to eventually file for bankruptcy.

GM CEO Fritz Henderson said in statement that Saturn and its dealership network will be phased out.

“This is very disappointing news and comes after months of hard work by hundreds of dedicated employees and Saturn retailers who tried to make the new Saturn a reality,” Henderson said in a written statement. Penske’s announcement “explained that their decision was not based on interactions with GM or Saturn retailers.”

Now, the commercial about losing your job and car are not so funny now.  Mr. Smith, what’s for dinner?

Shares of Penske fell $1.92 or 10 percent to $17.26 in after hours trading. They rose $1.32, or 7.4 percent to $19.18 in regular trading Wednesday.

Penske said it negotiated with another manufacturer to make Saturn cars, but that company’s board of directors rejected the agreement.

Penske spokesman Anthony Pordon would not identify the other manufacturer.

GM had agreed to keep building the Saturn Aura, Outlook and Vue models through 2011. After that Saturn would have to come up with its own products.

Without another supplier in place before the deal was signed, Penske couldn’t run the risk of taking on Saturn, Pordon said. It takes several years to design new vehicles or engineer foreign vehicles to meet U.S. standards. Penske would risk having no products to sell once the GM contract expired.

“There’s a pretty long lead time,” Pordon said. “You’ve got to try to time this so as the supply of one ends and the other one comes on board.”

Pordon said there is little if any chance that the talks could be reopened.

GM said Saturn vehicle owners can still go to their Saturn dealer for service and would be able to go to a certified GM dealer for service once Saturn dealerships are closed.

It had been expected that GM would announce the completion of Saturn’s sale to Penske in the coming days.

The news left many of the 371 Saturn dealers across the country stunned and fearful of being left with nothing to sell.

“I find this hard to believe,” said Carl Galeana, owner of two Saturn dealerships in suburban Detroit. “Everyone’s been saying we’re right at the goal line.”

Galeana said he’s heard nothing yet from GM or Saturn, but if the plan is to phase out the brand and cut the products, he’ll have to come up with another options.

“I assumed if you’re at the goal line, those things would have been figured out,” he said Wednesday. “We’re going to try to put some plan Bs in place at this point.”

Galeana said he’s concerned for his employees and still hopes the deal can be resurrected.

“It’s tough out there, but we’ll keep fighting. That’s all we can do.”

Saturn featured the iconic tag-line “a different kind of car company.” GM’s hope was that Saturn would attract younger buyers with smaller, hipper cars to better compete with Japanese imports. It built a new plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, devoted to Saturn production.

Despite a cult-like following that drew thousands to annual reunions in Spring Hill, the brand never made money for GM. The factory stopped making Saturns in 2007 and currently builds only the Chevrolet Traverse crossover. Today, Saturn production is scattered at plants across North America.

In the late 1990s, Saturn took a back seat as GM focused more on high-profit pickup trucks and SUVs. Then in 2006, car buyers began to find Saturn’s new models more appealing. But after a good year in 2007, sales dropped 22 percent last year as the U.S. car market withered.

GM has been trying to sell Saturn since earlier this year as part of its turnaround plan.

—-

AP Auto Writer Bree Fowler in New York contributed to this report.

Well Saturn, you can join my other favorite production cars that do not exist.

Remember Spencer for Hire? My man Hawk drove this...but white.

ROGER PENSKE STEPPED OUT On the balcony before it came on. There were a lot of people in the suite and it was as good a time as any for some fresh air. There were some bigshots from Sun Oil and some diehards from Sears and some of Roger Penske’s friends from his several different lives in several different states. And there was Mark Donohue, Gary Bettenhausen and Bobby Allison.

Donohue sat right next to the set. It was a very bad angle, much too close to watch color television. The picture seemed like it was going to jump out at him. The station ran the tape over and over from every camera angle they had. It got worse each time. The room was silent now and only the faces spoke.

Art Pollard had pulled out of the pits at 9:37 that morning. He started to drive his car through the first turn at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The car was an Eagle, very sleek, very low-slung, the same car Mark Donohue was driving. As the car came out of turn one, at about 180 miles an hour, Art Pollard lost the groove. The car made a quick veer to the right and hit the concrete wall. The right wheels were ripped off. The car bounced off the wall and skidded all the way down to turn two, 1,450 feet away, first onto the grass of the infield and then back on the track, where it started flipping end over end with a lot of the parts breaking off and flying away. It came to rest like a pancake on the last flip to the griddle. Art Pollard, who was 46 years old and had a lot of family and friends, was still in the car. He was as good as dead. When the car blew up, the flames shot back and Pollard swallowed them. You couldn’t see that on television. The flames are invisible and odorless and tasteless.

Nobody in the suite said a word. Mark Donohue took his clenched right fist and banged it on the sofa. His face was very red. Bobby Allison turned away and dropped his head low and said a prayer to himself. Gary Bettenhausen tilted the tip of his Goodyear hat over his eyes so you couldn’t see him crying. Roger Penske walked back in from the balcony, sensing it was all over. The balcony of his suite overlooked the exact spot where Art Pollard died. Penske walked in and looked at his three drivers. There was nothing he could say. It was going to be one of those months.

THERE ARE TWO KINDS of people at Indy. There are Penske’s people and there is everybody else. The other 400,000 drink beer and yell and get very greasy. Penske’s people are different.

Earlier that morning, Gary Bettenhausen stood inside his green and white wooden garage very much alone. It was the first day of time trials, a series of races against the clock to see who would end up where in the descending position order of cars for the start of the race two weeks away. The talk around Gasoline Alley, the legendary name for the garage area, echoed the stories in the papers. This could be the day, the first day in history, that a car and driver would average over 200 miles an hour turning the two-and-a-half­mile oval.

That’s not what Gary Bettenhausen was thinking. Deep inside, he was remembering an anniversary. “It was 12 years ago today,” he said. “My dad died here.”

Gary was only 19 then. He had just started racing modified Go-Karts. His father, Tony Bettenhausen, was 44 and an old pro at Indy. He was a cautious man. He had promised himself and his family he would never ride in a car that wasn’t his, a car he wasn’t sure of. He kept the promise until 12 years ago today. A friend who had helped Tony Bettenhausen build a silo on his Illinois farm the past winter asked him if he’d take his car out on the Indy track on a shakedown run, just to test it out for him. He couldn’t refuse. Anyway, it was only for one lap.

