Team Penske: 50th Anniversary at the Indianapolis 500 - Reviewed

I seem to be reviewing books lately that have little or no Ferrari content; I hope you'll forgive me, but this book is too good to ignore. It popped up on Amazon as "Recommended For You" and in this case, they were correct.

The book is quite large, with a 12" x 14.5" page size and weighing over 5 pounds. The contents page only lists the 17 years of victories, but in fact, all years from 1969 to 2018 are included. Following an introduction by Roger, each year is covered in from 2 through 6 pages, with a summary of Penske's year at the Speedway in about 3 paragraphs, tables for each Penske car listing the car number and name, the driver, the strategist, starting and finishing position, qualifying speed, laps led and laps completed, and a whole bunch of photos without captions. There are also images of race program covers & tickets, excerpts from the Indianapolis Star, and in winning years, a close-up photo of the driver's bust on the Borg-Warner trophy. There are a number of quotes, mostly from Roger, but also some from drivers or Tim Cindric.

Since Penske supplied all the content, I worried that there might be some exaggerated horn-blowing, but in fact the prose is quite honest and self-critical where needed, as in 1995. The 1996-2000 period, when Penske was absent from the Speedway, is covered in a simple 2-page spread, appropriately with a black background.

The appendices include photos of all the winning cars, taken at about the same point on the track, apparently just after the end of the race, because many of the drivers have a hand up! There are also photos of all the pit-stop competition winners, though these are quite small, and copies of the official photos of each car with its crew, taken in the pit lane, and these are even smaller. A delightful two-page spread has charts and graphs and even photos of the Borg-Warner trophy highlighting the location of each Penske driver's bust! And three pages of the inevitable statistics in tabular form.

I was pleasantly surprised by the book. Whether you like or dislike Penske and his operation, you do have to respect him, and I think that every IndyCar fan should have this book in his collection.
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