Newsroom (USA), March 10.- 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 demonstrating 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 championship. of the Indycar.
“My family was very poor, my parents don’t have rings because they sold them to eat. We are six brothers, we lived a very harsh reality when I was a boy, being able to see this now is incredible, a dream”, says Ricardo, still savoring the good participation in the first Grand Prix of the season.
“My family was very poor, my parents don’t have rings because they sold them to eat. We are six brothers, we lived a very harsh reality when I was a boy, being able to see this now is incredible, a dream”, says Ricardo, still savoring the good participation in the first Grand Prix of the season.
“Culturally we are so different that at times we can make a difference. We are not as structured as they are, there are times when you have to get out of the structure. Whenever something happens that requires you to react quickly, I believe that Latinos always have an advantage. It is what I tried to apply in my team in all these years”.
half the budget
A team with Indycar aspirations manages budgets above ten million dollars, Juncos Hollinger does so with half of those figures. It maintains sixty workers among pilots, mechanics, engineers and office staff.
Gathering all these professionals and competing on equal terms is quite a challenge for Ricardo and his team: “Clearly we have to work hard on budgets, marketing… The goal is for the commercial side to help the sports side, in that We are very strong and we have always won in lower categories. It’s about making this whole mechanism work.”
Gathering all these professionals and competing on equal terms is quite a challenge for Ricardo and his team: “Clearly we have to work hard on budgets, marketing… The goal is for the commercial side to help the sports side, in that We are very strong and we have always won in lower categories. It’s about making this whole mechanism work.”
“He had already made the decision to leave his Williams shares in Formula One. He came with us and we joined forces. He had what I didn’t, 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.
Since 2017 with its own factory
But the arrival of Hollinger is not the only impulse that has changed the path of the team, the opportunity to build its own headquarters in a privileged place has been key. “The opportunity arose to purchase the land, four acres four blocks from the Indianapolis 500 oval. At that time he had no idea that we could ever buy it.
After fighting so much with banks, we got credits to build the workshop in 2017. It has 4,000 square meters, it is designed for racing teams from scratch”.
Arriving at the factory every morning motivates the members of the project: “It still looks new, for me to see it is very exciting, very crazy. One of those things that sometimes happen in life and it’s hard to believe. It is a huge facility for the team to have such a workshop with the trucks inside. In winter, for example, we are 25 degrees below zero. That is another of the small dreams that we were able to achieve”.
Argentina wants an Indycar race
Completing the Indycar season at the best level is Ricardo Juncos’ present great challenge, but there is another idea that is on his mind and has become a medium-long-term objective: to bring a Grand Prix of the category to Argentina.
A milestone that already occurred in 1971, in the Ciudad de Rafaela circuit, and would mean breaking with the tradition of running mostly on US territory. Only Toronto is the city that currently visits the Indycar outside the United States, Brazil being the last visit to South America in 2015.
“After 51 years we took our car to Argentina in 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 was a Wednesday, a weekday. Those numbers have impressed those who rule the category. Ricardo Juncos is clear that racing in his country would be a guaranteed success.
“It was what I wanted to show, what car racing means for Argentines, that we are crazy after football and we also have Formula One-level tracks like Termas de Río Hondo,” he says with a smile. the director of Juncos Hollinger.
Now, that dream, still distant, is a little closer: “We are in the process. It is up to Indycar to make the decision, to analyze the demographic part that has to also serve them. The more Latino support we have, the more it will help for the category to go to Mexico, Brazil or wherever. The passion we have in Latin America is incredible and surely superior to what we have here, but we have to show it”.