Voices: Helio Castroneves and Tim Cindric on Team Dynamics

Team Penske drivers Helio Castroneves and Ryan Briscoe, along with Penske Performance Inc. President Tim Cindric answered questions about driver personalities and team dynamics during the recent 2008 Indy 500 Media Tour.

I had been looking forward to this session because I was interested in the relationship between Helio and Ryan, how it differs from the relationship between Helio and former teammate Sam Hornish Jr. (who is currently racing in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series for Penske) and how that ultimately impacts race preparation and strategy. The relationship between Helio and Ryan seems much more collegial, and you’d think that would make a difference, especially during the long month of May leading up to the Indianapolis 500.

Someone else asked essentially the same question I was going to ask Helio and/or Ryan about their relationship, so I followed up with a question to Tim Cindric about how he manages the two personalities and how that impacts their overall strategy.

Click the play button below to hear the audio. The first question is addressed to Helio, and my question to Tim comes second. The transcript follows.

Want to download the sounds? Buy me a beer!

Q: Helio, I forget if it was at the end of last week’s, this past Sunday’s race or the week before but you made the comment that “I keep thinking Sam’s back there.” Is there a chemistry that you’re expecting now with Ryan being your teammate?

CASTRONEVES: Well, the good news is Ryan has already been on the team, Team Penske. He was obviously on the Porsche side, but most of the time, and I had the chance last year to drive not with him but with his teammates. You know, it’s just different personality. I mean people sometime asking, “Hey, do you feel pressure, you know, for Ryan, because you’re replacing someone else?” The way I see, it’s just different personality for me. I had obviously Gil de Ferran, then Sam, you know, and now it’s him. I’m just trying to continue and having the great atmosphere in the team because I know if you have that kind of situation inside, everyone is going to succeed. You know, obviously Sam had only — I don’t think I ever have a teammate before he joined Team Penske. So for him the process probably took a little longer. Eventually, now he’s still on the Team Penske now, but he give me good luck in the Homestead race. But just to see the entire organization is always trying to keep everybody stick together and that’s great because I only see, you know, moving forward. I don’t see anything different with Ryan. In fact, I know we’re going to actually win a lot of races this year.

Q: I kind of wanted to follow up on that and ask Tim how you at your level, how you plan for the drivers to work together or not based on their personalities. I mean, obviously, I think that the relationship perhaps between Sam and Helio was a certain way and then Ryan coming into the mix now, the relationship between those two drivers might be a little bit different. I’m wondering from a team perspective, how do you plan for those kind of changes between the two drivers and does it really impact different things that you do in preparing for races?

CINDRIC: It’s a good question, and personalities are always different. Part of my job sometimes is to play psychologist with a lot of these guys. But we’re fortunate just from the outside to look the same, you know, from a Team Penske standpoint we’re fortunate to have his car look the same as his car and the guys being able to wear the same uniforms. That’s a big deal just from a psychological standpoint for the guys. We’re very fortunate to be in that situation because it reinforces the fact that we work for an organization, all of us, rather than for a car number. I’ve seen it within a lot of different teams and series and all that to where guys start thinking that they work for car numbers or that they work for a driver. As Roger says, they get a little confused. So that part of it is a good start before we even hire one driver or the other.

And the next part of it really has to do with them seeing how it can be mutually beneficial because at the end of the day, his career he wants it the best he can, and so does he and everybody else that falls in those places.

One thing that’s really helped Team Penske is the personality of this guy. You guys all saw it. The people, most of you know him before the shows and the dancing and all the rest of it, but he’s a big part of making this thing important to everybody else. He’s the one that preaches the things that we believe. You know, he’s the first guy to reach his hand out to these guys and say, “Hey, you know, this time it’s my turn, that time it’s your turn.”

For me watching it from the beginning, I remember when he and I and Gil came to this team at the same time, and we all had separate things to prove. None of us were, quote-unquote, successful in this business to the level we wanted to be, but yet we were working for a guy that was the pinnacle of open-wheel racing. I remember the separate, he and Gil weren’t the best of friends. One guy is on the phone one time telling me: “Hey, I’m not worried about Helio, he’s just up and coming, I’m worried about this, you know.” And Helio is on the phone saying, “Hey, I don’t care what Gil says about the car, we need to do this.” And for me in 2000 when Gil won the championship and I think Helio finished seventh in CART that year in the series, and Helio won his first race there at Detroit, it was OK, but I know I had a guy in Helio who believed he was as good as Gil. And there was a certain amount of envy in the fact that Gil was the champion and he had won the 100th race for Roger and some of these other things.

When Helio won the Indy 500 in 2001, to me the scales balanced with the two of those guys. You could walk into a room with one guy being an Indy 500 winner and one guy being a champion, and you walked in there together. It was the same situation with Sam. You know, he won his first race with us at Homestead, and that kind of brought things into the game, and the two of them fed off of each other. I’m sure it will be the same way with Ryan. I know that’s a long answer to that but just bringing it from that end.