Team owner Coyne is ‘a racer through and through’
ELKHART LAKE - Dale Coyne offers a pared-down version of his team’s Indy-car history that starts with “the old stock-block engines” in 1984, finishes with “then the merger happened, and here we are” and lasts precisely four sentences.
It’s appropriate, perhaps, that Coyne chooses this route; he is direct and humble with Midwestern sensibilities. But in condensing 35 seasons of Indy-car history to one paragraph, Coyne does sort of gloss over decades of struggles on the racetrack and challenges at the bank.
And 85 other drivers.
And a persistent climb fraught with setbacks and detours from the back of the field, and a 25-year wait for his first win.
And the satisfaction of reaching
the point where his name can be mentioned in the same sentences as Penske and Ganassi and Andretti weekly, not just when their cars are lapping his.
“The one ingredient Dale has always had is he’s a racer through and through,” said Jimmy Vasser, a retired champion driver who this year became a business partner of Coyne’s.
“He’s always there. He’s consistent. He’s going to be there.”
That persistence brought Coyne to Road America this week for Sunday’s Kohler Grand Prix, where veteran Sebastien Bourdais will pursue his second victory of the season in Coyne’s No. 18 Honda-powered car and 20year-old Zachary Claman De Melo will drive the No. 19 in his eighth Verizon IndyCar Series start.
Road America is where this racing journey began in earnest for Coyne, 63, more than 40 years ago.
A native of Minooka, Ill., southwest of Chicago, and a student at Joliet Junior College, Coyne drove to the track with buddies and stayed in a motor home for the June Sprints, which then was a big spectator event.
“I was sick and had mono,” Coyne recalled. “The Corvettes were running, and I was not very excited about it. Then the Formula 5000 cars — the Formula A cars — ran. Those were cool.
“I got up and said, that’s what I want to do.”
Hooked on open-wheel racing, he went back to the Sprints as a competitor and honed his skills in the Formula Atlantic and Super Vee ranks. Then he took Dale Coyne Racing into the CART Indy-car series in 1984.
To look at Coyne’s debut that season is to see his career as a whole.
With outdated and over-matched equipment and a tiny budget, he was no competition to the front-runners, but persistence carried him to the checkered flag, albeit 17 laps behind, in 14th place. From ’84 to ’91, Coyne started 34 CART starts as a driver, failed to qualify for 10 more, was running at the finish of seven and didn’t cover the full distance in any.
He was able to build with pay drivers who brought sponsorship in exchange for the opportunity to try to launch or resurrect a career. Along with dozens of names even serious fans wouldn’t remember, Coyne’s alltime roster of drivers includes Paul Tracy, Roberto Moreno, Michel Jourdain Jr., Oriol Servia, Bruno Junqueira, Justin Wilson and Mike Conway as well as the four-time Champ Car titleholder Bourdais.
“I just always thought they were lacking resources,” said Vasser, the 1996 CART champion, who competed against Coyne’s team as a driver from 1992-2008 and then as an owner. “They always seemed to be underfunded. He was doing everything he could, putting everything into it. They were fighters.”
It took until 2004 for Coyne to pick up his first top-five finish (two by Servia) and in 2009, Wilson finally took him to victory lane.
The tipping point for Coyne came after the reunification of open-wheel racing with the merger of Champ Car and IndyCar for the 2008 seasons and actually was helped by the economic downturn that affected all of motor sports.
Dale Coyne Racing is the last survivor from the Champ Car side of the merger. When teams such as Conquest, HVM, Newman/Haas and the various iterations of Vasser’s KV Racing team faded away, talented drivers, engineers and crewman became more readily available.
“The formula now has changed from teams making a lot of their parts to two or three chassis manufacturers to two engine manufacturers to budgets being $50 million for two cars to maybe 10 to 20,” said Scott Dixon, a four-time IndyCar champion. Dixon has raced against Coyne’s team on and off since 2001, mostly with the powerful Chip Ganassi Racing.
“The biggest thing I think Dale’s done is he’s got good people, man. He’s got a four-time champion with Bourdais. His engineering staff is really stacked. He has good mechanics. That grows.”
Bourdais is in his second stint with Coyne, landing at the team for the 2011 season after three years in Formula One and then again last year after KVSH folded.
Bourdais was able to bring in Craig Hampson, the engineer with whom he had won four Champ Car titles at Newman/Haas. They also added Olivier Boisson, a fellow Frenchman who had been Bourdais’ engineer at KVSH. And finally Vasser and James Sullivan — partners in KVSH — joined with Coyne on Bourdais’ side of the team, adding sponsorship and other support.
“We’re getting closer (in budget), and we’re certainly getting closer in performance,” Coyne said. “Performance per dollar, we’re No. 1.”
Bourdais won on the streets of St. Petersburg, Fla., in his return to the team last year, and then repeated in April. A penalty cost Bourdais a chance for victory in Long Beach, Calif., and he has slumped beginning with a crash in the Indianapolis 500, but he came to Road America ninth in points with the top five in sight.
Coyne’s No. 19 Honda-powered entry continues to be a development program for Claman De Melo, Santino Ferrucci and Pietro Fittipaldi, who is injured.
The statistics aren’t quite what the owners or drivers would prefer, but they’re a far cry from Dale Coyne Racing’s early years and a lot closer to what Coyne had hoped when he first opened his doors.
“We knew it was going to be a big climb and things needed to work out,” Coyne said. “You just work at it. You hope to get a dream sponsor that will give you the money you need to do what you need to do.
“That’s gotten a little better every year, and here we are.”