You can buy a good cotter pin for a few pennies at your local hardware store. They say it was a bad cotter pin that began the end to Tony Bettenhausen’s life. An axle broke and the car hit the wall and turned end over end.  

Late this May, Gary Bettenhausen walked out of the garage to go to his car, which was already in the pits. Somebody stopped him to say his friend Art Pollard had just been in an accident and had been taken to the hospital in pretty bad shape.

“What happened?” Bettenhausen asked.

“He hit the wall and turned end over end,” he was told.

Gary Bettenhausen didn’t say another word to anybody. He walked over and got into his car and drove out and turned the fastest qualifying time in the history of Indy. The crowd roared. He drove back into the pits and was interviewed over the public address system with a quarter million people in the stands listening. He sounded very happy, for the first time that day. He finished talking and there were more cheers as he walked away from his car. Then they announced it. Art Pollard had just died in Methodist Hospital. He was the 35th driver killed in the 57 years of the 500. There was total silence in the stands. Gary Bettenhausen broke down and cried.

LAST YEAR, GARY BETTENHAUSEN almost won this race. He led for a very long time. And when his car faltered, Mark Donohue came on to finish first. Either way, Roger Penske was a winner. This year he had added stock car superstar Bobby Allison to his racing stable. The writers were starting to call it the Super Team. They had come a long way in a short time at Indy.

In the beginning, Mark Donohue was a sports car racer. To a large extent he still is. Sports cars like Porches and Lolas are run in road races on roads that turn and twist and do interesting things. The Indianapolis 500 is basically a very stupid race. It’s 33 specially-built cars running counterclockwise around a two-and-a-half-mile oval 200 times. Whoever finishes first and fastest wins. It’s a very dangerous race. Roger Penske, who at 36 is the same age as Mark Donohue, used to be a pretty good race driver himself. But he, too, preferred the sports car circuit, because Indianapolis was too dangerous and too dumb. Penske and Donohue went along thinking like that for a couple of years, making pretty big names for themselves. But they finally realized that if they really wanted to get to the top, they had to go to Indy.

They used to call this course “The Brickyard” because it used to be paved with bricks—over a million of them. That’s changed. Little else has. There’s only one yard of bricks left now, right at the start-finish line. The rest is concrete.

The Indy 500, the world’s longest continuous left hand turn, is probably the most famous race in the world. It’s got a lot of things going for it. It’s got tradition, it’s got danger, but most of all it’s got money. Over a million bucks in the prize purse. The winner now gets about a quarter of that. Not to mention all the prestige, residuals and bargaining power with sponsors.

It’s a very simple race. Thirty-three cars are lined up in 11 rows of three, in the basic order of their qualifying speeds. They zoom and roar and cough and sputter, most trying to win, some just trying to finish. There are always mechanical failures that knock cars out of the race. And there are accidents. Detractors of the sport tend to play up the accidents. They say the crowd is bloodthirsty and the drivers are crazy. Some of that is true. Something will have to be done about the speed. That became very clear this year. Indy just wasn’t built to handle those grounded airplanes on A-frames with the thick, slick tires. It challenges every part of man and machine. And Roger Penske was never one to duck a challenge.

PENSKE IS A QUIET GENIUS. Under pressure, he’s one of the coolest people you’ll ever see. And the pressure is always there. This year, on the day before qualifications, Mark Donohue’s car blew an engine. Forget the $40,000 it costs to replace it. The Penske organization is never one to pinch pennies. They go first class all the way. It was mostly a problem of getting a new engine into the car on time and seeing that it worked right. It was an all-night job that had to be ready first thing in the morning. Anybody else might have panicked. Penske plotted things out and then left it in the hands of his chief engineer, Don Cox, the guy who fixes cars with a slide rule instead of a monkey wrench.

A calm and collected Penske returned to the suite to help his fiancée, Kathy Holbert, a very classy looking brown-haired girl, fill out the envelopes for the over $8,000 in race tickets he’d bought to send to sponsors and friends. Some representatives from those sponsors were in the suite at the time.

One of them cornered Penske the minute he walked in. “Listen, Roger,” he said, “I want you to make sure my kids get seats right in back of the pits. It’s very important to me.”

“And don’t forget those tickets for my nieces and nephews,” another money man said.

Anybody else would have told them to shove it. Certainly any man of nor­mal temper would have politely explained to them that his top driver, the defending champion of the Indy 500, just blew his car’s entire engine, and maybe that was a little more important than making sure somebody’s nephew had a seat for the race.

But Penske kept his cool. He thumbed through the pile of 400 tick­ets and managed to find one for everybody’s niece and nephew and second cousin. “You’ve got to stay cool,” he said later. “You’ve got to be proper.”

Penske likes to be proper about everything. It’s obvious by the way he looks. He’s a handsome, almost perfect-looking man. He’s slender because he doesn’t eat that much. He’s too busy. He eats as a function, and only when his stomach reminds him to. His hair has grayed quickly and distinctively over the past few years. It’s full and always in place. He wears a seemingly endless supply of pastel V-neck sweaters, with either an oxford cloth buttondown or a thin turtleneck underneath. He has a paranoia about cleanliness, about himself, his cars and everybody who works for him. In racing circles, he’s called Mister Clean, while Mark Donohue, his first and foremost employee, is called Captain Nice. The people who work closest with Penske wince when they hear that. There’s a slight role reversal there. Roger Penske is the captain. Make no mistake about that.

PENSKE CAME TO PHILADELPHIA in the mid ’60s. His racing days were just about over and he was looking for a solid investment. He got a piece of McKean Chevrolet in West Philly. He eventually took the place over, and it’s now run by his brother David. Roger went on to bigger and better things. A racing garage in Newtown Square, a whole line of auto products marketed through Sears, more car dealerships, car rental franchises, a tire distribution business, an insurance agency, a truck leasing company, and even his own speedway in Michigan.

Michigan International Speedway is near Penske’s third home in Southfield, near Detroit, where he spends much of his time now. The second home, of course, is Philadelphia, and the first is Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Roger Penske was born.

Shaker Heights is an affluent suburb of Cleveland. Penske always traveled on the right side of the tracks. His father worked his way up to become vice president of a firm that distributes steel. Roger Penske got interested in cars very early. His father brought him to Indy when he was 11. Now Roger brings his father.

