The culture that built INDYCAR’S winningest team

MONTEREY, Calif. — In 1996, Chip Ganassi Racing was still trying to prove it belonged among INDYCAR’s elite.

At Laguna Seca on Sept. 8, 1996, Jimmy Vasser was fighting to secure the organization’s first championship while teammate Alex Zanardi chased Bryan Herta for the race victory. On the final lap, Zanardi made an audacious move through the Corkscrew, going off the racing surface before emerging ahead.

When both drivers delivered, the pressure that had built through years of ambition finally broke.

Mike Hull, who helped build the organization’s early structure, remembers the reaction from the Ganassi timing stand.

“You could literally, I think, hear the exhale,” Hull said. “Everybody held their breath.”

“It was a perfect day,” he added. “You don’t get many perfect days.”

At the time, nobody could have known that the afternoon would become more than the first championship in team history. It was the beginning of a culture that would produce 18 INDYCAR championships, 151 race victories and three separate streaks of four consecutive titles.

Now, on the 30^th anniversary of the first championship, Chip Ganassi Racing is celebrating both its dominant run through the decades and 18 championships that stand as an INDYCAR record.

Even more remarkable is the continuity behind the titles.

Hull, crew chief Ricky Davis, and engineers Mark Paxton and Julian Robertson were part of Ganassi’s organization in 1996. All four remain with the team 30 years later, having worked through multiple generations of drivers, engineers, cars, regulations and manufacturers.

They were there for the first championship.

They were still there when Alex Palou secured Ganassi’s record-breaking 18th title in August.

That continuity is central to understanding how Chip Ganassi Racing has remained successful for three decades.

Chip Ganassi never expected it.

“Never, never,” Ganassi said when asked whether he believed the organization would make him the winningest championship team owner in INDYCAR history and one of the most successful franchises in American sports.

In 1996, he was thinking about the immediate future.

“I was just hoping to be around in ’97 and ’98,” Ganassi said. “In racing, a year or two is a long time.”

Three decades later, the first championship remains distinct.

“You certainly remember the first one,” Ganassi said. “I’ll never forget that. Those are just things you never forget as a team owner. Never, ever.”

But the championships that followed never became routine.

“None of them were easy,” Ganassi said.

The organization’s success began with a philosophy that was unusual in IndyCar at the time: equal treatment for its drivers and open communication among its teams.

“We worked really, really hard from the very beginning to build a culture that was all about equality through the whole system with the people, equal drivers, the whole thing,” Hull said. “Which was unique at the time because in INDYCAR racing, you had always had a number one and number two driver.”

Hull joined Ganassi in 1992. He helped develop an organization in which drivers received equal equipment, equal information and equal opportunity.

By 1996, he believed that philosophy had fully taken hold with Vasser and Zanardi.

“I think in ’96, when everything was well baked, the team philosophy really deserved the credit for how we won together,” Hull said. “And I think that’s created the culture that we have, the team vitality that we have, really, to continue to win.”

Paxton joined Ganassi in August 1995 after distributing resumes throughout the INDYCAR paddock. He was hired as a data acquisition engineer and worked with engineer Morris Nunn on Zanardi’s car.

He arrived just before the breakthrough and never left.

Neither did Hull, Robertson or Davis.

“Mike Hull is still around. Julian Robertson is still around. Ricky Davis is still around. I’m still around,” Paxton said. “So we know what it took to have this great chemistry at that time.”

The value of that experience is not simply that veteran employees remained. It is that they carried the organization’s lessons forward.

Ganassi operates with what Paxton calls an “open book policy” between its drivers and teams. Engineers share information, and what is learned on one car becomes available to the others.

Paxton recalled a newer employee being surprised by the level of openness because it differed from what he had experienced elsewhere.

Instead of protecting information during successful periods, the attitude is: “We’re doing something good here. How do we keep growing this?”

Ganassi expects that approach.

“We’re an open book around here,” he said.

That philosophy extends to the drivers. Ganassi wants them in the same engineering room and expects them to function as teammates even while competing against one another.

The concept can seem counterintuitive in a sport where the first person a driver is measured against is the teammate in the identical car.

But the results are difficult to dispute.

Ganassi’s champions include Vasser, Zanardi, Juan Pablo Montoya, Scott Dixon, Dario Franchitti and Palou. The organization has won 18 titles, one more than Team Penske in the INDYCAR record book.

It has also produced three separate four-year championship streaks.

The first began with Vasser in 1996, followed by Zanardi in 1997 and 1998 and Montoya in 1999. Dixon and Franchitti combined for another four consecutive titles from 2008 through 2011. Palou has now won four straight championships from 2023 through 2026.

Ganassi has spent decades hiring people he believes can operate within that environment.

He borrows a philosophy from longtime football coach Lou Holtz: The best way to motivate people is to hire motivated people.

Ganassi wants people who share the organization’s values and then gives them a clear understanding of what is expected.

Hull describes Ganassi’s leadership style as uncomplicated.

“What makes Chip really, really good is he’s a one-sentence person,” Hull said. “It isn’t that you know where you stand, it’s you know where you’re going.”

Hull believes the two men have complemented each other for more than three decades.

“My strength is all about creating priority today,” Hull said. “Chip’s strength is all about where we’re going to go next.”

Robertson has watched that philosophy from inside Ganassi for 33 years.

“The culture,” Robertson said when asked why he stayed. “Everyone has kind of the right attitude. Everyone works together.”

