Team Penske celebrating a milestone at Martinsville
Sunday at Martinsville Speedway, Team Penske will compete in its 1,000th race in what is now the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series.
Penske drivers Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano will battle for the victory in the STP 500 at Martinsville, with pre-race coverage starting on FS1 at 12:30 p.m. ET.
Team owner Roger Penske, who turned 80 earlier this year, has seen 23 drivers combine to win 101 NASCAR Premier Series races, along with 446 top fives, 739 top 10s and 115 poles.
Penske’s first NASCAR start came on January 23, 1972 at the old Riverside International Raceway road course in Southern California, not far from where Auto Club Speedway sits today. In the 1972 Winston Western 500, Mark Donohue qualified third in a Penske-owned AMC Matador, but finished 39th after breaking a rear-end gear.
In that race, Ron Keselowski, uncle of current Penske driver Brad Keselowski, qualified 30th and finished 34th when he lost an engine in his Dodge. The prize money for finishing 34th that day was $1,015.
Chris Economaki, the late, great motorsports journalist was the one who broke the story about Penske adding a NASCAR team to his racing lineup in the early 1970s. And, just as significantly, it was American Motors’ first foray into NASCAR.
Nobody in the motorsports journalism game ever had more or better sources than Economaki did, but this time he broke the huge story not through his own digging but through a hot tip: Economaki was sitting at his editor’s desk at National Speed Sport News in New Jersey when the phone rang.
On the other line, was an excited truck driver who’d picked up a load of Matador shells — what racers refer to as bodies-in-white — from the AMC factory in Wisconsin and was trucking them down south to be built into NASCAR race cars.
When Economaki answered the phone, the breathless truck driver said, “Hey, Chris! Penske’s gong stock-car racing!”
Right then and there, Economaki got the scoop on what would become one of the biggest headlines of the year.
And now you know the rest of the story.