Father Penske is a calm, thin man with shock-white hair. He is what Roger Penske will look like in 30 years. He came to Indy this year only for the time trials. He’s been having some heart problems and he didn’t think he could take the excitement of the race. He spent most of his time sitting in the sun of the 30-chair balcony off the suite—technically, room 164 of the Speedway Motel, little more than a living room with half a bath and half a kitchen and a view that costs $10,000 a year.

“Roger used to hang around gas stations all the time,” the elder Penske says. “One summer he got a paying job at one of them. He had his heart set on the old MG sports car parked out behind the station. I promised him if he earned the money, he could buy it. Well, he came up $100 short, but I gave him the difference. It was probably the best investment I ever made. He rebuilt that thing from scratch. And as soon as he fixed it all up, he sold it and traded up to a better car. He must have done that some 30 times before he ended up with his racing Corvette. I don’t know that we were too thrilled about that. It’s not that his mother and I discouraged him from racing. We just felt a lot better every Sunday night when he came walking in the door in one piece.”

From the Corvette, Penske moved up to a Porsche. He still likes that car. His team races it today in the better road races. Of course the car has changed a lot since then. Penske held off on serious racing long enough to graduate from Lehigh, get married and find a job as a sales engineer with an aluminum company in Cleveland. But he just couldn’t take all that sitting still. He quit his job and started racing full time. He became a very hot driver. In the early ’60s Roger Penske was one of the biggest names in road racing.

But he was more than just a race driver. He was a businessman with tremendous ability to package and sell himself. By now, that ability has been honed to an art. Roger Penske probably handles sponsors better than anyone else in the racing business. Penske is the supreme salesman. E. R. Bradley knows that probably better than anyone else.

Bradley, among the most polished brass at Sun Oil, came into what was then McKean-Penske Chevrolet on Chestnut Street to buy a car from Roger Penske. The two of them started talking about racing. Then Penske shifted the charm into high gear. He convinced Bradley that Sun Oil should be sponsoring a racing program. Bradley bounced it off his board and came back with a conditional okay. Sun wanted a team with the cleanest-cut image around. Roger Penske already filled the bill. All he needed now was a driver.

MARK DONOHUE GOT THE RACING bug the year after he got his mechanical engineering degree from Brown. He raced for five years as an amateur. He did very well, but was still very unknown. Donohue was always a very intense and introspectively emotional man. Which means he thought too much for a race driver. In 1966, he thought he would quit. A good friend of his was killed in a crash at LeMans. It was an end and a beginning. Donohue met Penske at the funeral. They had a long talk. Donohue was sold on Penske racing. He was the first employee, soon to become a partner in the corporation.

After a few rough races, the Penske-Donohue team started spending a lot of time in Victory Lane. Donohue drove a lot of different cars in a lot of different races. Camaros in short stock car races, and very exotic Lolas in marathon road races. Mark Donohue was considered one of the top drivers in the country. In 49 states, anyway. He had never been to Indiana. But in 1969 Roger Penske decided he had to go. There was only one race left and it was the big one.

At age 32, Mark Donohue was a rookie in the Indy 500. A promising rookie, but a rookie. To get to Indy, though, you need money. That’s where Penske came in. He managed to get $150,000 out of Goodyear and Sunoco. With lesser amounts thrown in from minor sponsors, they had enough to field one car.

In four years, things have certainly changed. The Penske racing sponsorship commitment is ten times what it was the first year at Indy. Penske has become a master at getting other people’s money and giving them a good promotional return on it. That’s the whole idea behind sponsorship. A company pays for you to use its product and display its trademark on your car. The car then becomes a 190-mile­an-hour billboard. And Roger Penske fields some of the best billboards in the business.

“The main thing,” he says, “is to go to a company and make a sponsorship proposal. But you can’t sign them up for just one year. That’s not long enough for either party because you don’t know if you’re going to have a poor year. If you do, the chances of them continuing are not so good. And if you’ve had a great year, the sponsor gets worried you might jack him up on the price.

“So I’ve got to get three-year commitments from our sponsors on the basis that we would produce for them. We’ve had excellent relations with our big sponsors like Sun Oil and Goodyear and Sears, mostly because of the way we’ve approached the relationship.

“You have to lay the groundwork with the big companies yourself. And I don’t have somebody go and do the groundwork for me. I do it myself. If I go in and there have to be some changes, I can make them on the spot.

“You notice our cars aren’t cluttered with a lot of product decals like the other cars. We’re not interested in the sponsors who’ll give you $5,000 after you’ve done something.

A lot of companies will only offer contingency money. If you happen to win and you’ve got their sticker on the car, they give you some money. To me, it’s not worth the few thousand dollars to junk up the car.

“Our sponsorship involvements this year will total about a million and a half dollars. That’s what we eat off of. If we ever had to worry about prize money to sustain our business, we’d be in serious trouble.

“But the one thing you’ve got to realize is that if I didn’t have any sponsors at all, I’d still be involved in racing, because it’s in my blood. I’d be into it just as far as I could financially afford myself.

“At the present time, we’re running a racing team just like we’d run a business. We try to control costs, which is very difficult, sometimes, when you have a run of bad luck. But we’ve had a profitable racing company for the past four years, and we expect to remain so in the future. It’s the toughest business I’ve been involved in. There’s no plateau in racing. Either you’re on the top or you’re on the bottom. And you can go up so fast and down so fast. Any one of those 33 cars could win at Indy. On the other hand, it can be disastrous, like it was for Pollard.

“Part of our success is picking the right people. All three of our drivers are good, clean-cut guys, which is good from a PR standpoint. When I do something, I want to do it the best we can. When I put a car on the track, I want to put the very best race car out there. From the crew to the drivers right on down to the paint job.”

Penske is a fanatic about that. During practice, every time a Penske car pulled into the pits, there was an extra man on the crew. Besides the regular guys to check the tires and the fuel, there was one man who carried nothing but a can of paste wax and a rag. His job was to polish the car.

Penske prides himself on having the best looking cars on the track. They are shining visions in navy blue and yellow—the Sunoco colors. He uses an epoxy base paint that won’t scratch. It’s cost him as much as $10,000 just to paint a car. He figures it’s worth it because people notice. And when they notice the car, they notice the sponsor stickers. And the sponsors like that. If they’re backing a $100,000 car, it can at least look washed and waxed.

