Tim Cindric is an integral piece of Team Penske. Cindric, is President of the company. A role he’s been in since 2006. On his watch, Penske has won five Indy 500s, five INDYCAR championships, three in the last five years, to go along with two NASCAR Cup Series Championships.

That’s why up until a couple of weeks ago when Cindric said on Wednesday that he saw Roger Penske a couple of weeks ago for the first time since the Daytona 500, well its was astonishing.

But, Penske has been a busy man as of late. He recently purchased the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and took over the reigns of the NTT INDYCAR Series. He had a laundry list of things he was trying to accomplish. Then a pandemic hit.

Penske, wanted to have Cindric up to Indy in May to show him the updates already made to the famed race track. Cindric, was amazed at the work already done.

“I got a chance to actually go to Indianapolis a couple weeks ago,” Cindric said on a zoom call on Wednesday morning. “The Daytona 500 was the last time that I saw Roger up until two weeks ago, other than these Zoom calls. He took the initiative to have me come to Indy and spend a couple hours with him on a golf cart going around the Speedway and just understanding what’s transpired since he took over and it’s amazing.”

Cindric, said IMS was the place he grew up on. He knew every in and out of the place from a young age.

“Having grown up there as a kid, I thought I knew that place like the back of my hand, and there’s so many places that I went to and that I saw on the outside of the racetrack that I had never seen before. [Roger] said, ‘What do you think?’ and after I thought about it, I’m like, ‘The best way I can tell you is that this whole place looks younger.’

Cindric, says he’s most interested into what the diehard race fans think.

“Like for us, we know the garage area like the back of our hand, we know the men’s bathroom, we know exactly where the paper towels are, what all works, what used to be there and what’s there now, and you walk it now and it’s amazing; you have LED lights in the bathrooms. OK, people have made jokes about the bathrooms, but when you understand how many of them there are and the fact that’s somewhere everybody goes… That’s one discussion.

“But what they haven’t really understood is just the sight lines, the video boards, the additional video situations that he has, and the overall customer experience – what you see as you drive in, what you see as you walk in a gate, the actual grandstand that you’ve walked up for years, and you’ve had this particular seat for years. It used to be a rusty banister, now it’s not. It used to be this and it used to be that.

“It’s unbelievable what’s happened in a short period of time. It’s unfortunate we are where we are now, but in some ways it’s good for the Speedway in that they’ve had even more time to do some of these things. It’s quite an evolution, and I think it’ll continue there for a while.”

Cindric, heads to Texas this weekend for the INDYCAR season opener. While he could have a larger influential role on the series now, he says his spot in the company hasn’t changed much.

“My role within the team, I guess I refer to myself as the team guy. [Roger] has got to focus on the series, and I really don’t have much influence in the series itself, except I probably have a seat closer to the table than I did before, as far as being one that he’ll reach out and ask about a certain thing that’s happening or what he’s trying to achieve and maybe try and give some direction with who else out there might be a good sounding board for some of the things that IndyCar or IMS is trying to be.

“But the quality of people there, he’s come to find that there’s a really good core within IndyCar and within IMS, and his leadership has really brought that to another level, I think. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to see that.”