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Interview

Tim Cindric on the highs and lows of Helio Castroneves’ IndyCar career

The president of Team Penske tells David Malsher how he'll look back on Helio Castroneves' legacy as an IndyCar driver, as a Penske team member, as a winning partner and as a friend.

Helio Castroneves and Tim Cindric

Helio Castroneves and Tim Cindric

Chris Jones

Helio Castroneves, Team Penske
Helio Castroneves, Penske Racing Chevrolet
Helio Castroneves
Race winner Helio Castroneves, Team Penske Chevrolet celebrates
Helio Castroneves, Team Penske Chevrolet
Tim Cindric
Roger Penske and Tim Cindric
Tim Cindric, Helio Castroneves and Roger Penske
Marlboro Team Penske driver Helio Castroneves, Penske Racing President Tim Cindric, Marlboro Team Penske Racing driver Sam Hornish Jr.
Penske Racing drivers Ryan Briscoe and Helio Castroneves flank Penske Performance President Tim Cindric
Helio Castroneves and Tim Cindric
Press conference: Helio Castroneves, Team Penske, with Tim Cindric and Roger Penske
Tim Cindric, Helio Castroneves, Team Penske
Helio Castroneves on the grid with Tim Cindric
Pole winner Helio Castroneves with Tim Cindric and Roger Penske receive the MBNA pole award
Helio Castroneves
Helio Castroneves
Helio Castroneves
Helio Castroneves
Spiderman
Helio Castroneves celebrating, with Roger Penske
Helio Castroneves
Helio Castroneves celebrating victory
 Hélio Castroneves
Helio Castroneves, Team Penske
Pole winner Helio Castroneves, Team Penske, second place Ryan Briscoe, Team Penske, third place Will Power, Team Penske
Helio Castroneves and Rick Mears
Helio Castroneves, Team Penske
Helio Castroneves
Helio Castroneves, Team Penske Chevrolet
Tim Cindric, Team Penske
Helio Castroneves, Team Penske Chevrolet

The tail end of the 1990s was bleak for Team Penske in CART Indy car racing. Hard to believe now, but Paul Tracy’s run of three straight victories that ended in May 1997 would be the last for Roger Penske’s legendary squad for three years. The winless seasons of ’98 and ’99 were, depending on who was asked, blamed on a variety of factors – the difficult Penske PC27 chassis (often switched for the Lola B99/00 in 1999), the Mercedes-Benz engines, the Goodyear tires, and Al Unser Jr., whose once brilliant talent had been subsumed by fading motivation and personal demons.

It’s safe to say that all these sub-par components added up to a mediocre package. But when contracts had ended, however, The Captain was able to give his ship a thorough refurbishment. For 2000, in came Reynard chassis, Honda engines and Firestone tires – the very same combination with which Chip Ganassi Racing had whipped the opposition over the previous four years. Penske’s driver lineup would change too, expanding once more to two fulltime entries with former Hall Racing and Walker Racing ace Gil de Ferran in one car, and Canadian comet Greg Moore in the other.

But in the ’99 season finale at Fontana, Moore was killed in his last outing for Forsythe Racing. So Penske approached 24-year-old Helio Castroneves, who’d shown flashes of star quality in his first two seasons in the series, but had discovered a few days earlier that Hogan Racing was letting him go. Needless to say, the Brazilian jumped at the opportunity.

Already recruited to the team was Tim Cindric who, after seven years as manager of Bobby Rahal’s team, arrived at a legendary squad that was in a state of flux but which now had a clear route forward. TC would become strategist for Castroneves, and over the coming years this pairing would become synonymous with success.

Cindric tells Motorsport.com: “Originally, Roger was going to call Greg Moore’s strategy and I would work with Gil de Ferran, but after Greg died, it somehow made sense for Roger to work with de Ferran and for me to work with the guy who – and I don’t mean this in an unkind way – was hard to understand! Helio’s English was not great at that stage.”

There was no mistaking his potential as a driver, however, and so despite Moore’s tragic demise, Penske discovered it still had two aces onboard for the 2000 season. However, while de Ferran was already the finished article, Castroneves still had much to learn.

Recalls Cindric: “In preseason testing it became obvious that Helio was fast, but the initial struggle was helping him understand how to race – maximizing your finish, mastering fuel mileage to give you more strategy options each stint, and taking care of the equipment. There were fewer fail-safes back thenp; major components such as gearboxes needed handling with a bit of care.

“I suppose my breakthrough with Helio was Long Beach, the second race of the year, when we finished second in what was a fuel mileage race. That was when he realized there was more to racing than running flat-out every lap. Then in May, Gil won Nazareth, Roger’s first win for three years, and a couple races after that, Helio won in Detroit and did his first fence climb. And we started recognizing that, yeah, these two were really good and their qualities balanced each other out.