That clean-cut, well-scrubbed look carries through the whole Penske team. Mark Donohue gave up his crew cut a couple of years back. But he still doesn’t fit in with a lot of the other drivers, especially at Indy. His hair isn’t slicked back with axle grease, and he shares Roger Penske’s V-neck sweater collection. He usually looks like he just walked in from an Ivy League fraternity meeting. He speaks very softly in a somewhat high-pitched, very boyish voice. He shrugs his shoulders and dips his head a lot. He’s a bad interview for most of the working press, the guys who are out after that one snappy, colorful quote to carry a story. Every time there’s an accident, the other drivers are always good for one-liners. “Yeah, we’re goin’ too fast” or “Man, we gotta do something about that.” Not Mark Donohue. He thinks too much.

THE NIGHT AFTER Art Pollard died, Donohue was flying back to Philadelphia in Roger Penske’s Lear jet. He was sitting next to Bobby Allison talking about differences and dangers. Allison was a little upset. He’s a proven veteran of the stock car circuit. But stock cars weigh around 4,000 pounds, which makes them look like tanks next to the 1,500-pound winged tubs at Indy. And Allison had been feeling some other pressures. The day before, his wife Judy walked into the Penske suite. It was her first time at Indy, too. She was invited out on the balcony to watch the cars go around. The first car she saw was Art Pollard’s, going around on its back.

Donohue help set Bobby Allison at ease. He went down the list of qualifiers and gave him the book on each man. “This guy takes chances, watch him.” “Don’t try to pass so-and-so on the outside, he’ll drive you into the wall.” But Allison’s main concern was the safety of the cars. He was used to cars that had things like roofs and roll bars and fenders.

“Racing cars today are nowhere near as dangerous as they’ve been in the past,” Donohue told him. “Especially at Indy, where you get the most publicity when someone’s killed or injured. Some years ago, when the old front end roadsters were the cars to run at Indy, the basic design concept there was to have a car that would be very strong in the suspension and not too strong in the chassis. That way they could run into things without achieving too much damage.

But when they crashed very hard into something, the suspension would come back through the chassis and generally injure the driver quite badly. The modern chassis design of the rear-engine cars is exactly the opposite. Any time the car has contact with something very hard, it shears all the wheels off. And with no wheels, the car won’t go very far. It’ll stop very fast.”

There are those who would tell you from all outward appearances that Mark Donohue is really Charlie Brown, still the little round-faced kid who thinks too much. But for Roger Penske, Mark Donohue does more than think. Back in those early days, back when it was a two-man operation out in Newtown Square, Mark Donohue did everything from engineering and putting the cars together to cleaning up afterwards. Now that the Penske race crew has grown to over 40 people and Mark Donohue has made an international name for himself, things really haven’t changed.

He can be found at all hours of the day and night somewhere around the little white bungalow at the intersection of West Chester Pike and Route 252, tinkering around with something. If it’s not one of his cars, it’s his boat. Donohue keeps a nice-size boat there. When he wants to get away from it all, he hitches it to a trailer and rides it up to the North Jersey shore, near his original hometown of Summit. He gets as many kicks out of the boat as he does out of the cars. And it was just a few months ago that the boat almost messed up his racing career.

He was working late at the shop on one of the cars. It was after midnight. He decided to turn in for a few hours. On his way out of the garage, the immaculate garage, the one with no dirt on the floor, the one with everything in its proper place, on the way out of the greaseless garage, he decided to check the hitch on the boat trailer. The boat was sitting a little loose. He tried to fix it. It didn’t work. The whole thing came down on his thumb, smashing it to blood. Donohue screamed like a cat.

Luckily, he wasn’t the only Penske person dedicated enough to be burning the midnight oil. A few yards away, in the little white bungalow, communications director Dan Luginbuhl heard the screams over the pounding of his typewriter. He ran out to help. Luginbuhl, who used to do some race driving himself, set a new world’s land speed record getting Donohue to the hospital, where his thumb was put back together again, minus only a few minor pieces.

THE PENSKE PLACE in Newtown Square has changed a lot since the first solo trip to Indy in 1969. Obviously, there are more people working there. The operation has gotten so big that it will soon be moved to a much larger site near Reading. Besides the Indy car, Donohue is now driving an American Motors Matador in stock car races and a highly-tooled Porsche in road races. They’re also working on something even more sophisticated for Formula 5000 racing.

Gary Bettenhausen was added to the team last year. He’s mostly an Indy car driver. At 31, he already had five 500s to his credit going into this year. Last year, his first driving for Roger Penske, he led the pack for most of the race. And when his car faltered, Mark Donohue came on to win.

And this year they’ve added stock car champion Bobby Allison to the Indy team, to keep the guys in the garage as busy as ever. But there are other machines besides race cars there, and that’s where Don Cox comes in. Cox, also in his early 30s, is director of engineering for Penske. His machine is a computer. He uses it for everything from setting up suspension systems to timing pit stops. Cox feeds in all the variables—the driver, the car, the racetrack—and comes out with a program, what the racing people call the hot setup.

Cox graduated from the General Motors Institute and did a lot of ex­perimental planning work with the Chevrolet racing people before joining Penske. He’s now considered one of the best chassis designers in the business. Some of the older mechanical men for the other race teams scoff at Cox’s slide rule approach. They’d rather stick to common sense and monkey wrenches. What’s the difference, they figure, as long as you win? Don Cox figures there’s a very big difference.

“Of course, our major objective is to win the race,” he says, “but the race is usually the last thing you do. Our initial objective when we get to the track is to show up with a properly prepared car that’s worth the tag, ‘Penske Racing.’ And there’s a good reason for that. Last year we went to Indy with what I thought was a beautifully prepared car. And so for the whole month of May, we got a lot of attention because it was such n attractive car.

“Now this is the kind of thing the sponsors are looking for. They want to win the race too, but they’re looking for attention. That’s why they give us the money. That’s why we’re in the business.

“You have to be organized like that. You know what’s got to be done that day, who’s going to handle what, when to make the pit stops. All that has to be done before the race. The race is just the thing at the end.

“We set our race strategy before­hand and try to stick to it. Each driver is different, each car gets a different setup. There’s no room for confusion. If we go organized and prepared and lose the race, that’s all right. But if we’re not prepared and we lose, it’s inexcusable.”

Penske’s people are always prepared. They’ve got this little seven-P motto: Proper prior planning prevents piss-poor performance. Mark Donohue’s preparation has always paid off. He’s won a lot of road racing championships and he’s done well at Indy. He was Rookie of the Year in 1969, finished seventh. The next year he moved up to second. A bad transmission in 1971 forced him out of the race early. But he made up for it last year, winning it all and automatically becoming the hottest property in racing. On his return to Indy, he was greeted like royalty.

