‘You can feels some tension’: Team Penske’s bid to win another Indy 500 for ‘The Captain’

INDIANAPOLIS – In the middle of the Team Penske nerve center in Gasoline Alley sits a battered table that’s been a key to winning the Indy 500 for a half-century.

From 1973 to 2006, the table was in a conference room at the team’s former shop in Reading, Pennsylvania. For the last 15 years at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it’s sat in the center of a neatly organized bank of humming monitors and tidy engineer workstations. Its yellow top and fading wooden bullnose molding seem out of place in such a high-tech hub.

But the table is where virtually every major move – from strategy plays to driver hiring to car and engine innovations – was consummated for a team that has a record 18 Indy 500 victories.

So when the team left Reading, the table went to the Brickyard. In recent years throughout May, it’s where team owner Roger Penske and Team Penske president Tim Cindric have camped out to oversee the machinations of the most storied team in Indianapolis 500 history.

“I wanted to keep the table because in any meeting with Roger, that’s where you were,” Cindric told NBC Sports. “Any decision relative to Penske Racing happened on that table.

“I decided this table is going to Indy and will be in our conference room for the rest of time.”

During its run in the Reading shop, the table was in a room with another keepsake.

It’s a photo of Roger Penske surrounded by 14 Baby Borgs (the team ran out of room to Photoshop in the latest spoils) in front of a mural of Al Unser’s 1987 Indy 500 winner by famed artist LeRoy Neiman.

When the Reading shop was inundated in 2006 in a flood so massive there were fish inside from the Schuylkill River, the water line stopped at 4 feet — just below the photo.

After being rescued, the photo was relocated