Penske Racing Team: 40 Years of Excellence Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is the first history of the Penske Racing organization (outside of Mark Donohue's autobiography "The Unfair Advantage") that I know of. According to the author of this book, Roger Penske has turned down several opportunities to have "official" histories written. This history comes from a fan of the team, and it shows - sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad.
Early in the book, the author leans too heavily on quotes from other books. Mr. Hummel's writing style, however, is good and he usually keeps the reader interested in the story. The book also covers all the series that Penske Racing has been involved in from the very beginning, not just Indy Car and NASCAR as they are best known for today. It also contains what I think is the best explanation of driver/engineer Donohue's crash in an F1 car that eventually led to his death. But there is much missing information and many, many errors.
The section on the team's Trans-Am days is shorter than I expected. A lot of interesting and rule skirting things went on back then but not much is discussed. While their elevated fueling rig is mentioned, their rig which used dry ice to shrink the fuel (allowing more into the car's gas tank) is not. Using the same Camaro to qualify for two cars at the same race goes unmentioned. In another instance, their Camaro with a vinyl roof is discussed but the reason for it having said vinyl roof is not - they were cheating and had to cover up an over-acid-dipped roof.
But the biggest flaws are the inaccuracies in the book, such as saying that Mario Andretti in 1978 was the only American F1 champion in "over half a century." Well, what about Phil Hill in 1961? Stating that Peter Revson replaced Dan Gurney with Team McLaren in 1970 when he did not drive for them until 1971 and was with Lola in 1970. Peter Gethin replaced Gurney and Revson replaced Gethin.
The author has Denny Hulme exiting the 1972 Road Atlanta Can-Am race with a "mechanical problem." Yes, there was a problem, his car flipped over backwards while cresting a hill, but that would be aerodynamic - and catastrophic - not merely "mechanical."
A pair of photos of a Penske Mercury NASCAR stockcar are mislabeled as a Chevrolet. Tony Stewart is said to have driven in CART when he never did. The book states that Helio Castroneves got his nickname "Spiderman" from climbing the fence at Indy after winning the 500 when in reality that nickname came a year earlier when he won his first CART race and climbed the fencing at that venue.
Shall I go on? What worries me are the errors I wouldn't catch in the sections of the book I don't know a lot about, such as the team's F5000 and NASCAR days.
Another annoying error in the book is the constant misuse of the prefix "ex-", as in ex-US, to refer to a race outside the United States. That should be "non-US" as "ex-US" means the race was previously in the US and now is not.
Many of these errors must also be blamed on the publisher, Iconograph. Are there no editors working there? A good (heck, a mediocre) editor would have caught most, if not all, of these errors.
I really wanted to like this book, right up to finishing the last page, but I can't really recommend it. Certainly not for the seasoned or older racing fan. If you have only recently become a fan of auto racing and would like to know more about the Penske organization besides what they presently do in the IRL and NASCAR, this is a decent book to read. You'll learn about the team's roots. You'll learn about incredibly important former team members such as Mark Donohue and Rick Mears. But you won't have it all. And you unfortunately will also have a lot of incorrect information.
We'll have to continue to wait for a good history of what is one of, if not the most, successful and innovative teams in American racing history.


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From its modest beginnings behind a Philadelphia-area watchmakers shop some 40 years ago, the Penske Racing Team, more than any other organization, has influenced the development, growth and direction of auto racing in the United States as both a sport and a business. Led by former race driver turned "Fortune 500" business mogul Roger Penske, this team has won more than 250 major auto races around the world, captured 19 national championships (including 12 Indy-Car titles), and have enjoyed success in all forms of racing--Indy-Cars, sports cars, Formula-1, endurance racing and NASCAR. Penske Racing Team...40 Years of Excellence documents the fascinating history of this unique organization, focusing on the talented drivers and innovative engineering that have been responsible for the teams spectacular and enduring success. This bookalso highlights the key events that have defined American motorsports during this timeframe; including the rise and fall of U.S. sports car racing in the 1960s and 1970s; the politics of the USAC-CART split in the late 1970s; the CART-IRL battle that unfolded 20 years later; and the phenomenal transformation of NASCAR from its moonshine roots into the mainstream commercial phenomenon that it is today.

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