INDIANAPOLIS — After spending several years trying to find her first Indy car victory, Sarah Fisher is hoping the key to success is keeping it all in the family.
Fisher officially unveiled her IndyCar shop during last week’s Indianapolis 500 Media Tour. The family-owned operation, known as Sarah Fisher Racing, includes her husband, Andy O’Gara, and father-in-law, longtime IndyCar chief mechanic John O’Gara.
“I remember when I was 19 years old and coming here to Indy and knowing how incredible the opportunity was to compete here as a driver,” Fisher said. “And now under the umbrella of Sarah Fisher Racing, I get to come here and compete as an owner/driver. So it’s very exciting for me.”
The team plans on running in the Indianapolis 500, the August race at Kentucky Motor Speedway and the season finale at Chicagoland Speedway.
The team also unveiled its marketing partner, Tony Venturoso, the president of Gravity Motorsports and ResQ, an energy drink.
“We spent some time with Sarah over the past several months, and the more and more we spend time together with this group, the decision we made to go with Sarah Fisher Racing was absolutely right on,” Venturoso said. “We’re so thrilled to be here.
“Given the unification of open-wheel, we feel that the popularity will continue to grow and spike in the next coming months and years with the Indy Racing Series, and we want to be part of this and Sarah Fisher for years to come. As we get further down the road, more plans will be announced with Sarah Fisher and upcoming opportunities.”
O’Gara spent many years in Indy car racing, including working as chief mechanic for Robbie Buhl at Team Menard and later in the same capacity at Dreyer & Reinbold Racing.
The opportunity to get into team ownership was the lure that got him to leave Dreyer & Reinbold.
“We’ve come a long way in the last couple months,” O’Gara said. “It wouldn’t be possible without all these guys in the white shirts behind you. It’s our team. We looked about two months ago at some used machinery, and we made a decision to go with all-new stuff.
“We have a good group of guys. They may not have the last name Fisher or O’Gara, but they’re family. I dare anybody to find a better group of guys, to assemble a better group of guys to work on the race car. These guys will do anything. We started with a bare shop and you can see what we have now, and that’s happened in a very short amount of time. It’s going to be very similar to D & R.”
After several seasons trying to get back into the sport, including two tours with Dreyer & Reinbold, Fisher was eager to take the next step in her career by becoming a team owner.
“I wanted to be a team owner,” she said. “When you’re racing as a driver and when you have a big group of people in your family that has input and knows what they’re doing, you think about the way that you want to maybe move forward and some things that you would do differently. I married my crew chief, Andy O’Gara, and obviously our year last year with him being my chief mechanic went well because we went through with the wedding.
“But in thinking about our plans for the future as a married couple now, we got to thinking, around maybe May or June, about taking it on ourselves and being able to make the decisions going forward that we wanted to make and have that reflect in our own team. So, I think he’s the one that originally brought it up to me.”