MOORESVILLE, N.C. -- Brad Keselowski is holding court, pointing ceiling-to-floor and all around a monstrous dwelling with his left hand while taking measured sips between sentences from an 11-ounce bottle of Fiji water with his right. He wears a black polo shirt emblazoned with Discount Tire across the right breast, and jeans, and stands on a foundation of black and red Puma sneakers.
It's rainy and muggy outside in rural North Carolina. Not in here.
In here it is clean. Grossly clean. And drably vibrant.
Team Penske headquarters is 450,000 square feet. You could eat off the floors, which are made of rows and rows of heather gray square tile. It is debated aloud whether this building is the largest tile-floored dwelling in the United States, or merely east of the Mississippi River. Either way, it is pristine.
Most race shops these days are cleaner than your home. That's the standard. The days of oil-stained concrete floors and soiled rags and dirty, dusty apparatuses are gone. It never ceases to amaze how teams build high-performance machines without a trace of waste. No boxes. No metal shards. No broken glass. Nothing.
Everyone stares in each direction Keselowski points. Over here to your right are some chassis, bare as a baby's bum. Why is that impressive? Well, because three or four days ago they were fully dressed racecars, complete with sheet metal, electronic dash boards, carbon fiber seats, suspension, wheels, the whole thing.
Three days ago. Now here they sit, side-by-side, like skeletons picked clean by hungry buzzards. Three days ago they looked like the pair of cars up on jack stands over to their right, standing at attention in front of an industrial fan. One carries the familiar, classic Wood Brothers paint, No. 21. That is the car Ryan Blaney drove to a career-best fifth-place finish two nights before this in Kansas.
The other is black and yellow; Keselowski's Kansas car. I don't know why they're being fanned. I take a photo. I think that was OK.
In an adjacent room, off to the left and through a garage bay, there are vending machines that spit out car parts and sanding pads and other things I'm too ignorant to label with the zip of a Team Penske corporate ID card. I've never seen one of these contraptions before. Neither has the colleague who brought it to my attention. He and I just stood and stared at it wide-eyed, marveling at the concept that within it, every part in the company is accounted for, including the specific employee who removed it. Efficient.
Keselowski strolls casually on, describing to a gaggle of reporters and photographers that Penske doesn't sell wrecked or obsolete racecars. You might get $15,000 for what was once a race-ready quarter-million dollar machine -- but the secrets carried within that machine are more far valuable than the $15,000 they, now-raced, command.
Keselowski says educated racers can learn other teams' tricks just by looking at their cars.
There are rows and rows of racecars here. No one can decipher any advantages. Penske houses a multi-car Sprint Cup NASCAR team, an XFinity Series NASCAR team, and a four-team IndyCar legacy.
It is May. And for Roger Penske, May is Christmastime. Everyone in this building knows it. May matters more to Roger Penske than anything else in his expansive business empire. This is obvious upon entrance to the IndyCar sector of the Penske shop.
On the far wall is a row of 6-foot-tall photographs, each representing one of Penske's record 16 Indianapolis 500 victories. Since the early 1970s, when the team operated out of a small shop in Reading, Pennsylanvia, the goal was to fill an entire wall with victorious moments at Indy. That continued in 2007, when the group moved south to North Carolina.
And last year, when Juan Pablo Montoya won his second 500 and Penske's 16th, they achieved it, wall-to-wall documentation of all those wins by a who's who group of superstar driver: Mark Donohue, Rick Mears, Bobby Unser, Danny Sullivan, Al Unser and Al Jr., Emerson Fittipaldi, Helio Castroneves, Gil de Ferran and Sam Hornish Jr.
The gym walls in the back of the shop are covered with famous quotes, up high where the wall meets the ceiling. De Ferran once said, "I am proud to wear this [Penske] uniform because I am aware of the people who have worn it before me."
There are four cars lined up underneath that shop wall of photos, one for each of Team Penske's current drivers. Two of those drivers are standing here, Will Power and Simon Pagenaud. It takes them less than five minutes to begin explaining the expectation.
"This is the most important race of the year for us, every year," Power says. "This one is all about Roger. It always is, but this is more that way. His 50th year in racing, the 100th running [of the Indianapolis 500] ..."
His thought tails off and he pauses. He strangles the water bottle in his hand and pumps his fists.
"God! I hope I'm the one!" Power says. "He loves that race so much. The 500, for me, is everything. It is everything."
As he says this to me, I see the same intensity I saw in Keselowski's body language 30 minutes prior. He'd handed the tour reins to his crew chief, Paul Wolfe, and walked over to say hello. I wondered what the true benefits are to having NASCAR and IndyCar under the same roof. And I wondered far more what, after all these years, most impresses him about his boss.
"This is a culture of efficiencies and manufacturing," he said. "It is consolidation, conducive to a culture of elaboration."
Deep.
So what about Roger? What sticks out?
"So. Much. Energy," he said. "Having a race team is like having a kid. Every team is a kid. It's like he's had a 5-year-old for 50 years! Damn! I swear being around him makes me feel lazy, like I'm the 80-year-old and he's 20. He just never stops."
Perhaps it all goes back to his dad, Julius. Perhaps this 450,000-square-foot building, with the immaculate flooring and all those photographs is a father's influence. Perhaps May is Christmastime and Father's Day for Roger Penske.
Because his father, Julius, first took him to Indianapolis in 1951.
In May 1951, Roger Penske was 14 years old. And for a 14-year-old boy, hanging with your old man is the ultimate.
Perhaps one of those quotes on the Team Penske gym wall -- the one in the center, most-prominently displayed -- says it best:
"Effort Equals Results." - Julius Penske.
It is Roger Penske's favorite quote.