MARK DONOHUE’S PICTURE was pasted all over Indianapolis. You could pull into any Sunoco station in town and buy an official Mark Donohue drinking glass with his picture and car on it. You could buy posters and pictures and blowup toys and T-shirts and just about anything else you could put a man’s name on. It was very impressive, returning as defending champion, impressive to everybody but Mark Donohue.

“We just can’t go out there and throw our press clippings on the ground and expect the other drivers to slide all over them,” Donohue said. “Each year we’re back to zero, just like everyone else.”

And 1973 promised to be the best 500 ever. It promised to be the year that someone would turn the oval at over 200 miles an hour. It probably got a bigger buildup than any 500 before it. The quarter of a million grandstand seats were sold out months in advance. People from all over the Midwest came weeks early just to be first in line for a parking spot in the infield. It was going to be a very big year.

The Penske suite seemed to be the hub of pre-race activity. It was a constant jam of corporate presidents and beautiful people. Linda Vaughn, the Hurst Shifter girl with the big boobs who figured largely in one of the Penn Central executive scandals, was a constant visitor. So were the president and chairman of the hoard of Sun Oil. So were some of the bigger journalists, like Bob Jones from Sports Illustrated, who wears a racing jacket that says BOB JONES, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, just in case you weren’t sure.

Kathy Holbert was constantly answering the phone. There were always requests for interviews and pictures. Penske and his people tried to oblige, but it got kind of unwieldy. They finally had to lock themselves in the garage area to get away from it all.

They would be in Indianapolis over a month, preparing for a race that would probably take about three hours. There were all kinds of tests to run. They had to check the tires and the engines and the chassis and anything else you could think of. Indy is run by a bunch of old men and, because of it, is very much steeped in tradition. There is still something called Carburetion Day, even though none of the cars have carburetors any more. There’s a very simple formula at Indy. If it was good in 1911, it’s got to be good today. There is an outcry for change every year at Indy from the younger folks, but the change never comes. This year a lot of those younger folks were saying, well beforehand, that this year’s cars were too fast for the track, that something had to be done or somebody was going to get very badly hurt. The old men didn’t listen.

The second best-attended sports event in this country is the time trials for the first best-attended sports event in this country, the Indy 500. The time trials consist of one car going out on the track by itself and running four laps, or ten miles, as fast as the driver can push it. At the end of four days of qualifying, the fastest 33 cars are set for the race.

ROGER PENSKE HAD a definite program for time trials. “I want to qualify our three cars in the first four rows,” he said. And his drivers proceeded to go out and do it. Mark Donohue ended up on the outside of row one, Gary Bettenhausen was in the middle of row two and Bobby Allison was on the outside of row four. It was all almost too easy to be true. Mark Donohue even came close to breaking the 200-mile-an-hour mark. Two others came closer, but nobody did. That set up even more anticipation for the race itself.

In the two weeks between the time trials and the 500, everybody had a pretty good time. The Holiday Inn Northwest was the hot spot in town, and on any given night you could find anybody who mattered drinking up and shooting off. Everybody but Penske’s people, that is.

It’s not that Roger requires an oath of abstinence or anything, even though he prefers orange juice to an occasional Manhattan. It’s just that he takes racing seriously. And so do the people who work for him. In Gasoline Alley, the lights hardly ever went out in the Penske garage area. There was always more work to do on these thousand-horsepower monsters.

Meanwhile, Andy Granatelli was going around pasting STP stickers on any blank space left in town. Peter Revson, the Revlon heir and race driver, was passing out free samples of a soon-to-be-marketed product called “Rev-Up,” vitamins for men. There was a picture of Revson on the back of each package with a nifty little quote: “Unlike your car, you can’t trade your body in for a new one.”

The commercialism was everywhere. A driver never talked about his helmet. It was always his Bell Helmet. And as each driver pulled in from a good practice run, he made sure to step up to the public address mike and tell the crowd what gave him that extra little push. “Those Champion spark plugs didn’t miss once and the Goodyear tires really held on the curves,” said veteran Gerry Grant.

But there was always something to balance out a commercial plug. “The Lord rode with me,” Mel Kenyon said. “I came into that last turn and I asked the Lord to give me a little push. And the Lord came through.”

You’ve got to remember, this is Indiana. That’s why most of the couple hundred thousand people who flooded the infield for the race were young. It looked like a Midwestern Woodstock. Could it be that so many young kids were interested in auto racing? No, there’s just nothing else to do in Indiana.

The 500 has always been a circus. The prices just keep getting higher. This year, the good seats went for $20 and $40. It was either that or sit on the top of your car. A lot of people did. The crowd was estimated at well over 400,000. They lined up all through the rainy night before, waiting for the bombs to go off at 5 a.m., signaling the opening of the gates.

While they waited, many of them read newspapers to get the latest dope on the race. A banner headline announced that a poll of racing writers had picked Gary Bettenhausen and Mark Donohue as the two favorites to win the race, and Bobby Allison was predicted for Rookie of the Year. That night the Penske suite was more crowded than ever.

THE 57TH ANNUAL INDIANAPOLIS 500 TAKE ONE—Monday, May 28

It rained like a son of a bitch. This race had only been called off once before because of rain. That was in 1915. The crowd sat this one out. By mid-afternoon, there was a break in the clouds and they got the cars onto the track and ready to run. The celebrities paraded in Cadillac cars. The Purdue band played “The Star Spangled Banner.” Jim Nabors sang “Back Home Again In Indiana.” Thousands of helium balloons were let loose. Tony Hulman, the man who owns the Speedway and half of Indianapolis, cranked his hand into an imaginary starter and cried, “GENTLE­MENNNNN, STAAAAART YOUR ENNNJUNNNS!”

The cars started. The crowd roared. The cars took a parade lap of the course. Then they sped up for a pace lap. They came out of the fourth turn and got the green flag. The race was under way. And before the public address announcer could get those words out, the race was over, some 70 yards later. At 150 miles an hour, there was some bumping in the middle of the field. One car touched wheels with another, one car hit the wall. There was a giant explosion like a bomb dropping. A sky-high ball of orange flame rolled down the course. People in the stands across from the pits were doused with fuel. No one died immediately. Ten cars were involved in the crash. Driver Salt Walther was really messed up badly. He was taken to the hospital with terrible burns and breaks. So were a dozen spectators. Some of them were released. The cleanup operation looked like something out of My Lai. And just when things started to get back into order and it looked like they might start the race again, it poured. It was almost enough to make you believe in God. The race was put off until the next day.

