IndyCar Hopes to Repeat Washington Success

Penske Corporation President Bud Denker had 81 meetings in a 93-day span on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, this year to secure the structure of the NTT IndyCar Series’ Freedom 250 Grand Prix. He and his associates slogged through 1,350 pages of permits, orchestrated mind-boggling logistics, and saw red sometimes with all the government red tape—and he’d do it all over again.

Denker uttered three sentences that proved he clearly knew the importance of making last Sunday’s one-off street-course race a success and had faith it would be a success: “You have only one 250th anniversary to celebrate… My boss is Roger Penske…It’s going to be historic.”

Denker said following Sunday’s race, “I don’t think we’d get one pushback from any person that we worked with in this city to not have this race again.“

“You know what we built? We built trust and transparency. Because we have that with the city, every single agency, because of the team I have, there would be nobody to say not to do this again. I’m confident of that. The decision’s up to us.”

Denker said, “I think it’s a financial decision, ’cause it’s very expensive to do this. You don’t do much in this city if it’s not six figures, okay? Wish everything was just six figures.

The other thing about it is, you have to say to yourself, ‘There’s only one 250-year event. What is 251 going to look like? What do you call it?’ Sponsors that came in this year, will they come back again in a non-anniversary year? Many corporations set aside money for their anniversary. They did. They had marketing dollars set aside. We captured a lot of that,” Denker said.

President Donald Trump was the linchpin to all of it, who in January signed an executive order directing the Interior and Transportation departments to help “designate a suitable race route that showcases the majesty of Washington, DC, and its iconic national monuments,” and to issue all required permits, as well as to coordinate planning with the city’s mayor.

Penske’s penchant for getting every detail perfect prompted Denker to say, “This was not a race, it was an event. There’s a difference, isn’t there? A big difference between a race and an event.

Denker called his key team leaders Michael Montri and Jonathan Bailey “just geniuses. These guys could go anywhere in the world and put a race on. You saw it.”

In this stunningly compact amount of time, this IndyCar race/project/event/extravaganza, brought more diverse people together than the United Nations has done since the 1940s.

Australian IndyCar veteran Will Power spoke of the series’ “United We Race” motto.

“I’ve said it forever—it’s such a great series from that perspective. You have so many different nationalities in there. It’s a very friendly paddock. What do we have, eight American drivers. A third of the field is American. When I joined the series 20 years ago, that was one of the things that they were trying really hard to do, get some top-level American drivers. That’s exactly what we have now,” Power said.

Denker was impressed by the atmosphere he saw. “This was not a race, it was an event. The fly-overs that the team prepared, the pageantry of seven fly-overs. I had the opportunity to be in the lead vehicle of the motorcade. I was in the lead vehicle motorcade because we were timing when the president’s Beast needed to be on the front stretch at the right place. We hit it within five seconds, Air Force One flying over. That’s how perfect of a day it was today. Gives you an example of what it was. How about the eagle coming off the building and landing in front of Mr. Trump? It just gave you goose bumps. Frankly, brought a lot of tears to my eyes, watching the cars come on the grid, then seeing them come down pit lane, it just hits you. It’s been a year since I’ve been here to try to do this.”

The IndyCar series looks to the future, and it’s clear that the Freedom 250 Grand Prix was a resounding success, and one that could potentially be repeated. With the right combination of planning, funding, and support, it’s possible that this event could become a regular fixture on the IndyCar calendar, bringing together people from all walks of life to celebrate the thrill of racing.