In 1994 the Penske Indycar team was unstoppable with its PC23, but to win that year’s Indy 500 it devised a secret engine that took the competition by surprise. Doug Nye recalls the dominance of the Dorset-built destroyer

TO INNOVATE YOU MUST FIRST imaginate” was an unusually constructed but typically to-thepoint Colin Chapman saying. One of his great rivals over many years was the American racing driver, entrepreneur, team principal and similarly self-motivating Roger Penske.

As a well-wired driver of his own cars, Penske had imagined an innovative, lightweight and effective car which would comply with contemporary 1962 regulations in US West Coast professional racing, but which would pack a winning performance advantage. The result was his centre-seated Cooper-Climax Zerex Special – based upon a Formula 1 Cooper T53 and so named after the antifreeze being marketed by the chemical company DuPont de Nemours that the Clevelander had skilfully massaged into sponsoring his racing.

Penske had already shown he could run with the best even before he appeared in the sleek little Zerex to spreadeagle all opposition in the big-time sports car classic at Riverside ’62 – leaving Jim Hall’s Chaparral, the UDT Lotus 19s of Masten Gregory and Innes Ireland, and Bruce McLaren’s Cooper Monaco in his dust. He repeated that win in the following Fall-series race at Laguna Seca. His rivals nicknamed Roger’s Zerex the ‘FUBAR’ – politely explained as meaning ‘Fouled-Up Beyond All Recognition’. For 1963 rules were tightened and the Zerex reappeared as a conventionally-seated sportsracer, entered by the Mecom team, and Roger won some more, most notably in the Guards Trophy at Brands Hatch – although narrowly defeated in the Fall races by the new King Cobra-Ford V8s. He also made a brief Formula 1 appearance with a Lotus 24 in the US GP at Watkins Glen, finishing ninth.

With over 1000bhp on tap, the built-in-secret 1994 Penske-Mercedes PC23 was intended for just one race – the Indy 500. Prompted by Mario Illien and Paul Morgan of Ilmor Engineering, backed by ever enterprising Roger Penske, Mercedes-Benz and Marlboro, this British-built beast hit 252mph on the Speedway’s back straight and carried Al Unser Jr to his second Indy win…