Date: 2010/03/23

Standing in victory circle with his driver Jamie McMurray after history’s longest Daytona 500, Chip Ganassi was beaming. Just over a year ago, trying to keep pace with the big-team juggernaut of NASCAR racing, Ganassi joined forces with Dale Earnhardt Inc. to form Earnhardt Ganassi Racing. The new alliance went winless in 2009, but 2010 couldn’t have begun better as Ganassi became just the second man to field winners in both the Indianapolis and Daytona 500s.

Ganassi’s achievements as a team owner extend well beyond those two races, though, with nearly 120 wins in Indycars, NASCAR and Grand-Am. He maintains alliances with three major motor manufacturers, relationships forged on his four corporate cornerstones of integrity, innovation, partnership and performance.

He’s won Indycar championships with Jimmy Vasser, Alex Zanardi, Juan Pablo Montoya, Scott Dixon and Dario Franchitti, and Indy 500s with Montoya and Dixon. His Grand-Am team has three championships with Scott Pruett, Memo Rojas and Max Papis driving, and an unprecedented three consecutive victories in the Rolex 24 at Daytona. Although his NASCAR squad has yet to claim the Cup, it has to date collected seven wins, including McMurray’s aforementioned Daytona 500.

Ganassi’s merger with DEI, the company run by Earnhardt’s widow, Teresa, was a typically pragmatic move designed to take advantage of the economies of scale presented by NASCAR’s regulations. "In this ultra-competitive era,” he said at the time, “it is necessary to build and sustain the strongest team possible, and our combining with the people and equipment at Dale Earnhardt Inc. will help create a strong program for years to come."

Chip’s never one to shy away from the tough decisions, as Jimmy Vasser knows. In 1996, Vasser – who now runs his own team -- won CART’s PPG IndyCar World Series to give Ganassi his first championship. He says his old boss is deeply dedicated to what he’s doing.

“Chip’s just a guy who’s not running for mayor,” he offers. “He focuses everything on his race team and puts everything he has into it. He’s not there to be your best friend, but he gives everybody in the team what they need to get the job done, and then expects them to get it done. He’s not afraid, as he’s shown over the last decade and a half, to make changes if it’s not working. I respect the fact that the only thing that matters to Chip when it comes to the race team is winning.”

Given the heady aroma of accomplishment pervading Chip Ganassi Racing, one might naturally wonder how it all began.

“My father went to an auction in Indianapolis in 1963,” he recalls, “and brought home a Super 8 film of the 1963 Indy 500. I was five years old at the time, and I used to watch that film day and night, shooting it against the living room wall. I can tell you anything about that race because I’ve seen it so many times.”

Thus was the spark ignited in young Chip. “I always had some sort of fossil-fuel-fired vehicle -- go-kart, dirt bike, snowmobile -- when I was younger. That’s how it got started. I never thought of racing as a vocation, I just thought it was maybe something I could do on weekends, so I got into Formula Ford. Then I met (former Super Vee star) Tom Davey and he’s the one who pushed me to do something more serious.”

After winning the SCCA’s Northeast Division FF championship in 1980, Ganassi graduated to Super Vees, then moved into Indycars for 1982, making five starts in a year-old Wildcat-Cosworth owned by Jack Rhoades with a best finish of 11th at Cleveland. Ten outings followed in ’83 with Pat Patrick’s team, capped by a pair of podiums and another top-five in the final three races. In 1984 he became a regular top-10 contender, and was coming off a career-best second at Cleveland when he tangled with Al Unser Jr. coming onto the bumpy backstretch at Michigan International Speedway and crashed heavily into the inside guardrail.

Helicoptered away to hospital in critical condition with a closed head wound and various lesser injuries, things didn’t look good for The Chipster. Despite making a full recovery and four scattered starts over the next two seasons, he realized his driving career was over.

“The accident didn’t make me want to get out of driving,” explains Ganassi, “but what it did, because I was out of driving for six months, was give me a different perspective on the business. At the time I was in my mid-20s, I’d graduated from the school of business at Duquense University, and my family had a business I was involved in, so you naturally look at that side of things. It was really serendipitous that it happened all at the same time. Racing was making a turn from guys like Briggs Cunningham, Augie Pabst and Lindsey Hopkins, the sportsmen, and becoming more of a bona fide business. I just hit the timing of that just right.”