Robertson said Ganassi’s success cannot be reduced to what happens at the racetrack. The infrastructure behind the cars and the preparation at the shop are just as important.

“It’s not like you just show up and go fast at the track,” Robertson said.

Work on the next Indianapolis 500 essentially begins the day after the previous one ends.

Although mechanics may identify most closely with an individual car, Robertson said the organization responds as one when necessary. When an urgent hybrid change was needed on the No. 10 Honda at Milwaukee last month, personnel from throughout the team joined the effort.

Engineers operate similarly.

“It doesn’t matter which specific driver,” Robertson said. “It’s just for the good of the whole.”

Davis has lived that philosophy almost from the beginning.

Ganassi gave him an opportunity when Davis did not believe he had much to offer in return. Other teams later offered him more money to leave.

He stayed.

“It’s not about the money,” Davis said. “You come and you want to win races, and you want to win championships. And I helped lay the groundwork for that first championship into what we have now.”

Davis, named mechanic of the year after this year’s season finale, developed such a sense of ownership in the organization that he stopped thinking about the race cars as Ganassi’s.

“It may say Chip Ganassi Racing on the sign, but this 10 car car, this team car, is my car,” Davis said. “And that’s the way I treat it.”

That sense of ownership was already present in 1996.

So was the willingness of the drivers to make the people around them feel part of the success.

Zanardi was a fierce competitor, but Davis remembers that he also knew what every crew member drank and would bring coffee to the crew without being asked.

Paxton remembers Zanardi’s practical jokes and infectious personality.

Hull remembers Zanardi treating every person around his car with equal respect.

Ganassi remembers all of it.

“Special, special,” Ganassi said of Zanardi, who followed Vasser as Ganassi’s second champion. “He was a fierce competitor, but he was a joy to be around.”

Ganassi believes Vasser and Zanardi did more than win races and championships.

“You look back at guys like Zanardi or Vasser, they laid the groundwork for what this team is today,” he said.

Nothing illustrated that first championship team’s personality better than the final race of 1996.

Vasser was racing to clinch the championship while Zanardi stalked Herta for the victory.

Then came the Corkscrew.

On the final lap, Zanardi went inside Herta entering the famous downhill turn, left the racing surface, somehow maintained control and emerged ahead.

Davis initially thought the race was over when he saw Zanardi go off course on the television monitor.

Then Zanardi appeared in the lead.

“Unbelievable,” Davis said.

Hull said the move was not entirely spontaneous. Zanardi had spent the season using worn tires during practice sessions to explore unconventional braking areas and passing lines.

Davis later learned Zanardi had gone off in the same area several laps earlier to see how the car would react.

“He was setting himself up to make that pass,” Davis said.

The gamble barely worked.

Hull said the excursion damaged the car’s cooling system and Zanardi would not have made another lap.

Ganassi compares the moment to baseball: “a two-out, full-count, bottom-of-the-ninth World Series moment.”

Zanardi won the race.

Vasser won the championship.

Chip Ganassi Racing had its breakthrough.

Thirty years later, Paxton says the engineering challenge has changed dramatically.

The 1990s offered teams opportunities to gain significant advantages through choices involving engines, chassis and tires. Today’s INDYCAR regulations create much tighter technical boundaries, forcing engineers to search for increasingly small advantages.

That makes execution — and the driver — even more important.

It also makes sustained success more difficult.

Yet Ganassi has won 13 championships in the 19 seasons since IndyCar reunified in 2008, an extraordinary level of success across different cars, regulations and driver combinations.

Paxton knows how unusual it is because he has been there for virtually all of it.

After another championship, he and his wife made a point of going out to dinner because, Paxton said, sometimes even people inside Ganassi have to remind themselves to appreciate what is happening.

“This is not a trivial accomplishment,” Paxton said. “This is big time.”

The celebration, however, never lasts long.

After Palou’s fifth championship in six years was secured at Milwaukee, Paxton watched team members return home in the early morning hours and almost immediately begin preparing the cars for the next race.

The organization does not spend much time being devastated by losses or intoxicated by victories.

The focus moves to what comes next.

That is another thread connecting 1996 to the current era of Palou.

Davis calls Palou cerebral and extraordinarily calm, a driver who understands which battles to fight and rarely makes the same mistake twice.

Robertson believes championship drivers must possess two traits.

“You have to be very smart and very fast,” he said.

Palou, Robertson said, is both.

Ganassi admits nobody predicted what Palou would become when the team hired him.

“Absolutely not. Nobody did,” Ganassi said when asked whether he envisioned the championships that would follow. Anyone who claimed otherwise, he said, would be telling “a big lie.”

But Palou’s titles have reinforced a pattern that stretches back to Vasser.

Different drivers. Different engineers. Different generations of race cars.

The same organization keeps winning.

And four of the people who celebrated that first championship at Laguna Seca in 1996 are still there to see it.

Ganassi could not have imagined then where the first title would lead.

Hull could not have known that the philosophy being tested with Vasser and Zanardi would still define the organization three decades later.

Paxton could not have known that the job he accepted in 1995 would allow him to watch the same principles survive multiple generations of cars, drivers and engineers.

Robertson and Davis could not have known they would still be helping Ganassi win championships 30 years later.

But perhaps that longevity explains the 18 championships and 151 victories better than any statistic.

The first championship did not create the Ganassi culture.

It proved the culture could win.

Thirty years later, nobody in INDYCAR has done it more.