A behind-the-scenes look inside Team Penske’s massive NASCAR facility
Head north on I-77 and take Exit 33 onto U.S. 21 in Mooresville. Turn right, then turn right again and you’ll find the home of Team Penske, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and is one of the most successful motorsports teams in the country.
You may think NASCAR is nothing more than a driver turning left a lot. You’d be wrong. Behind the drivers there are hundreds of people working hard to help the team succeed. That’s what I was interested in learning more about when I toured the Team Penske facility last week.
Penske’s two racers in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (the top level of stock car racing) both qualified for the Chase for the Cup (NASCAR’s version of the playoffs).
Brad Keselowski, who races the No. 2 Ford and won the 2012 Sprint Cup Championship, and Joey Logano, who races the No. 22 Ford, will compete in Dover, Del., Sunday to try and qualify for the next round of the playoffs, which features just 12 drivers.
Through my tour of the facility, led by Penske Public Relations Manager David Hovis, and a conversation with Logano crew chief Todd Gordon, I learned how the team gets ready for the race. The highlights:
The facility is huge.
Penske’s facility in Mooresville is 400,000 square feet, and the team has other facilities in the Charlotte area for things like engines, wind tunnels, etc. There’s a main area where the cars are built, a space for the pit crew to practice, offices and a gift shop. The main area of the facility is big enough to park at least four car haulers — that’s pretty big.
In addition to the two Sprint Cup teams, Penske has one full-time team in the Xfinity Series (a level below Sprint Cup), four Indy Car teams (which finished first, second, third and eighth in this year’s championship) and two teams in the Australian Supercars series.
They take the cars apart after every race and rebuild them from scratch.
After every race the cars are stripped all the way down to the chassis, which is the part of the car that everything sits on. When I was there, several cars in various states of deconstruction lined a wall in the center of the shop. Hovis wouldn’t let me take pictures of that area because he didn’t want me to share any of their top-secret technology, but to me it just looked like grey car frames and masses of intertwined metal.
The cars are rebuilt on the other side of the wall. The teams work a few weeks ahead, so when I visited last week they were working on cars for this weekend’s race and beyond.
Each Sprint Cup team has 12-15 cars in its fleet and takes two cars to each race.
“Our turnaround for being able to re-race a car is typically five or six weeks, but you can turn a car around in two weeks if you had to,” Gordon said.
The teams work together — to a point.
The Keselowski and Logano teams work together in the shop, and even the Indy Car and NASCAR teams work together on occasion, especially on the manufacturing side. But when Keselowski and Logano hit the track, there can only be one winner.
“We probably race together as two cars and one team as well as any organization,” Gordon said. “We know that together we can all be more successful. We leave the racing part of it up to the drivers on the race track.”
Inches matter.
These may be called stock cars, but these machines are nothing like the Ford Fusion you’d drive off the lot of a dealership. You won’t find a stereo, passenger seat, or even a speedometer inside. Many aspects of the car are regulated by NASCAR and can’t be changed, which means the teams have to get creative in how they make the cars faster. So how do they find a competitive advantage?
“I can’t tell you that,” Gordon said.
Fair enough. Can you just be vague about it?
“Any place there’s a tolerance, we still have a window to work with,” he added. “Whether the window is an inch or the window is an eighth of an inch, there’s still a window to work with it.”
A lot of people work here, but only a few go to the track.
About 400 people work for Team Penske but the vast majority don’t go to the race track each weekend.
About 15 people per team travel to the race track, including the driver, pit crew, crew chief, mechanics and truck drivers. The others rarely get to see the result of their hard work in person.
If one of the Penske cars wins this weekend, there’ll be a party at the shop Monday.
When one of the drivers win, the team throws a “win toast” in the shop at around 3 p.m. Monday. It features food and a keg of Miller Lite (there are perks to having your car sponsored by beer), and the winning crew chief speaks to the team.
“It’s a way for us to bring victory lane back to the guys who don’t get to go to the race,” Hovis said.
Photos: Corey Inscoe
This story was originally published September 28, 2016 at 11:19 PM with the headline "A behind-the-scenes look inside Team Penske’s massive NASCAR facility."