Oilpressure

This May marks thirty years since one of the more controversial Months of May. If you have read the book Beast, by Jade Gurss, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.

In April of that year, Roger Penske held a press conference at the IMS Museum. He was accompanied by his three drivers – Emerson Fittipaldi, Al Unser, Jr. and Paul Tracy. This was not any ordinary press conference where a new sponsor or livery was introduced. Instead, this was a bombshell.

Penske announced that he, Ilmor Engineering and Mercedes-Benz had been secretly designing, developing and testing an engine in total secrecy. Since I am not a gearhead, I can’t speak intelligently about the engine, but it was a pushrod engine that utilized a loophole in the USAC rule book. It was the same rule that allowed the Buick V6 stock block pushrod engine to run competitively in the Indianapolis 500.

The Mercedes pushrod engine was a purpose-built V8 that some say produced over 1,000 horsepower; making it a beast compared to the Ilmor and Ford-Cosworth engines everyone else was running. This was the first year for Honda, and they were so underwhelming that the only Honda team, Rahal-Hogan, had to get Honda’s blessing to shelve their engines for May and run Penske-Ilmors for the month. Rahal ended up finishing third, one year after he had failed to qualify.

Many were angry in the paddock, but they had nothing to be angry about. Penske had studied the rule book, and used what he learned to his advantage. It was that unfair advantage of Team Penske that Mark Donohue had talked about more than twenty years earlier. This wasn’t cheating. It was manipulating a loophole in the rules, and having the resources to take advantage of it. Other teams didn’t like it, but there was nothing they could really do about it. It was similar to how all theother teams felt about Andy Granatelli’s turbine in 1967. As Graham Hill said “I’m bloody jealous. I only wish I had thought of it”.

The first few days of practice, Team Penske drivers didn’t show much. But a couple of days before Pole Day, Fittipaldi turned a lap of 230.438 mph, a speed approaching the 232 record set by Roberto Guerrero a couple of years earlier, prompting race officials to slow speeds in 1993. What got everyone’s attention, however, was his backstretch trap speed of 244 mph.

Al Unser, Jr. put his Penske-Mercedes on the pole with an average speed of 228.011 mph. Fittipaldi put his on the outside of the front row with a four-lap average of 227.303 mph. Tracy had crashed on Friday and was ordered to sit out Saturday qualifying. He was a second-day qualifier with a speed of 222.710, which was only good enough for the inside of Row Nine.

It was a sign of the times that thirteen entered drivers did not qualify. 1994 also saw the retirement of Indianapolis 500 legends Johnny Rutherford and Al Unser.

Paul Tracy was never a factor in his Penske Mercedes, and went out with turbo issues on Lap 92. Despite Little Al winning the pole, it was Emerson Fittipaldi that dominated the 1994 race. Fittipaldi led 145 laps, and was on the verge of lapping Unser, Jr., who was running second. Suddenly, Fittipaldi inexplicably crashed, while leading, into the wall exiting Turn Four on Lap 184.

I was in attendance that day with my (first) wife. We were sitting in Turn Four, but Fittipaldi had just gone out of our view when he crashed. There were no video boards around the track back then, but a few of the people sitting around us had radios. Just when it looked like Fittipaldi was about to win his second consecutive Indianapolis 500, and third overall – someone screamed out “Emmo hit the wall!”. The entire section erupted in cheers.

Keep in mind, this was just one year after Fittipaldi, at first, refused to drink the milk in 1993’s Victory Lane. Although he eventually took a sip of milk – the damage had been done. Emotions were still raw from that lapse in judgment. All the goodwill that he had built with the fans in the previous decade had gone out the window in a matter of seconds. Who would’ve thought that those emotions would linger more than thirty years?

As a result, Fittipaldi was very unpopular by that time; and Al Unser, Jr. was extremely popular. Plus, fans of the second-generation driver were still not over what happened in Turn Three at the end of the 1989 race, just five years earlier. Little Al led the final fifteen laps and won by more than eight seconds over rookie Jacque Villeneuve.

The Mercedes-powered Penske chassis was dominant throughout the month, but only one of them finished the race. The one that finished, won. After the race, USAC closed that loophole and the Mercedes 500I never raced again. But the one race it did run, sure did cause a stir.

With all that is going on with Team Penske these days, I’m not sure if they will be boasting about the year when they manipulated the rule book. But what they did in 1994 was completely legal. Still, unless you were a fan of Marlboro Team Penske in those days – it made a lot of people mad. And it was thirty years ago this May.

George Phillips

Reminder:  The answers for the Trivia Contest are due on Tue May 21. If you missed it, you can find the questions here.

This entry was posted on May 15, 2024 at 4:02 am and is filed under Indianapolis 500. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.