INDIANAPOLIS—Joey Logano would like nothing better than to fill the one glaring hole on Roger Penske’s resume as a team owner.
Penske has won a championship in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (2012 with driver Brad Keselowski). Team Penske driver Will Power is the reigning IndyCar Series champion.
Penske has 16 Indianapolis 500 trophies in his showcase. Keselowski won the NASCAR XFINITY Series race at the Brickyard in 2012.
But the victory Penske now covets most is a Brickyard 400 win at Indianapolis. The boss has made that abundantly clear to both his Sprint Cup Series drivers, and their next opportunity comes Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“Any time we hear Indy coming up, we start getting the calls from Roger,” Logano said. “We really want to win this race. This is the one on his bucket list that he hasn’t gotten yet, and we talk about it a lot. It would be very special to give him a Brickyard 400, along with the Indy 500 he won earlier this year and the Daytona 500 we won earlier, too.”
In fact, Logano gave Penske his second victory in the Great American Race in February, and a victory on Sunday at Indy would be doubly sweet.
The last driver to win both the Daytona 500 and Brickyard 400 in the same season was Jamie McMurray in 2010—driving for Chip Ganassi, Penske’s archrival in both the NASCAR and IndyCar garages.
BRUTAL START TO BRICKYARD WEEKEND FOR TIMMY HILL
The No. 98 Ford driven by Timmy Hill had a multitude of issues in Friday’s Sprint Cup practice. In the second session, a 35-pound tungsten weight fell off the car. NASCAR typically takes a dim view of ballast that is not secured properly.
The sanctioning body confiscated the jettisoned weight and will address the matter in next week’s competition meeting.
In Happy Hour, Hill’s Ford spun off Turn 4 and slammed nose-first into the inside wall, forcing his team to go to a backup car. As a tow truck was removing Hill’s car from the track, the back of the car scraped the track, knocking off the rear extension.
Hill didn’t participate in the opening practice session. In hindsight, he might have been better off skipping them all.
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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