Background and career
Roger Searle Penske (born February 20, 1937), often referred to by his nickname "the Captain", is an American auto racing team owner, businessman, and former professional racecar driver. He is the owner of Team Penske, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, IndyCar, and other auto racing-related businesses. Penske is the founder, chairman, and namesake of the Penske Corporation, a holding company for his various businesses. Penske received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Donald Trump in 2019.
Penske was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 1937 into a devout Episcopalian family. He was heavily involved with his church as a boy, singing in the church choir and serving in the ministry as an acolyte. His father Jay was a successful corporate executive for a metal fabrication company who encouraged his son to become an entrepreneur. As a teenager he bought older cars, repaired them, and sold them at a profit from his family's home outside Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Shaker Heights High School in 1955, Penske matriculated at Lehigh University, where he was a member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, and he graduated in 1959.
Penske's first racing venture was in hillclimbing, and then he drove in road course racing at the Vineland Raceway in Vineland, New Jersey, as a member of the Philadelphia Region of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) in Porsches. Penske made his first professional racing start at the now-abandoned Marlboro Motor Raceway in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Sports Illustrated named Penske SCCA Driver of the Year in 1961. He competed in two Formula One Grands Prix and won a NASCAR Pacific Coast Late Model race at Riverside in 1963. He never ran the Indianapolis 500; however, he was offered a rookie test at Indianapolis with the Dean Van Lines team. Penske continued racing until 1965, when he retired as a driver, to concentrate on his first Chevrolet dealership in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
During college, Penske worked at Alcoa as an intern, and in 1959 joined them as a sales engineer after graduating, while also pursuing a career in racecar driving where he met people involved in Chevrolet. In 1963, he left Alcoa to become a manager of a Chevrolet dealership in Philadelphia, which he bought a year later with a loan from his father. He shifted his focus away from race-car driving to the dealership after the purchase. In 1969, Penske founded Penske Truck Leasing in Reading, Pennsylvania by purchasing a truck rental and leasing business with three locations serving eastern Pennsylvania.
Penske Racing debuted in 1966 at the 24 Hours of Daytona. He developed one of the most successful teams in the IndyCar Series and NASCAR racing. He is the most successful team owner at the Indianapolis 500 with 20 victories. He is known by his nickname of "The Captain". Penske also served as a race strategist for his IndyCar team, most recently for driver Will Power. Penske won his first NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship with driver Brad Keselowski on November 18, 2012. In late 2014, it was announced Penske would take a 51% stake in Australian V8 Supercars team Dick Johnson Racing, forming DJR Team Penske. The team entered one car in 2015, initially for Marcos Ambrose, before he stepped aside to make way for Scott Pye. The team expanded to a second car for New Zealander Fabian Coulthard in 2016, before Pye was replaced with another Kiwi Scott McLaughlin in 2017. Coulthard won the combined team's first championship race at the 2017 Tyrepower Tasmania SuperSprint. In 2019, the team won the biggest race of the year: the Bathurst 1000. On September 16, 2018, driver Brad Keselowski won the South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, giving Penske his 500th race victory as an owner across all racing series. Later the same season, Joey Logano would clinch the championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway, winning Penske his second championship in the Cup series.
Penske is chairman of Penske Corporation, based in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Some of the company's holdings include a significant stake in publicly traded Penske Automotive Group, an international company that operates automobile dealerships in the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe; Penske Truck Leasing, a truck sales, leasing, and fleet maintenance company; and Penske Motor Group which operates auto dealerships in California and Texas. On November 4, 2019, Penske acquired the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a 2.5-mile course in Speedway, Indiana known for the Indianapolis 500, and IndyCar from the Hulman family for an undisclosed amount.
