Roger Penske reunited with his lost 1958 trophy

Mike Teske
490 shares
share
tweet
emailBy Mark Glendenning | June 3, 2023 6:30 PM ET

As a team owner, Roger Penske left the Indianapolis 500 with a claim to a special piece of silverware: his 19th Baby Borg. But as a driver, he didn’t fly out of Indianapolis empty-handed either. In this case though, it was a trophy he’d won 65 years earlier.

Penske the driver first got his feet wet in amateur road races, but in 1958 he decided to up the stakes and acquire a used Porsche RS for SCCA events. The payoff was immediate – he won the 1500cc class in the SCCA National at Marlboro Raceway in Maryland – and he received an elegant silver cup for his efforts.

He continued to have success in sports cars for the next few years, including wins at the Riverside California Grand Prix and the Pacific Grand Prix in 1962, and the Nassau Tourist Trophy in 1964. But in 1965 he hung up his helmet to focus on his rapidly expanding business interests, and over the years that followed, that first trophy from 1958 became lost.

Fast-forward several decades, and Tennessean motorsports history enthusiast Mike Teske was browsing through an antique shop in central California’s San Joaquin Valley when something caught his eye.
The original Penske victory hardware, once lost, now found. Mike Teske

“I actually have a couple of NASCARs and I was searching for trophies, and I found a couple that were for cars that I had,” Teske told RACER. “So I’ve always kept an eye out for them, and when I saw this one… I didn’t even really know about Marlboro Raceway, so it piqued my interest. The guy in the antique store didn’t know what it was, so I had to do a little research.”

Research is Teske’s forte: he’s one of the world’s top authorities on the Ford GT40. But it still took some digging and cross-referencing for him to work out that he’d acquired the trophy from Penske’s 1958 win. Having established that, Teske decided to return the trophy to its original owner: a mission that took some time (“Roger Penske’s not an easy guy to get in touch with,” he said) but which finally came to pass this year at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on the eve of the 500.

“Honestly, I have to believe it has been decades since I last saw that trophy,” Penske told RACER. “What a terrific surprise from Mike Teske while we were in Indianapolis. On top of Josef’s win in the 500, it made it a special week.”

The circumstances that led to the trophy falling out of Penske’s possession and making its way across the country to an antique store in California’s agricultural heartland have been lost to the mists of time.

“Since my driving days we have moved shops a few times, from Newtown Square, PA to Reading, PA to Mooresville, NC,” Penske said. “It is likely not the only thing that got misplaced in those moves. Very happy to have it back.

“It brought back some great memories of my driving days. We had a lot of fun and I’m proud of our success in those days. It is amazing that Mike was able to find it and give it back to me. I greatly appreciate it.”

For Teske, whose own house is a self-described “mini-museum” of GT40-related artifacts, there was almost as much pleasure in seeing the trophy return “home.”

“Roger’s done a lot, so to see his eyes light up was special” he said. “He said, ‘I like everything nice and bright and shiny’ – which this is not; it has aged – ‘and I’m going to get this cleaned up and I’m going to put it in my office in Detroit.’

“I think it’s hard to impress him with all he’s gone through and achieved in life, so it was very special for me to be able to give it to him.”