His new career began when he bought out Patrick. “I basically bought Pat’s team and paid into it over a two-year period through ’87 and ’88, but I was kind of young at the time and I thought it best to keep a low profile. Then in ’89 we had a boom year, with Emerson (Fittipaldi) and Marlboro and winning the Indy 500. I was just learning my way around the business at the time, so I was happy to stay in the background as the up and comer.”

Apart from Patrick, among Ganassi’s other examples to emulate was Roger Penske, the first to win both the Big 500s. Chip remembers his first encounter with “The Captain.”

“Everybody looked to Roger as the guy who set the bar,” he acknowledges. “There was a banker in Pittsburgh who knew Roger, and we were trying to decide whether to buy a Penske PC7 or a brand-new Gurney Eagle. So, he put me on the phone with Roger, who said an interesting thing: ‘Whether you buy a used car or a new one, the hotel room costs exactly the same.’ I thought that was a pretty profound statement, because what he was saying was you have a lot of costs that are the same whichever way you go. It was pretty profound at an early time in my career, and now here I am shooting it out with him week in and week out.”

Ganassi Racing began in Indycars in 1990 after landing Target as its primary sponsor. Victories didn’t happen until Michael Andretti, fresh from his desultory F1 experience, briefly landed there for 1994, winning both the Surfers Paradise opener and the summer round in Toronto.

Following a winless ’95 as he expanded to a pair of Ford-powered Reynards for Bryan Herta and Vasser, Ganassi gambled on Honda engines for ’96, creating the vaunted Reynard-Honda-Firestone “package” that dominated subsequent seasons. Then Tony George formed the Indy Racing League and took his 500-mile race out of the CART championship.

Chip stayed with CART, kept Vasser and hired F1 reject Alessandro Zanardi to handle his second car. Vasser set the tone winning the season opener at Homestead then adding three more wins from the next five races to build the unstoppable momentum that brought him the PPG Cup. His new Italian teammate won three times to become Rookie of the Year.

As the 20th century rolled to its close, CART offered the most diverse and challenging championship on the planet, with four car constructors and four engine manufacturers pursuing glory on a mix of long and short ovals, city street circuits and natural terrain road courses. Ganassi has called it a magical time in all of racing, and not just because his team dominated, winning 30 races and four consecutive championships. Zanardi swept to twin titles in ’97 and ’98 to earn another F1 shot and open the seat for gifted Columbian Juan Pablo Montoya, who claimed the ’99 crown as a rookie.

In Y2K, Ganassi made a move he characterizes as purely business, but which altered the landscape of American racing. He broke ranks with CART and entered a pair of IRL cars at Indianapolis for Vasser and Montoya, who won handily on his first attempt with Vasser seventh. Ganassi views the action with characteristic detachment.

“What you realize when you’re in business is you have to watch out for yourself. It’s easy to get caught up in the hoopla and excitement of racing, but in the end you have to do what’s right for your business if you want to be around. We’re one of the few teams that’s in all these different series, and we approach it strictly as a business.

“You have to look at it that way, and sometimes you have to take a long-term view. I don’t think we were breaking ranks with CART as much as just taking a long-term view of the industry. Things happen all the time in racing that people try to put labels on, but the fact of the matter was that we had a damn strong team at the time.”

The following year he filed four entries for Indy, joined by fellow CART owners Penske and Barry Green. Penske’s pair finished first and second, with Green’s third and three of Chip’s cars running fourth through sixth with Vasser, Bruno Junqueira and Tony Stewart as the interlopers dominated the race. By 2003, he’d switched to the IRL full time, with new driver Dixon taking three wins and the title.

Chip is not one to stand still, however, and he next joined forces with colorful Cuban Felix Sabates to go NASCAR racing. That program got rolling in 2001 with Sterling Marlin driving, and the veteran Tennessean won three races to lead the championship for much of the year before fading to third.

