The Indycar miracle team with a Latin character

Ricardo Juncos made a decision in 2001 that would change his life forever. Pushed by the crisis in Argentina, he settled in the United States with a few dollars and the idea of ​​showing his talent in the motor world. Twenty years later, he is the owner of a team with his reference team as one of the permanent constructors of the Indycar championship.

“My family was very poor, my parents didn’t have a ring because they sold it to eat. We are six brothers, we lived a very difficult reality when I was young, to see it now is incredible, a dream”, said Ricardo, still savoring the good participation in the first Grand Prix of the season.

He leads the ‘Juncos Hollinger’ team, the only box where Spanish is spoken within the Indycar circusa Latin spirit that allows them, at times, to make a difference to other teams.

“Culturally we are so different that sometimes we make a difference. We are not as structured as they are, there are times when you have to go outside of the structure. Whenever something happens that requires you to react quickly, I believe that Latinos always have an advantage. This is what I have tried to apply to my team all these years”.

HALF BUDGET

A team with Indycar aspirations manages budgets of more than ten million dollars, Juncos Hollinger makes it to half of those figures. It maintains a workforce of sixty pilots, mechanics, engineers and office staff.

Gathering all these professionals and competing on equal terms is a challenge for Ricardo and his team: “Obviously we have to work hard on budgets, marketing… The goal is for commercial that side to help the sports side, that we are very strong and we always win in the lower categories. It’s about making this whole mechanism work.”

After years complicated by the pandemic and without competing in Indycar, The arrival of Brad Hollinger gave the team a big financial boost. The former owner of Williams in Formula One has split from the premier class and partnered with Juncos.

“He has already made the decision to leave his Williams shares in Formula One. He joined us and we joined forces. He has what I don’t have, and vice versa. So this gave us the opportunity to return to Indycar but in a totally different way, because before we didn’t know when we were racing, now we are one of the stable teams in the championship”, says Ricardo Juncos.

FROM 2017 HAS OWN FACTORY

But the arrival of Hollinger was not the only impulse that changed the path of the team, the opportunity to build its own headquarters in a beautiful place was the key. “The opportunity arose to buy the land, four acres four blocks from the Indianapolis 500 oval.. I have no idea when we can buy it.”

“After much fighting with the banks, we got credits to build the workshop in 2017. It is 4,000 square meters, it was designed for racing teams from the beginning.”

Arriving at the factory every morning serves as motivation for the project members: “It looks like new, for me it’s so exciting, it’s crazy. One of those things that sometimes happens in life and is hard to believe. It’s a huge facility for the team to have a workshop like that with trucks inside. In winter, for example, we are 25 degrees below zero. That’s another one of the little dreams we’ve achieved”.

ARGENTINA WANTS INDYCAR RACE

Completing the Indycar season at the best level is the current big challenge of Ricardo Juncos, but he has another idea in mind and has become a medium-long-term goal: to bring a Grand Prix of the category to Argentina.

A milestone that took place in 1971, at the Ciudad de Rafaela circuit, and would mean breaking the tradition of running mostly on US territory. Toronto is the only city currently visiting Indycar outside the United States, Brazil last visited South America in 2015.

“After 51 years, we took our car to Argentina last November. It was managed by Agustín (Canapino), we did an exhibition in Buenos Aires before 60,000 people, and another in Termas de Río Hondo before 15,000. It’s a Wednesday, a weekday. Those numbers dwarf the category leaders. Ricardo Juncos is clear that running in his country will be a guaranteed success.

“This is what I want to show, what car racing means to Argentines, that we are crazy after football and we also have Formula One-level tracks like Termas de Río Hondo,” he said with a smile. the director of Juncos Hollinger.

Now, that dream, still far away, is quite close: “We are in the process. It is up to Indycar to make a decision, to study the demographic that should also serve them. The more Latino support we have, the more helpful it will be for the category to go to Mexico, Brazil or wherever. The passion we have in Latin America is incredible and definitely superior to what we have here, but we have to show it”.