Captain’s Marvels

Team Penske has won many races and championships with customer cars – March, Reynard, G-Force, Dallara – by being a superior team operationally. But in Indy car racing's "kit car" era, Roger Penske's empire produced its own racers. While there were a few duds among the studs, usually Penske creations were gems, so picking the very best of the best is difficult. Oh, and they're not all Indy cars, either...

This story is an excerpt from RACER magazine's GREAT CARS III ISSUE, on sale now.

• VIDEO: Jackie Stewart tests a Penske PC17

PC23
1994/Indy car

Everyone raves about the Penske PC23B (BELOW), which dominated 1994's Indianapolis 500 with its Ilmor-Mercedes 209cu.in. pushrod V8 engine, and rightly so. However, that tends to unfairly overshadow the fact that the "regular" PC23-Ilmor (ABOVE, and TOP) allowed Team Penske to dominate the '94 Indy car season to an extent no team has matched since. Penske drivers Al Unser Jr., Emerson Fittipaldi and Paul Tracy finished 1-2-3 in the final championship standings.

The PC22 of 1993, designed by Nigel Bennett, had scored eight wins in the hands of Tracy and Fittipaldi, but his new one was something else again. Even now, the stats for this car are breathtaking. In the 16-race CART championship, Penske scored 12 wins – eight for Unser Jr., three for Tracy and one for Fittipaldi. Five of those wins were podium lockouts for the guys in red 'n' white, and a PC23 started from pole 10 times. Heck, the car was so fast that Junior – never a driver who bothered much about qualifying – started P1 four times. Little Al only took pole on three occasions across the other 19 years of his Indy car career!

So what made the PC23 so special? Well, Bennett had done his homework in making percentage improvements on the PC22's aero package; the Ilmor/D was a significant step ahead of the Chevrolet-badged unit from the year before; and between them, the three drivers put in 4,500 miles of testing prior to the season opener. Even the gearbox, initially a weak point, was a tougher cookie by mid-season.

The open-book policy that prevails at Penske worked wonders, too, and the three drivers and their race engineers, Terry Satchell (Unser), Nigel Beresford (Tracy) and Tom Brown (Fittipaldi), took a methodical approach to group debriefs, overseen by head of engineering Grant Newbury and contributed to by the recently retired Rick Mears.

In short, all the stars aligned in 1994, and Team Penske took full advantage.

Next up: PC7
1979/Indy car...

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