Penske draws on IndyCar team for Petit Le Mans

By Marshall Pruett | October 6, 2017 12:29 PM ET

Take a gander under Team Penske’s tent at Petit Le Mans and you’ll find plenty of familiar faces from its championship-winning Verizon IndyCar Series program.

From mechanics to engineers to managers, the team behind Penske’s IMSA ORECA 07-Gibson Prototype effort hail from the No. 3 Chevy IndyCar program Helio Castroneves led through 2017, along with crew from its other open-wheel entries.

“From a management perspective, we all know what has to be done, and from a crew standpoint, most of the guys here we’re looking to be part of the program, and we’ve told all them we’ll get back from Petit and then look at who’s going to do what,” Team Penske president Tim Cindric told RACER.

Castroneves’ IndyCar engineers Jonathan Diuguid and Raul Prados, crew chief Travis Law, Penske managers Kyle Moyer, Clive Howell, and Jeff Swarthout, and more have jumped in to help the team prepare for its debut as Acura Team Penske next year fielding ARX-05 DPis.

The one-off, warm-up act for Petit Le Mans already pushed the effort to extremes after Castroneves suffered a chassis-destroying crash in testing at Road Atlanta on Sept. 21. The ORECA 07 tub held up well and ably protected the Brazilian, who went off at the frighteningly fast Turn 1 and nearly cleared the fence before returning to earth.

An extensive build was required to ready another 07 chassis, and based on the team’s speed during the opening day of practice, the strength of the organization has been clear to see.

“Jonathan Diuguid and Raul will be the technical leads on what we do here, there’s a couple of data engineers and lead mechanics we’ll bring over from IndyCar to be involved in the Acura program,” Cindric said. “We’ve had some support staff raise their hand saying they want to be here, and there’s some others who didn’t even know what a DPi car was until we got here, but they want to learn.”

Looking back to Team Penske’s last visit to Petit Le Mans in 2008 with the Porsche RS Spyder program, at least four or five of the folks here this weekend took part in the race-winning performance. Swarthout, who Cindric has tasked with managing the Acura DPi effort, is one of the RS Spyder veterans to bridge Penske’s sports car activities starting with Saturday’s 10-hour contest.

“You’ll recognize a few guys from those days, and we had Jeff come in – he was looking after our Supercars program in Australia – and jumped right in with the Acura deal,” he added. “Our goal is to run 10 hours, penalty free. If we can do that. With all the nuances, we’ll put ourselves in a good position in the end.”

IMSA, IndyCar, WeatherTech Sportscar Championship