“De Ferran went on and won the championship and Helio got a couple more wins [Mid-Ohio and Laguna Seca]. But the following year, when we made that outing in the IRL to compete in the Indy 500 and Helio won it, that totally balanced our whole Indy car operation. We had the reigning CART series champion and the reigning Indy 500 champion.”

Long before that, says Indianapolis-born Cindric, he could feel a personal bond with Brazil’s answer to the Duracell bunny.  

“Yeah, we became close pretty quickly,” he says. “I liked his constant ‘Let’s get after it’ attitude, and him always being happy about being a racecar driver. That rubbed off on everyone around him and it worked both ways because he felt appreciated and comfortable within the team.

“And on a more basic level, I could understand what he was trying to say versus what words he was actually saying! When he arrived in the team he had about 50 words of English and even they weren’t very good, but I soon picked up on what he was trying to convey at any given point.”

By the end of 2001, de Ferran had become champion for the second straight year and Castroneves had chalked up another three CART wins on his way to fourth in the championship, as well as adding his face to the Borg-Warner Trophy. However, both brilliant Brazilians had their delight tempered by learning their joint destiny for 2002. Rather than launching another raid on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May in the middle of their CART campaign, to try and snatch victory from the Indy Racing League regulars, they would in fact be switching sides in the U.S. open-wheel war.

“Helio and Gil were road racers and weren’t thrilled about making that transition to the IRL, which was all ovals at that time,” admits Cindric. “When they first tested an IRL car at the Speedway with Treadway Racing in the fall of 2000, they discovered it was a tractor compared with a CART car. So when Roger decided to move the team across to the IRL, it was inevitable that our drivers were going to miss the power of a CART car and miss road racing, too.

“But by then I think Roger and I had conveyed to Helio the importance and history of the Indy 500, and he came to understand that a lot more in 2001 once he had won it. He loved how big a deal it was and the appreciation the crowd showed him, and from then on IMS became his favorite venue. So I think that helped him overcome any other misgivings he had. And of course, he went on to win it again and get second in the IRL championship.”

It would be de Ferran who chalked up Penske’s third straight 500 win in 2003, but the elder Brazilian then decided to retire at year’s end, to be replaced by Sam Hornish Jr., who’d won the 2001 and ’02 IRL titles with Panther Racing. Both Castroneves and Hornish initially suffered as Penske’s Toyota engines fell from the cutting edge and Honda-powered Andretti Green Racing became the team to beat. After Toyota and Chevrolet pulled out of the series, all entries ran Hondas in 2006, and Penske was back on top, coinciding with Cindric becoming team president. Hornish and Castroneves took four wins apiece, but the American edged title honors by two points.

That would be as close as Castroneves came to the top spot in the IndyCar championship in his 20 years. Although he’d finish as runner-up in 2008 and ’13 to Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott Dixon, and in ’14 to teammate Will Power, Helio’s 30 wins make him the most successful Indy car driver to never clinch the year-end title. Solace for such disappointment could of course be found in his three Indy wins – 2001, ’02 and ’09.

“I think one of Helio’s greatest attributes is the fact that he doesn’t dwell on things,” says Cindric. “He’s ready to move on very quickly. And those Indy wins were a mental fallback. Compare that to Will [Power], who didn’t have Indy success to fall back on; until he won the title in 2014, each second place in the points standings was more and more disappointing. Whereas with Helio, it was the other way around. The first near-miss was more disappointing than the second one.”

Talking of Power and Castroneves inevitably leads conversation to 2011, the second year in which the Australian took the fight to Ganassi duo Dario Franchitti and Dixon. Castroneves, in anticipation of 2012’s two-pedal Dallara DW12, was desperately trying to convert to left-foot braking, but early errors rendered him a bit-part player in the championship by mid-season. Power, by contrast, was a potential champion being let down on occasion by strategy and bad pitstops, and so Cindric decided to thoroughly investigate the issues by switching to Power’s car from the Toronto round onward. Effectively throwing his weight behind the team’s sole title contender, he brought to an immediate halt an 11-and-a-half year stint as Castroneves’ man on the pitstand.

“That was probably the toughest thing I’ve had to do in my career,” agrees Cindric. “I had to choose what was right for our team over what I personally wanted to do. It didn’t feel natural, especially midseason. It felt like cheating on your wife or girlfriend. And it wasn’t about Helio underperforming. It was about, ‘Why is Will’s team winning poles and races but not dominating the championship?’ Either Roger or I needed to go and experience that first-hand.

