Mike Shank on adding Helio Castroneves: 'I thought this was one of the missing pieces'
INDIANAPOLIS – Mike Shank could’ve had Helio Castroneves – constant energizer bunny exterior, four-time Indianapolis 500-winner lore, glass-half-full mentality, all of it – by handing over a brand ambassador role to the 48-year-old who just can’t give up on his IndyCar dream.
It would’ve kept the Brazilian racing legend present, visible, busy – and most importantly, Meyer Shank Racing’s asset to use in the near-future, as the team aims to both grow and recover from a recent rough patch. It would’ve been simpler, cleaner and not all that uncommon in IndyCar.
Rick Mears will forever be associated with Team Penske, and you’ll hardly ever catch him at a racetrack without some version of the team’s famous black, white and red uniform that extends from drivers, strategists, executives, PR officials … the list goes on.
Dario Franchitti? Until he wants to spend his time otherwise, it’s hard not to imagine the three-time 500 winner as anything but Chip Ganassi Racing’s driver-whisperer who simultaneously backed Jimmie Johnson’s radical transformation from stock cars to open-wheel racing and helped Alex Palou’s rapid rise from a forgettable rookie to IndyCar champion.
And Tony Kanaan? There’s no telling what Castroneves’ similarly loud, brash, affable countryman will do as part of Zak Brown and Gavin Ward’s team at Arrow McLaren alongside Pato O’Ward, Alexander Rossi and company in the years to come as its special advisor.
'Push each other until the end': Castroneves, Kanaan reflect on careers before last 500 battle
Shank wanted more – in part because the MSR co-owner had seen in recent years what happens when Castroneves takes ownership of a project. We’ll never know for sure, but it’s hard to imagine Castroneves’ surprise 2021 500 win for a team that had never – and has never since – won an IndyCar race without the very real notion that Castroneves was, at the time, fighting for his racing career.
In the fall of 2020, he’d put a bow on what was a rather lackluster end to his Team Penske IndyCar career, finishing 27th, 18th and 11th in the 500 from 2018-20 – his worst-three-year stretch in his 20 attempts – after having been shifted from a full-time IndyCar role into a full-time ride in IMSA at a program that was now going away. He managed to capture his first high-level racing championship that fall with Acura Team Penske, something that eluded him in IndyCar, despite a resume of 30 wins, 50 poles and 93 podiums.
It would’ve been easy to take that title and ride off into the sunset, a driver that Roger Penske – for all their history together – no longer had a place for. We know the story now: MSR, a team looking to expand, saw synergy in hiring the legend without a ride into a brand-new seat at a team that, frankly, hadn’t done all that much before deciding it was taking the next step. MSR’s success – and in many ways, its future – was predicated on the direction in which Castroneves’ went. And if Helio was to make anything of this final, racing chapter in the day-to-day limelight, it was likely to come with MSR – or not at all.
And look how far they’ve come.
One 500 victory. A 2022 IndyCar campaign that, with Simon Pagenaud, included double-digit top-10s and a pair of drivers in the top-10 of the 500. Three IMSA victories in the five endurance races he’s run with MSR – including a two-for-two mark in the most important stop on the calendar: the Rolex 24.
What Castroneves has accomplished in his short tenure with MSR is why he’ll both continue to run 500s in the team’s classic pink-and-white digs, but also have the all too hilarious opportunity to start asking – and if Friday was a preview, perhaps demanding? – his teammates call him boss. Because moving forward as a minority partner in MSR, Castroneves now truly owns a stake in every manner imagined in what he does, how he performs and the way in which he leverages his on-track successes and off-track relationships towards MSR’s growth and success.
The next chapter: Castroneves stepping back from full-time IndyCar racing, joins MSR ownership group
“We could’ve added him just as an ambassador without the ownership side, but we felt like it was a stronger relationship if we gave him that stake,” Shank told IndyStar Friday after the team’s press conference, in which Shank and co-owner Jim Meyer also confirmed its IMSA ace Tom Blomqvist as one of its two full-season IndyCar drivers for 2024. “We recognized early-on – I’m talking the year he started with us in 2021 – when he won the 500, (co-owner Jim Meyer) and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve got a problem.’
“There’s nobody in the paddock more recognizable, better with the media, sponsor and corporate sponsors, especially. From that moment forward, we knew we would need someone to fill that ambassador role, that coaching role. But he also gets the business side of what we do. His network is huge, and it just made sense for us to be able to go down this road. Remember, this isn’t a charity business. I have to be somehow not below the line, so how can we best prepare ourselves to do that for the next five years? I thought this was one of the missing pieces.”
The surprising part in all of this isn’t to have to start thinking as one of IndyCar’s modern-day legends taking part in the series’ annual team owner meetings – “I want to start asking questions,” he quipped – but that Castroneves could have been persuaded to give up on his full-season racing dreams that began in his native Brazil more than 30 years ago, briefly took him to Europe and eventually landed him in the U.S. in a mano-e-mano battle with countryman and best-friend Tony Kanaan for a 1998 CART ride with Tasman Motorsports.
He’s long promised he would keep driving as long as someone was willing to give him a cockpit to sit in, and for nearly 30 years, he kept that dream alive. In his only season not racing full-time in IndyCar or IMSA, 2021, he still managed to string together 14 starts across the two series, along with Tony Stewart’s SRX series. And that year, he accomplished something few ever have: wining the Rolex 24 and the 500 in the same calendar year.
This next chapter, Castroneves clarified Friday, isn’t an end or even a winding down of the use of his incomparable competitive spirit, but merely a way to repurpose it. You don’t have to beat around the bush with the four-time 500 winner; he knows he hasn’t displayed a level of results MSR needs to keep moving forward the last two years. And he wants to be part of the solution.
“I want to be very clear. I am not retiring, okay? I just want to make sure people understand that. Actually, my line is open now to do other series – SRX, IMSA, NASCAR, Stockcar Brazil, whoever calls,” he said. “I still have a lot of fire inside me, a lot of energy that I want to burn, but now I’m going to focus that on the 500, but outside that, we have a lot of work ahead of us. The best for me in this condition is to step aside and help Mike and everyone go to the next level.
“I’m still very competitive, but there’s only so much you can do with that (driving). And when opportunity knocks, you just can’t all a sudden say, ‘No, no, I’ll wait.’ If it happens, you’ve got to decide – it may be now or never. I know Mike gave his life to becoming a team owner, and I know how hard it is. I’ve seen it, and that’s why I’m very grateful and honored to have Jim and Mike and the whole Liberty (Media) Group to accept me into this position.”
As MSR adds a rookie in Tom Blomqvist, with the prospect of possibly adding another young driver or even just one without experience within the team – if it opts not to bring back the still-injured Simon Pagenaud, whose results had taken a serious dip to below 20th in points before he was sidelined July 1 – it now has Castroneves’ full-attention he can put toward that mentoring role.
“I can’t do both,” he laughed. “My wife can multi-task. I’m different. I focus on one thing, and what we want to do is find talents and give them the best opportunity (for success).”
This move, too, is recognition from Shank that this team in transition can’t be fixed by him alone. Whether it’s as a driver coach, an engineering asset or just another mind on the timing stand, his team’s new minority owner has raced one of IndyCar’s longtime tracks more than double the number of race weekends MSR has. As a brand ambassador or advisor, Castroneves might’ve been expected to give his two cents when asked. As MSR’s latest co-owner, his own team now depends on it.
“All these things he’s picked up over the years, they can come out now. It’s part of it,” Shank said. “He’s got a stake in the ground with us.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Mike Shank: Helio Castroneves as a co-owner one of MSR's 'missing pieces'