THE 57TH ANNUAL INDIANAPOLIS 500 TAKE TWO—Tuesday, May 29

It was a bright, sunny morning, but the stands were hardly full. A lot of people had to go back home and back to work. Track officials stalled for a little over an hour to let more of the crowd in. As they waited, the clouds moved in. The cars took a parade lap, then a pace lap, then a red flag. The race was stopped before it started. There was rain on the course. The rain never stopped. They waited about three hours and called the race off again. The forecast for the next day said rain. Some of the drivers used the time to bitch. Gary Bettenhausen, an official drivers’ representative, complained that the cars weren’t allowed to have roll bars over the open cockpits. He said that was an easy way to kill people. There was a simple answer to his request. They didn’t have roll bars in 1911. It continued to rain.

THE 57TH ANNUAL INDIANAPOLIS 500 TAKE THREE—Wednesday, May 30

It was a dark and rainy day. What else was new? The people at the weather bureau said there might be a break for a few hours. So they lined the cars up and in mid-afternoon, they sent them off again. It was stupid. Everybody knew they couldn’t get 500 miles in. But under the rules of the race, you only needed one lap over 250 miles to make it official. And that’s what they were aiming for, just to get a race in, any race, just to get the damn thing over with already. It was getting so that nobody cared who won anymore.

Most of the drivers anticipated a short race. Many of their mechanics turned the screw—tightened the engine up to make it go faster over a shorter distance. Now it was a race against the rain.

Roger Penske put on one of his several sets of $10,000 headphones, each tuned to a private radio band to keep in contact with the drivers in the cockpit and with different spotters around the track.

Bobby Allison’s car was late getting to the grid. Some last-minute minor changes in the garage area. A little bit of the old Penske perfectionism that almost backfired. All the other drivers were in their cars when Allison came running, right at the introduction to the national anthem. Being the patriotic Southern gentlemen he is, Allison refused to move while the anthem was being played. Because of that, the car didn’t have a chance to warm up. He went out with a cold engine with the oil pressure building.

On the second lap, Bobby Allison was headed home. It was a catastrophic failure for both him and Penske. A bolt broke and a rod went through the side of the engine block. The thing that hurt the most was that there was no control over it. The engines are built by a firm in California. They do all the building and all the testing. Somehow, Bobby Allison’s defective engine just got past them. Months of work were down the drain in less than a minute.

Allison got out of the car, ripped off his helmet and kicked the ground. “I’m disgusted with the whole thing,” he mumbled. “I didn’t even have a chance.”

Meanwhile, Mark Donohue was running well, in second place, right behind Bobby Unser. His first pit stop went off Penske perfect. At 16 seconds, it was the fastest of the day.

Then things started to cloud up again. A car spun out on the backstretch. The yellow flag was put out. Everyone had to maintain position and go no faster than 80 miles an hour. Roger Penske thought it was a good time to bring Donohue in for another stop. He flashed an “IN” on the signboard and Donohue came in for another fill-up. This time, though, he got caught with his fuel hose dangling. The yellow flag was only momentary. While Donohue was still in the pits, the green flag went out and the race was back on, minus one defending champion. Donohue hurried out, but it was too late to regain his position. Penske didn’t consider it a mistake. He had to bring him in sometime. In the end, it didn’t matter.

The clouds got heavier. Some of the bigger names had already dropped out with engine problems. Revson, Andretti, Ruby, Foyt. Swede Savage, one of the fastest qualifiers, was running as well as anybody. Until the fourth turn. Savage’s car, with a full 75-gallon tank of fuel, had something go wrong. It stopped going forward and started sliding across the track and hit the wall and went up in flames and disintegrated. A wheel shot 100 feet straight up in the air. Pieces of the car were all over the track. It was terrible. Everybody started running to help. In the pits, a running crewman was hit by a speeding rescue truck. He was killed.

They managed to pull Swede Savage out of the wreckage. He was badly burned and broken. They flew him to the hospital in very critical condition. It was just terrible. Even those vultures who paid good money to see blood had had enough. The people in the stands were still. And it started to rain. Somebody said God was crying again. It lasted for about an hour. The race started again, but nobody really cared. It was all anti­climax from here. It was all a disaster.

Mark Donohue’s next pit stop was only a few hundred yards off. That’s where he ran out of gas and had to coast into the pits because a fuel tank lever bent, locking out a half tank. He lost more ground, but the trouble had just begun. His next pit stop was on lap 89. Gas and tires. Only the engine didn’t sound so good. They couldn’t figure out why. They sent him out. He went by again. This time he was really sputtering. “Get the plugs!” Roger Penske yelled.

On lap 91, Donohue was brought in again. The stop took an outrageous two minutes and 23 seconds. They were hoping to solve the problem.
Only they weren’t sure what it was.

Meanwhile, the field was folding. Al Unser went out, then Gerry Grant and Mike Hiss and Joe Leonard. Five laps later, Donohue came in for an inspection. There were no leaks and no obvious problems. But he was still sputtering. Still running slow. The stop lasted a minute and 21 seconds. Two laps later, they brought him in again. He sat in the car for a few laps while they changed the whole ignition system. Then they fired the car up. It sounded terrible. They shut it off. A disgusted Mark Donohue was out of the race. It was a burned exhaust valve. Another engine failure.

“What can I say,” he said as he left the track. “We’ve only got one consolation. The part failed. The guys didn’t.”

The race fell apart in quick order. Bobby Unser went out, Dick Simon, A. J. Foyt in a backup car, David Hobbs, Mike Mosely, fastest qualifier Johnny Rutherford. The only hope left for the Penske team was Gary Bettenhausen, and he just wasn’t running well. He had been reporting steering problems on his two-way radio. He had to run the car slower. He was afraid to go too fast. Afraid he’d lose control and crash. He made two pitstops while his crew inspected the rear end of the car. They found nothing wrong and sent him back out.

The next time he came in, Penske thought he heard some vibrating in the front. He started yelling for somebody to check under the nose of the car. A pit man slid under. A piece of the chassis was rubbing the winged part of the nose. The piece was quickly cut off. ‘Everything was perfect now, but Bettenhausen had lost several laps to the field making the adjustment.

