PRUETT: "The Ganassi Way"

GRAND-AM

PRUETT: “The Ganassi Way”

With Chip Ganassi's Grand-Am team aiming to claim their fourth consecutive Rolex 24 victory, Marshall Pruett delves into the source of their success.

Marshall Pruett | Posted January 21, 2009 Oakland, CA

Chip Ganassi's strict and detail-oriented leadership style has delivered an unrivaled number of road racing championships since the nineties. (LAT Photographic)

‘Three-peat’ is a perfect term for winners of three consecutive sporting titles, but for the Chip Ganassi’s racing team, this weekend’s Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway could find the team looking for a catchy phrase to describe a fourth consecutive victory in America’s toughest endurance race.

Beyond searching for the perfect term to describe winning four Rolex 24’s in a row, seeking an answer to how the Ganassi team has amassed these amazing wins in 2006, 2007, and 2008 is even more intriguing.

But the answer to Ganassi’s domination isn’t locked away in a secret file titled ‘How to win at Daytona’ – it’s found in the DNA of how Chip’s road racing teams have conducted business for almost two decades.

“I think there’s the way everybody else does it, and then there’s ‘The Ganassi Way.’ They do it differently than everybody else, they do it better than everybody else…” said Leigh Diffey, SPEED’s ace Grand-Am host. After years of watching Chip Ganassi’s Grand-Am team put their stamp on the Daytona Prototype category, Diffey’s seen the impact they’ve made firsthand.

“When they first entered the series in 2004, they brought in Indycar and NASCAR personnel to form the team, and it raised the bar—instantly. From whom they are and what they represent, they changed the face of the series and everyone else has been trying to catch back up since then.”

Ganassi Racing has made the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona International Raceway their personal playground since 2005. (LAT Photographic)

‘The Ganassi Way’ is about refining their crew, their cars, their pit stops, and their overall focus until they’ve achieved machine-like accuracy. Its one thing to apply the ‘The Ganassi Way’ to a two hour Indycar race, but to take that same methodology and dominate three 24 hour races – a combined 72 hours of competition – is hard to fathom.

Elite team owners like Chip Ganassi are often thought of as being too far removed from the shop floor to be bothered with the day-to-day running of their teams, or unable to have a direct impact on how the small details are executed. But that’s exactly what distinguishes an owner like Chip Ganassi from rival team owners who’ve yet to reach similar levels of success. As the saying goes, “The devil is in the details.”

2008 was a perfect indicator to gauge how deeply ingrained the elements of winning are forged into Ganassi’s team: Indycar series champion with driver Scott Dixon, Indy 500 winner with Dixon, Rolex 24 winner with drivers Scott Pruett, Memo Rojas, Juan Pablo Montoya, and Dario Franchitti, and a Daytona Prototype championship with Pruett and Rojas. The final tally has all the markings of a team at full stride – a group that’s defined by how they dominate the opposition.

Add in the half-dozen CART, Grand-Am, and IRL championships earned prior to 2008, and the path to how we’ve arrived at the current Ganassi Dynasty is easy to trace. With all of this momentum behind them, it’s not beyond reason to think they could claim a fourth Rolex 24 on Sunday.

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