Cameron especially likes Penske’s competitive approach.
“He supports us in the good days and the not so good days,” Cameron explained. “He’s always there to support me. The reason why we’re all here and compete is because we want to win and expect that we can win. I don’t think there is any other external source that can put any pressure on you (than yourself).
“It’s a wonderful environment to be in. He always gives us great resources and great teams, great people and cars,” Cameron continued. “You have total confidence in your crew and your car at all times because you’re surrounded by the best people. He (Penske) has been on our stand for a number of races — on all the races we won — and it was great to have him there for a handshake and that support when you get a pole or win.
“I really, really enjoy that. We didn’t have any big success in the first year, a couple poles and tried to figure out what to do going forward,” Cameron noted. “This year, we had a great year with poles and wins and won the championship.”
Cameron has earned three IMSA championships in the last six years.
Team Penske Managing Director Ron Ruzewski is impressed with Cameron. He brings expertise to the “old hands” Montoya and Castroneves.
“They know how to go fast and they can learn anything, but they weren’t necessarily intimate with all the idiosyncrasies of modern-day sports car racing,” Ruzewski said. “Dane brings a level of experience and he’s a championship-caliber driver. He has been very instrumental in the development of the car. Obviously, it’s a spec series but you can develop your own set-up packages, engine features and there’s the opportunity to homologate the car and to know what you need out of a car and have that experience.”
Ruzewski placed a finer point on Cameron’s contributions to the team.
“Dane and Ricky are particularly important, but in the case of Dane more so because he could put that into terms the engineers could work with and what our targets should be,” Ruzewski explained. “We are also realists and realize you can’t always achieve those targets, but you keep pushing to get better and better gets us as close as we can. He worked very intimately with our guys to try to achieve those goals and worked with all the other drivers, Juan, Ricky and Helio, to explain to them what we needed when we show up at these events.”
That’s obviously why Penske was so reticent about predicting immediate success. It all came good in 2019 and Ruzewski puts it in perspective
“Winning the DPi championship is a big deal for that program and sports car racing,” he said. “That’s where a lot of Penske’s heritage is. Roger doesn’t just get into anything to just do it. He wants to do it, to compete for overall wins and overall championships. I’m sure we could have gone to Le Mans with some other car (in LMP2) but you’re not competing for an overall win.” The rare air in LMP1 is only possible with manufacturers like Audi, Porsche and now Toyota with very deep pockets and massive engineering budgets. And that’s why LMP1 is on life support.
There’s no rest for the weary at Team Penske’s Acura shop.
“So, we got the job done,” Ruzewski reckoned. “Now we feel we have some unfinished business with winning the endurance races. We definitely want to win the Rolex 24 At Daytona. We want to win the 12 Hours of Sebring again and the other endurance races. We want to win another championship. It means a lot to us from the stance that we accomplished our goal — get back into the limelight and add another championship.”
No doubt Cameron takes Penske’s “effort equal results,” mantra to heart as he prepares to defend the DPi title.