He pulled back on the track and started driving hard. He was running better than anybody out there, picking up a place or two on every lap. There was some excitement in the Penske pits as Bettenhausen moved from fourteenth to tenth to eighth to seventh to fifth and kept standing on it. Then Roger Penske put out his hand to signal. It got wet. It was raining again. By now, they had enough laps in to make it legal. By now they just wanted to get the race over with before another disaster happened. They put out the yellow flag and then the red. They never even bothered to drop the checkered. In what seemed like almost a kangaroo court proceeding they declared Gordon Johncock, the guy who, by attrition, happened to be leading at the time, the winner, gave him the trophy and quickly left. A half hour later the sun was out again, but everybody had gone home.

“It, was just a matter of who was going to break down or crash next,” Gary Bettenhausen said. “It just wasn’t a race. It was a disaster.”

It was an Indy 500 that would be remembered not for its winner, but for all of its losers. A few days later, the United States Auto Club, the group that governs the race, would partially give in to the cry for safety by cutting the fuel loads almost in half and shortening the allowable limit for the cars’ aerodynamic rear wings. But it was too little too late. It should have been a time for celebration, but there was nothing for anybody to celebrate. You couldn’t even call it the Indy 500. The rain made it the Indy 332-1/2.

Mostly everybody packed up and went home, grimly determined to forget the whole thing. Roger Penske stayed. He locked himself in a garage with Don Cox and they started figuring what went wrong and plotting where to go from here, trying to work on how they could avoid things like this. Roger Penske wasn’t waiting until next May to straighten things out. The racing team was, after all, the most visible part of the multi­million dollar conglomerate called Penske Enterprises Inc. And the cap­tain knew he had to run it right. This wasn’t a time to mope. It was a time to plan ahead. Everybody in the organization knew that.

Back in the suite, the only thing that was left of the crowds of the previous days were some broken plastic cups. There were only half a dozen people left there, all Penske people. There was no one breaking the door down for an interview. The phone didn’t ring. It was a lonely defeat.

Dan Luginbuhl got up and walked over to the closet in the corner where he had hid the four cases of champagne for the victory party that never was. He opened one of the cartons and pulled out a bottle.

“We better drink some of this stuff before it goes flat,” he said. He corked a bottle and poured some of the pink stuff into a paper cup. He lifted it high.

“Here’s to next year,” he said. He gulped some bubbles and walked over to the garage area, where the lights stayed on all night.

Fun with headlines today …

This one is all over the news:

“Roger Penske buys Saturn”

(click here for the real story)

What comes to your mind?

Here’s what came to ours:

I dagarna kommer det kanske blir klart att Roger Penske kommer att köpa General Motors Saturn division.

Roger Penske är en amerikansk racerstjärna som vann stora framgångar på 50 och 60 talet. Efter sin aktiva karriär som förare fortsatte han med att bygga upp sitt eget stall, Penske Racing. Utöver detta byggde han upp ett nät av bilåterförsäljare. Denna bolagsgrupp, Penske Corporation är idag ett Fortune 500 bolag.

För mer detaljer kan man läsa en artikel i New York Times.

GM har tidigare berättat att de tänker sälja sin division för Hummer bilar till den kinesiska företaget Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery. Vän av ordning kan nu ställa sig frågan hur det kommer att gå för Saab?

Listen to High Speed Stuff on iTunes

Fellow podcaster Ben Bowlin and I consistently roll two High Speed Stuff podcasts out of the HowStuffWorks garage each and every week. You can download them (for free) on iTunes whenever you choose. In fact, if you’re not already a regular listener, you may want to scroll through our ever-growing list of past High Speed Stuff podcasts once you get there — you’re bound to find something that grabs your attention. So, what did we chat about this week?

On Tuesday, Ben and I discussed pace cars. We covered a lot of ground on this topic including the most basic stuff like: What are they? What purpose do they actually serve? Who drives them? And we even touched on the topic of what makes a good pace car. Things get really interesting (at least I think so, anyway) when we start talking about pace car accidents. Yes, it does happen. Not very often, but when it does, the results are usually pretty dramatic. In any case, we have a couple of examples that I think will interest you.

Thursday’s podcast was all about television cars. You know what I’m talking about, right? I mean when the car becomes the focal point of a television series, often eclipsing the actors and actresses that star alongside the four-wheeled celebrity. Need an example? Well, I don’t think I’m really giving anything away when I say that the General Lee from “The Dukes of Hazzard” is one of the first of many, many cars that we discuss during this episode. We went deep on this one, going way back in television history, so you might be surprised by some of our examples. We even gave a couple minutes of air time to animated cars. After you listen to the podcast, try to come up with a few examples that we didn’t think of and then let us know what we missed.

So, now that you know what’s happening on the High Speed Stuff podcast this week, well…what are you waiting for? Head over to iTunes and give it a listen — just remember to come back here to let us know what you think in the comment section below. Or if you’d rather send us an e-mail, you can do that, too. We always read the address at the end of each episode.

By the way, if you haven’t been watching the automotive news this morning, here’s what’s going on: General Motors may sell its Saturn brand to Roger Penske today. According to The Associated Press, “Penske has said his company, Penske Automotive Group Inc. of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., is interested in the Saturn brand and intended to make an offer.”

(Thanks to HowStuffWorks.com editor/blogger Chris Pollette for the tip!)

Podcast and other related stuff:
HowStuffWorks Video – “Ethanol E85 Pace Car”
1998 Chevrolet Corvette Pace Car Replica
How the General Lee Works
How Saturn Cars Work
How Podcasting Works

Victory was sweet today for Indy 500 racer Helio Castroneves.  Earlier in the week he faced down and won against the IRS in court, returned to Indy Car racing in a flash, won the pole position for the 2009 Indianapolis 500, and helped his Roger Penske teamates to a rousing victory in the pitstop competition.  Then, for the ultimate coup de grace, Castroneves went on to win today the 93rd Brickyard race by a 1.9819 second margin over runner-up Dan Wheldon and third-place finisher Danica Patrick on the 2.5-mile oval track. 

Castroneves is no doubt savoring the rare racing air, adding a third Indy 500 victory to his illustrious career, reaching a status that only eight other racers have reached.   And team owner Roger Penske is probably racing to another planet with the win being his fifteenth victory at the Speedway’s premier race. 

