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Ganassi on Penske: He ‘sets the bar’

SPEEDWAY, Ind. (WISH) — Together they’ve won 20 Indianapolis 500 races, checkers one out of every five times they compete here. Team Penske and Target-Chip Ganassi, powerful competitors through and through.

“Obviously a lot of respect and a lot of, he’s still the one that sets the bar, if you will. It’s a high level, I can tell you,” said Chip Ganassi of Roger Penske.

“They’ve made us better. You can’t win an IndyCar championship or an Indy 500 without going through Team Penske,” said Scott Dixon.

Dixon is Ganassi’s IndyCar standard bearer. At Penske, the internal competition is as intense and important as anything else they do.

“I can go to any of my three teammates and say, hey, I’m struggling here, what are you doing? They go, oh I tried this, I go here, I make sure the car does this,” said Juan Pablo Montoya. “It’s very open, that’s why we’re so good. That’s why as a team we’re so strong because, yes, on the track we do want to beat each other and really badly, but off the track we’re really good friends.”

“We do want to beat each other,” said Helio Castroneves. “We know that every time that we are faster than these guys, we have a high chance to be beating everybody else.”

Whether you’re a fan of Penske or Ganassi and its stable of racing stars, you can be sure that at least one of them will have a real shot at taking checkers at the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

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