What is the Penske Racing Museum?
There is a glass building on the south frontage of the Loop 101 at Scottsdale Road with Indianapolis 500 winners parked inside it, and most of the people who drive past every day think it is another showroom.
The Penske Racing Museum is Roger Penske’s trophy room, planted in November 2002 in the middle of his Penske Automall, the row of Ferrari, Bentley, Porsche, Land Rover and BMW stores that lines Chauncey Lane on the Phoenix side of the city limit. It is two stories and roughly 9,000 square feet. Admission is free, the doors are open seven days a week, and there is no ticket desk, no docent, no velvet rope. You park in a dealership space, walk in the front, and stand a foot from the car Rick Mears drove to his first Indy win in 1979.
Team Penske has won the Indianapolis 500 a record 20 times, and the museum’s ground floor is where a rotating handful of those winners sit when they are not being borrowed for an anniversary. Danny Sullivan’s 1985 March 85C, the “spin and win” car that did a full 360 in front of Mario Andretti and kept going, is the crowd favorite. Joey Logano’s 2015 Daytona 500 Ford gives the stock-car people something to hold onto. A replica of the Pontiac Catalina Penske himself raced at Riverside in 1963 reminds you that the man selling you a Range Rover next door used to be quick.
Upstairs is the mezzanine of trophies and the Turn 4 Café, a weekday counter run by a caterer, with tables that look down on the cars and out onto the dealership test track. It is the only museum we know of where you can eat a club sandwich above an Indy 500 winner while somebody test-drives a Lamborghini outside the window.
How to do it right
Aim for a weekday late morning. The museum opens at 10, the café opens around the same time and closes by 2:30, and between 11 and 1 the building has a low hum of dealership staff on lunch break and almost no tourists. Walk the floor first, eat upstairs second, then go back down once you know what you are looking at. On weekends the café is closed and the hours shift, noon to 5 on Sunday, so read the frontmatter before you drive.
Finding the door is the hard part. Chauncey Lane runs east-west just south of the 101, one block west of Scottsdale Road. Every building on it is a dealership and the museum is a dealership-looking building among them. Look for race cars behind the front glass. There is no dedicated lot; any open space in front is fine. The official site lists 7191 E Chauncey and most map apps say 7125. Do not let the discrepancy send you back to the freeway.
Read the placards, they are better than most. The cars are labeled with the year, the race and the driver, and the tire stacks and engines along the walls have their own notes. A full lap of the ground floor takes twenty minutes if you read; the mezzanine adds ten. This is a one-hour stop, not an afternoon, which is exactly why it pairs well with everything else in North Scottsdale.
Third Saturday is the show. Once a month the lot becomes Cars & Coffee, 8 to 10 a.m. from fall through spring and 7 to 9 in summer, free, with food trucks and several hundred cars ranging from concours-grade to somebody’s uncle’s Nova. Arrive before the start; the rare metal shows up first and leaves first. If you want the weekly version of the same ritual, the Pavilions Rock ‘n’ Roll Car Show runs every Saturday evening down at Talking Stick, and both are on our list of things that happen every week.
Bring the kids. Nothing is behind glass except the trophies. A seven-year-old can crouch at fender height and look into the cockpit of a car that won at 200 miles an hour, and nobody will say a word. It is on our museums and attractions list and our budget list for that reason: it is the most impressive free hour in the north Valley.
Why an Indy trophy room ended up between a Ferrari store and a Land Rover store
Roger Penske stopped driving in 1965 to sell Chevrolets in Philadelphia, and the pattern of his whole career was set: racing as the public face, car dealerships as the engine. Penske Racing won its first Indianapolis 500 with Mark Donohue in 1972 and built its shops in Pennsylvania and later Mooresville, North Carolina. Penske Automotive Group, meanwhile, grew into one of the largest dealer groups in the world, and by the turn of the century one of its densest clusters was here, on the freeway frontage where Scottsdale Road crosses the 101, marketed as the Scottsdale 101 Auto Collection.
That is the whole explanation for the museum’s location. Penske had a collection of winning cars scattered between shops and loan exhibits, and he had a campus full of affluent customers who like fast things. In November 2002 the two were combined: a purpose-built, two-story museum in the middle of the dealerships, free to anyone who wandered in, with the trophies upstairs where you could see them from lunch. When it opened, the team had 15 Indy 500 wins and the museum held 12 of the winning cars. The count has since climbed to 20, the last two with Josef Newgarden in 2023 and 2024, and the floor changes as cars go out on loan to the Speedway museum and to the team’s own anniversary displays.
The Scottsdale connection is not incidental. This corner of the Valley is the closest thing America has to a car-culture capital for one week a year, when Arizona Car Week puts Barrett-Jackson at WestWorld and half a dozen other auctions in tents and ballrooms within a few miles of this building. The museum is a natural free stop between paid ones, and the Penske lot’s Cars & Coffee is the unofficial morning gathering during that week. The rest of the year, it is what it looks like: a quiet, immaculate room where the most successful team owner in American motorsport keeps the receipts, next door to where he sells cars.
What to know before you go
It is not a large museum and it does not pretend to be. There is no simulator, no film, no restoration shop to tour, and no guarantee any particular car will be there on a given day; the team borrows its own history constantly. Treat it as a free hour, best combined with something else on the north side, whether that is a morning hike, a dealership browse, or lunch at the Turn 4 Café itself. Call ahead only if one car is the reason you are coming. Otherwise just go. It has been sitting there, free, since 2002, and the fact that you have not been yet is the point of this page.