The next season Marlin again led the points for many weeks, but his title run was terminated by a vertebra-cracking crash. Ganassi tapped unknown Jamie McMurray to substitute, and he surprised everyone, including Chip, by winning only his second Cup start – a record that still stands.

Expanding into Grand-Am for 2004, Ganassi watched Pruett and Papis take the championship. His team has remained a force, winning 23 races and two more titles, its efforts crowned by the Rolex 24 Triple.

Widely considered a hard-nosed, hard-hearted, hard worker, Ganassi does nothing to dispel the impression. All he cares about is winning, an attractive attribute for anyone seeking similar success.

The long-time Managing Director of Ganassi’s Indycar and Grand-Am programs, Mike Hull, says his boss provides “a quality of helping us find, in ourselves, what it takes to win every day and to win on Sunday. He drives us extremely hard and he helps us find what we need to win. That’s always been the common denominator for him. He then steps back and empowers us to get our job done, and that’s what he does with everyone who works for us. He wants the same thing we want.

“He expects from us what he expects from himself. I think what he’s all about is that he never looks back, he’s always looking forward. He has a lot of faith and confidence in the people who work here, and we all realize we don’t win on our own.”

Pruett also sees both sides of his boss. “Chip’s hard-core,” he asserts. “He’s hard on guys, he demands a lot, but he just expects out of you what you should be doing. So, while he’ll chew your ass and get on the guys, I have never wanted for anything from the car side that he hasn’t provided. He has given us whatever we need to go do our job. That’s what makes Chip Chip. Racing is his life.”

Franchitti’s perspective is particularly interesting. After jumping unproductively to NASCAR with Ganassi in 2008, he returned to Indycars as Dixon’s championship-winning teammate last year. His arrival meant Chip had to dump Dan Wheldon, twice a winner in ’08, but as Vasser noted, he’s not afraid to make changes.

Dario agrees that Chip “knows how to put the right people in the right places. He’s very good at watching what goes on, seeing what is needed and then acting on it. He makes the right decisions at the right time, and he gives us what we need to do the job.”

Franchitti almost went to NASCAR for ’07, but is glad he didn’t since he won both Indy and the IRL championship instead. “We came pretty close to doing a deal,” he concedes, “but Juan became available and because of all their history they did the deal instead. The way he dealt with that was to keep me in the loop, and I really appreciate that. It was an awkward position for him to be in, and I think he handled it really well.”

Ganassi understands that the key to success is employing the best people: “I’ve been fortunate to have great sponsors, like Target, in laying a foundation for this company, and I’ve been able to attract great people. From there it just kind of snowballs; solid people attract more solid people.

Among those solid people is Ben Bowlby, former design chief for Lola Cars. Bowlby and his staff have created a wholly new concept for the Indycar of the future called the DeltaWing, and if the furor generated by his preliminary design is any indication, he may just have something. Ganassi and the other Indycar owners are backing Bowlby’s work, and if open minds prevail it may just come to be.

While one can find those who have little good to say about Ganassi, his methods do inspire loyalty, as demonstrated by the remarkable retention rate evident in his crews. Vasser even believes he’s seen his former employer’s soft side: “I remember the day we got our championship rings. He had tears in his eyes. A lot of people probably wouldn’t believe that, but he’s actually a pretty sensitive guy.”

Chip maintains he won’t apologize for growing his business and making it successful, but on the other side of that force are the aforementioned loyalty and a strong sense of social responsibility. His team has a history of aiding charitable causes like St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.

“We began the St. Jude’s relationship through Target,” he notes, “and it really opened up my eyes to the world of giving. It’s easy to say that you give money, but we take the drivers and visit once or twice a year. Target House is where the families can stay so they aren’t just stuck in a hotel room. It’s where the kids can enjoy toys and playing with other kids and just being normal. It’s rewarding to give something back and help somebody who needs it. Anybody with children can relate to that, so we feel it’s a good cause.”

There’s that soft side again, but don’t go thinking it’s a defining characteristic. Chip Ganassi is a confident, calculating man who expects to win at whatever he tries.

Author

John Zimmermann

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