Cindric guides the Penske racing ship under one roof

The central axis of Penske Racing's headquarters near Mooresville, N.C., does not actually mark the Mason-Dixon Line, the famed cultural divider between North and South.

That is, however, the running joke at 200 Penske Way, a former electronics manufacturing plant that's now perhaps America's most sophisticated and comprehensive motorsports facility.

One side of the 375,000-square-foot complex is home to three full-time Sprint Cup and one part-time Nationwide series teams, as well as for the business and marketing offices. Across a driveway, big enough for delivery trucks to drop of parts on either side, is another racing world of IndyCar Series and American LeMans Series teams operated under motorsports mogul Roger Penske's banner.

Tim Cindric, who as president of Penske Racing has a lead role in making it all work, burns up a lot of shoe leather roaming these passageways.

“I try to go to them instead of calling them in to see me,” Cindric said. In a building so big he has a golf cart parked not too far from his office, that's a decision not lightly made.

On Tuesday afternoon, Cindric stepped out of a meeting of Penske's key NASCAR personnel to conduct a tour of the far-flung enterprise. Earlier, he'd been in on a weekly conference call with officials at Porsche headquarters in Germany about the ALMS program. In the IndyCar portion of the shop, a chassis had just been unpacked from the Dallara factory in Italy.

The ALMS team began in 2005 and briefly shared quarters with Penske's IndyCar operation in Reading, Pa., before moving to Mooresville. The IndyCar team's move was completed after the following year.

If you broaden your idea of diversity to include the variety in racing cultures, the Penske headquarters is very much like a revved-up United Nations. Part of Cindric's job is figuring out when to unite and when to divide.

“We tried to keep separation where it might otherwise have been disruptive,” he said. “It probably would have been counter-productive to have just planted the Indy cars or the sports cars out in the middle of the NASCAR shop.”

Still, there are times when what works in one part of the building might have applications in one of the other in-house ZIP codes. That's where Cindric steps in.

“I hear everything that's going on and it's really up to me to say, ‘Hey, we need to apply this over here and that over there,'” he said.

“It's sort of like we started out as neighbors, if you want to call it that, in all these different disciplines. These neighbors learned how to live in one big house and eventually it becomes a family. That's kind of the process that I've been working through.”

On a given weekend with all three operations in action as many as 140 people are on the road representing Penske Racing. That includes Cup drivers Ryan Newman, Kurt Busch and Sam Hornish Jr. and their crews as well as IndyCar drivers Helio Castroneves and Ryan Briscoe and two ALMS teams.

Cindric is among them. He calls race strategy for Castroneves' IndyCar team and for one ALMS team, often pitting himself against Roger Penske on the other pit box.

He tries to make at least one NASCAR race per month, too, but his role there is not as hands-on. Mike Nelson is the NASCAR team manager, and each race team's crew chief makes the big decisions on Sundays.

Cindric's background is on the open-wheel side. He is from Indianapolis and his father Carl built engines for Indy cars, working year-round for much of his career from a shop inside the gates of Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Cindric went to work for his dad while he was in high school and wanted to grow up to be a race engineer, open wheel's equivalent to a crew chief. He also secretly dreamed of working for Penske, whose cars have won the Indianapolis 500 a record 14 times.

In late 1999, Cindric answered the phone at his house. Penske was calling, and he was looking for somebody to take over as president of the open-wheel operation.

“I said, ‘OK, who do you want to ask me about?'” Cindric said. “I was thinking he was going to ask me for a reference for somebody.”

Penske wanted Cindric. Two years later, they won an Indianapolis 500 and Penske gave Cindric the owner's trophy. That pulled Cindric even with his wife, Megan, who has the 1996 owner's trophy her late father, Jim Trueman, won with Bobby Rahal.

This has been an eventful year for Penske, Cindric and the hundreds of people who work on both sides of the building.

Newman got Penske his first Daytona 500 victory in February and an ALMS team produced the company's first overall win in the 12 Hours of Sebring. Busch, Briscoe and Castroneves drove in the Rolex 24 at Daytona, earning a third-place finish in Penske's first entry since 1973. But Newman is leaving at season's end, and none of Penske's three NASCAR teams is likely to make this year's Chase.

“When you're not doing as well, it's easy to say there are too many things going on,” Cindric said. “I think long-term, the key is having people who have a day-to-day trust with each other.”

With people from different places and with different backgrounds working all over the Penske building, Cindric said he's found it's often best to let those people see how each other work and let them learn about what they have in common.

“At first, when the sports car and IndyCar stuff started rolling in to NASCAR country, it was like a space ship was showing up,” Cindric said. “Before long, though, people just realized they're all race cars.”

This story was originally published August 10, 2008 at 4:58 AM with the headline "Cindric guides the Penske racing ship under one roof."