But let’s not lose sight of our good Southern Nevada performances in the race. 

Despite the race having five yellow flags and horrendous crashes, thirty-six year old Canadian Alex “Tag” Tagliani, who lives in Las Vegas, officially driving as a rookie for Conquest Racing in All Sport/Big Red car No. 36, achieved the honor of being the best-placing first-year man with his eleventh place finish.   

Tag has a long history of competition in the former CART series and was very fortunate to get the nod by Conquest to race, bumping fellow teammate Bruno Junqueira that really had the best qualifying time, but was not their prime racer. 

Talking at Saturday’s public press conference, Tagliani said, “I was so excited to drive that I didn’t really understand what I was missing by not being in the Indianapolis 500 race. Everything came along last year. Obviously, the two series merged, we have now just one open-wheel series. I finished the season with Conquest. That got me to run with them this year. When we arrived here in Indy, I definitely didn’t realize how big this race was.” 

Not to be outdone, fellow rookie Englishman Alex Lloyd, aka Pink Lloyd, racing the pink car No. 99 sponsored by HER (Healthy Energy Revitalizer, an energy drink for women) started in the middle of the fourth row with an impressive four-lap average qualifying speed of 222.622 mph, and went on to finish the race, finishing 13th. 

Lloyd’s car owner is Sam Schmidt from Henderson, Nevada. 

Only three other rookies finished this year’s Indy 500 race:  Tomas Scheckter, 12th place; Scott Sharp, 14th place; and Ryan Briscoe, 15th place. 

Both Tagliani and Lloyd finished ahead of many veteran race car drivers including A.J. Foyt IV and John Andretti. 

Thankfully, there were no serious injuries among drivers or crew in the race, although racer Vitor Meira was transported alert and awake to Indianapolis Methodist Hospital for further evaluation of back pain and released. 

The Indy Car series takes no break this week before returning to action this weekend at the famous Milwaukee Mile on June 1st.

(Prior Las Vegas Backstage Access articles on the Indy 500 race.)

Shock.  That’s the only word to describe what I felt when WXYZ TV in Detroit Thursday evening announced that the 2009 Detroit Grand Prix on Belle Isle was being cancelled. Not believing what I heard, I checked with my main Indy guy Robin Miller, who confirmed it, and moments later, a story appeared on-line at the Detroit Free Press.

Two years ago, Roger Penske brought back racing to Detroit and Belle Isle by spending at least 7 million dollars of his own money to turn what was a joke of a race facility into a crown jewel.  Fans came flocking back.  Both years Saturday and Sunday were sold out, but now the economy has done in even The Captain.

I’ve been proud to be part of the Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix the last two years as the lead track announcer.  I was proud of what the facility on Belle Isle had become, world class.  I was proud that Detroit was able to shine worldwide on television with visuals that rivaled Formula One in Monaco.  Now, that is all gone.

This decision had to be one of the toughest that Roger Penske may ever have had to make. 

Roger has become the biggest cheerleader for beleagured Detroit that there is.  From first being the Chairman for Superbowl XL that through his leadership had even Detroit bashing media types singing the praises of Motown by the end of their stay here, to spending his own money with no hope of ever getting any back on the Detroit Grand Prix, Roger Penske has done his all for his adopted home.

Roger Penske doesn’t fail, or if he does, he makes sure it doesn’t happen again..  The only time I can remember of failure was at Indianapolis when his cars shocked the world by not qualifying for the 1995 Indy 500.  He didn’t get a chance to overcome that failure until 2001 thanks to the CART/IRL split and only had his cars finish 1-2 in his return to the Brickyard.  I’m hoping history repeats itself and in 2010 Roger Penske triumphantly announces the return of the Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix.  Until then, thanks Roger for not giving up on Detroit.  We won’t give up on you or the Grand Prix.

STATEMENT ON DETROIT GRAND PRIX CANCELLATION

DETROIT, Mich. (December 19, 2008) – Officials for the Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix announced today that the 2009 event will be postponed due to the difficult economic conditions prevalent in southeast Michigan and across the nation. 

“The economic environment that our region, state and country faces, both today and in 2009, is difficult,” said Roger Penske, Chairman of the Downtown Detroit Partnership. “It is unfortunate that we must postpone the 2009 Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix as sponsorship opportunities and support has proven to be very challenging for the event in the near term.” 

The Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix has brought tremendous benefit to Belle Isle Park and to the region since the event returned world-class auto racing back to the Motor City for the first time in more than six years in 2007. Both the 2007 and 2008 races established themselves as one of Detroit’s most popular summertime events, featuring both the American Le Mans Series and the IndyCar Series. 

Over $7 million in infrastructure improvements have been made to Belle Isle since the return of the Grand Prix, including the paving of roadways, repairing or replacing damaged lighting and drainage, landscaping, the renovation of the Belle Isle Casino and Scott Fountain and the installation of pedestrian bridges, children’s playgrounds and irrigation systems on the island.  

According to a joint study conducted this year by the event and the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau (DMCVB), the Grand Prix generated over $55.2 million in economic impact for metropolitan Detroit in 2008 and another $12.8 million in direct spending throughout Detroit and its surrounding tri-county area. 

This year’s study by the DMCVB also revealed the Grand Prix helped attract thousands of visitors to the area as 28% of event attendees came to Detroit from outside the tri-county region and 52% of those visitors came from outside the state of Michigan. 

“I want to thank all of the fans that have supported the 2007 and 2008 Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix events,” said Bud Denker, Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix Event Chairman.  “Over 100,000 people attended each of the past two Grand Prix races and we are hopeful we can extend the excitement of world-class racing on Belle Isle in the future. We also want to thank the City of Detroit, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and the City of Windsor for their partnerships. The Grand Prix would not have been possible without the support of more than 50 corporations including Bridgestone/Firestone, Bosch, Comerica Bank, General Motors, Meijer, Caesars Windsor, Charter One Bank, Pepsi, MGM Grand Detroit and many others. Finally, the over 1,000 Grand Prix volunteers were the best ambassadors of any race in North America and we say thanks to them. If the economic conditions improve, we hope to be able to bring the event back to Detroit in the summer of 2010.” 

The Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix is a 501(c)3, non-profit corporation and a subsidiary of the Downtown Detroit Partnership. 

Further information on the future of the Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix will be announced in 2009 and will be found at the event’s official web site, www.detroitgp.com.