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This past Friday, we got word that a legend is stepping down. Tim Cindric, President of Team Penske will step aside from his day-to-day duties of basically running Team Penske after 25 years. Cindric wasn’t just heading up the three-car IndyCar team – he was also in charge of the NASCAR program, and the sports car program. If there was anything in the Penske organization that had to do with any of their racing teams – Cindric was in charge.

When Roger Penske had to step back after buying IMS and IndyCar in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest; it was Cindric who was in charge. Heading up the Penske IndyCar program is massive enough, but when you throw in NASCAR and all of the other racing series Team Penske was involved in – Tim Cindric had a huge job. Yet he navigated it so well that he made it look easy.

It wasn’t that easy. Several different people are being shifted around to take on the duties that Cindric was performing. But Cindric won’t be going away, at least from IndyCar races. He is just scaling back from the other stuff

I think many people have taken Tim Cindric for granted, thinking he was just the care-taker of a well-oiled machine. If you were a fan of this sport in the mid-to-late 90s, you know that Team Penske was struggling before Cindric was hired near the end of the 1999 CART season.

Three out of four seasons, from 1996 through 1999, Team Penske went winless. Paul Tracy provided some hope in the first half of the 1997 season, when he won three races in a row. Other than that, it was a huge dry spell for The Captain. The tipping point was the 1999 season. Lead driver Al Unser, Jr, struggled to 21st in points, as he dealt with his own personal demons. Three other drivers spent time in the No. 3 car, before Gonzalo Rodrigues was fatally injured in practice at Laguna Seca. The Penske chassis was so bad that a new Lola chassis was on hand as a replacement for each car.

In October of 1999, it was announced that team Penske would experience an overhaul for 2000. Penske cleaned out his stable of drivers and hired Gil de Ferran and Greg Moore as teammates. They would be driving the preferred Reynard chassis with Honda power and Firestone tires; replacing the Penske chassis with Mercedes power and Goodyear tires. Also new for 2000 was Tim Cindric, who had just been hired away from Team Rahal. Of course, there was a major course correction when Greg Moore lost his life a few days later at Fontana. That’s when Helio Castroneves was tabbed to replace Moore, and the rest is history.

Under Cindric’s guidance, team Penske won the next two CART championships. He also oversaw the team’s return to Indianapolis in 2001, after being absent since 1995. The result was a dominant win by Castroneves, with de Ferran in second. For 2002, Team Penske moved fulltime into the IRL, with Cindric running the show. Sam Hornish won the championship, but Castroneves and de Ferran finished second and third respectively, with Castroneves earing his second straight Indianapolis 500, in a little more controversial fashion.

I won’t go through every season, because it would take too long. But suffice it to say that Tim Cindric was a big part of pulling Team Penske out of the late 90s doldrums and putting them back at the top.

Since the beginning of the 2000 season 25 years ago, Tim Cindric has been been at the helm of Team Penske’s IndyCar program. He was later put in charge of all of the team’s racing programs in various series, along with heading up the IndyCar program.

In one moment Cindric would probably like to forget, he got caught up in the aftermath of last season’s P2P scandal. Fair or not, he was in charge, and he was ultimately responsible. He and a few others were suspended for the Month of May in 2024, leading to him not being present at IMS in May for the first time in recent memory.

I was asked over the weekend if I thought his stepping down was somehow due to the push-to-pass scandal. I really don’t, but then again – I tend to take things at face-value.

Tim Cindric will be 57 in April. That is a high-pressure job he has been in for the last quarter of a century. His son’s NASCAR career is blossoming and I think he has probably reached a point in his life that he would like to step back and enjoy life. I’m sure he still loves racing, and that is why he will still have a role at Team Penske. He just won’t be the one in charge and responsible for every single thing that might go wrong.

I’m envious. I am retiring from my day job at the end of this year. I (think) we will be OK financially, but it’ll be tight. I will be 67 when that time comes. Tim Cindric is still relatively young, and he is most likely going to be very well-off financially. He will still have plenty of time to do whatever he wants, and he won’t be clipping coupons out of the Sunday paper (if there is such a thing anymore) in order to do it.

He will have the best of both worlds. He will have the flexibility to do what he wants to do, but he will also still be connected to the team and sport he loves. We should all be so lucky. He will be missed by fans who are used to seeing him completely involved at the track on race weekends, but he will still be the. He is just scaling back on his own terms. Good for him!

George Phillips

This entry was posted on February 3, 2025 at 4:03 am and is filed under IndyCar. 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.