“In retrospect, I’d say by making that move I extended Helio’s career. He now had Roger as his strategist, and perhaps that was what he needed; maybe Helio and I had become too comfortable together.”

After that torrid season in which he scored just two podium finishes and finished a mere 11th in the championship, Castroneves was back on form from 2012, winning on the debut of the DW12, and going on to finish each of his last six seasons inside the top five on the points table. The wins became less frequent – and dried up altogether between June 2014 and July of this year – but that wasn’t through lack of effort or pace. Over that same period, he scored 16 poles – more than anyone but Power.

For this author, that ability and willingness to still take it to the edge at the age of 42 is one of Castroneves’ most impressive feats. Certainly, it impressed his most recent teammates Power, Simon Pagenaud and Josef Newgarden. But the Penske man who knows Helio best is not surprised.

“Helio’s always been in denial about anything to do with his age!” chuckles Cindric. “He truly does have the attitude that he’s still 24 or 25. Mentally, he still has that enthusiasm for racing, too. Physically I don’t think he’s lost anything, either. I guess his hairline is about the only thing that’s changed since he joined the team.

“Over the 18 years with us, he’s seen good times and bad times for open-wheel racing and he’s witnessed tragedies, unfortunately. But whatever the circumstances, Helio’s attitude has been consistent, which is very hard. Changing your financial stature and family situation are major life factors that can influence a driver’s outlook, but being a racecar driver has always come first for him, so his mindset about risk has never wavered.

“And that desire has kept him open-minded and willing to learn from the various teammates he’s had, so that’s led to him staying very competitive. There were times when wins got away from him over the past three or four years, but they were usually for reasons outside his control, not because he had lost anything as a driver. Otherwise changes would have been made.”

And now, of course, changes have been made. Roger Penske has scaled down his IndyCar lineup to three fulltime entries, and Helio has been moved to the team’s revived IMSA sportscar program. Next May, he’ll race in the GP of Indianapolis and attempt to take his fourth Indy 500 win, but his days as a fulltime IndyCar driver are over.

So what were Cindric’s favorite wins with his favorite driver?

“For me, the Indy 500 in 2001 was special because it was his first win there and my first win there,” he replies. “But there was extra euphoria for a lot of reasons, not just because it was the biggest race in the world. For one thing, at that point we were a CART team winning an IRL race. And then Helio climbed the fence and interacted with the crowd in a way that hadn’t really been seen before at the Speedway. So that day will never be topped in my mind.

“Detroit 2000 was special, too, because that was his first ever win at this level and it’s a happy privilege to be involved in somebody’s first victory.

“Another highlight has to be Indy in 2009, just a month or so after Helio’s tax trial had ended. I understood as well as anyone else what he had gone through in court. And then what I went through personally trying to process the idea that such a good person could be deported for things which were out of his control… That win put the world right again, and the timing couldn’t have been better.”

Cindric then adds: “But do you want to know the worst miss while racing with Helio? That will be Motegi 2008, when we were beaten by Danica Patrick on my birthday, all because he didn’t listen to me.

“We’re just inside the Top 10 on the final restart but we’re going to win because we’ll save fuel by going full-lean and just hang out in the draft until the final laps and then charge. Well Helio totally ignores me and goes flat out for 15 laps and gets to the front. By the time I get through to him what we should have been doing, it’s too late. He then leans it out, and I’m like, ‘Sorry, but you’ve got to let Danica past just to reach the finish.’

“Afterward he tries to say one of his earplugs fell out so he didn’t hear me tell him to back off. My reply was, ‘When you’d saved enough fuel and I told you to richen the mixture at the end of the race, you did that, so I know you could hear me then…’ Eventually he admitted he’d heard me earlier but ignored me. I still give him a hard time about giving me my worst ever birthday present…”

Cindric has held Castroneves in great affection and respect for almost two decades now. Naturally, therefore, he’s delighted that Team Penske’s 2018 racing schedule will allow him to continue as strategist for champion Newgarden in IndyCar and also call Helio’s races in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar championship. That will result in a hectic travel itinerary, but it’s absolutely worth it from Cindric’s perspective, because he finds that working with his old partner provides life lessons.

He admits: “Before Helio joined Penske, I used to think, ‘Who is this clown? Why’s he so happy all that time? No one’s like that. No one’s that excited about being a racecar driver.’ But then you work with him for a while and you realize it’s not a façade. He’s just like that.

“Also, Helio knows how to take racing seriously but not take himself too seriously. He can laugh at himself, and that teaches you a lot about how to laugh at yourself. And very soon you realize that he’s also taught you how to not look back with regret but look forward to your next time racing together.

“And that’s how I’m feeling right now.”

 

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