Austin Cindric picked up the phone last Wednesday and called a man he had never actually raced against. Rusty Wallace won his last Cup Series race the year Cindric’s father was still building his own open-wheel career, more than a decade before Austin was born. But when Team Penske decided to mark its 60th anniversary with a throwback at North Wilkesboro Speedway, there was only one car anyone wanted to see again.
“I think when you think of the No. 2 car, you think of Rusty Wallace. That’s the first thing you think of,” Cindric said. “It’s the car, the team, the driver that really built Team Penske’s NASCAR program into what it is today, or at least a great foundation for it. So to be able to go through our 60th anniversary of Team Penske and to not have anything about Rusty Wallace, I think, would be a miss.”
On Sunday night, Cindric will pilot a black and gold No. 2 Freightliner Ford at North Wilkesboro, a scheme lifted directly from the car Wallace drove to a career-high 10 wins in 1993, a season that included a sweep of both races at the tight, bullring short track. It happens to land on the same weekend the speedway itself returns to the Cup Series schedule for the first time in three decades, a coincidence Team Penske built an entire tribute around.
A Car Built From Memory, Not a Template
Cindric didn’t just borrow the paint. He called Wallace directly to ask permission, and by his own account the conversation ran long before it ran short. “Actually talked to him Wednesday,” Cindric said. “He’s all excited about how much he loved that car. Like, ‘Oh man, that’s a badass car!’ Like, all right, good, we’re gonna run it again. So it was cool to talk to him about that, and I think it’s gonna be great to have it out there, and most importantly, do my part in representing those colors well.”
The scheme carries the same No. 2 lettering Wallace ran three decades ago, wrapped around a mosaic of photographs pulled from Team Penske’s history with the car. But the detail that separates this throwback from a simple nostalgia play sits on the rear decklid, where the names of every current Team Penske employee are printed in gold. Four names in particular stand out to anyone who worked in the shop in 1993: Mike Wingate, Jeffrey Thousand, Gary Brooks and Dave Munari, all of whom turned wrenches on Wallace’s car that season and all of whom still show up to work in Mooresville, North Carolina, more than 30 years later.
The Radio Call Nobody Forgot
Munari, who worked as a fabricator and windshield cleaner on the 1993 car, still remembers a specific radio exchange from that spring’s North Wilkesboro race between Wallace and crew chief Buddy Parrott, the kind of story that gets retold at the shop until it hardens into legend.
“Wilkesboro was the worst for traffic, but Rusty could really get through traffic,” Munari said. “I’ll tell you a little funny story about the Wilkesboro race, the spring race. Buddy Parrott was the crew chief, and we’d run 30 laps. We’re leading the race. Buddy said, ‘Rusty, come in here and pit for four tires.’ He said, ‘Buddy, are you crazy? We’ve only run 30 laps!’ He said, ‘I said get in here.’ We come in, change four tires. Rusty went out and just about lapped the second-place car. That’s how much tires meant. So we run about 20 laps, and Rusty goes, ‘Hey, Buddy, is it time to put tires on yet?'”
Wallace finished that 1993 season as championship runner-up, a year defined by short track speed the team still points to as a template. Together, Munari, Wingate, Thousand and Brooks represent something Team Penske leans on more than most organizations in the garage: a workforce that has stayed put. Brooks had already bounced between Ranier Racing, J.D. Stacy’s team and Precision Products Racing before he joined Penske in 1991, and the contrast stuck with him immediately.
“When I first came to work here, just getting a chance to go to work for Roger Penske meant a whole lot to me. I always wanted to do that,” Brooks said. “I worked for other teams, and whenever they would show up, you’d sit there and see them unload the stuff they had and the equipment they had, and whatever. It was like, man, look at that. These guys have got it going on over there. So that’s what enticed me to actually just want to be here and take the job, and then it’s just caliber of the people.”
Jeffrey Thousand credits the organization’s stability to ownership, not luck. “We have an owner that loves racing,” Thousand said. “And with that being said, he’s going to give us all the resources that we need to perform. Not to say you don’t have your typical ups and downs with racing, but we knew from the get-go with Roger supporting Team Penske that what we needed, we were going to get.”
What the No. 2 Car Actually Represents
The No. 2 has carried more of Team Penske’s identity than any other number in its stable. Between Wallace’s 37 wins, Brad Keselowski’s 34, Kurt Busch’s eight and Cindric’s own three, the car has delivered 82 victories and one championship, Keselowski’s title run in 2012. Cindric is still chasing his first win of 2026, and he isn’t pretending the throwback paint guarantees anything different on Sunday night. Short tracks and superspeedways have historically been where Team Penske performs best, and he’s treating North Wilkesboro as a real opportunity rather than a ceremonial lap.
What counts more to him, by his own description, is what the tribute says about the people who rarely get their names on a car. “For me, the biggest win is getting the employees involved and it being a home race in a lot of sense,” Cindric said. “I mean, you think of Charlotte being a home race, but this is still very much a home race to have this all in-house and be able to thank the people that really make Team Penske what it is.”
Sixty Years, One Number
Team Penske’s anniversary season has produced plenty of milestones already, including a manufacturer landmark for Ford at Atlanta the same week this throwback was unveiled. But few of those moments connect the organization’s present to its past as directly as this one. Wallace arrived at Team Penske in 1991 after a rocky exit from Blue Max Racing, and the partnership took only two years to produce the best season of his career. His 1993 campaign, 10 wins and a runner-up points finish, remains the benchmark every short track specialist to drive the No. 2 afterward has been measured against, including Keselowski in his own title run and Cindric now.
Wallace’s fingerprints are still on the way the team approaches short tracks like North Wilkesboro, according to people who worked alongside him. The car wasn’t just fast in 1993, it was reliable in exactly the moments that mattered, which is why a four-tire call on lap 30 could turn into a near lap of the field rather than a gamble that backfired. That kind of institutional memory doesn’t show up in a press release, but it shows up in how a crew chief calls a race three decades later.
Cindric is aware he’s stepping into a lineage rather than just borrowing a color scheme for a night. Three of his four Cup Series wins have come on short tracks or road courses, a pattern that lines up with exactly the kind of racing Wallace built his reputation on. Whether that translates into a result at North Wilkesboro remains to be seen, but the throwback gives Sunday’s race an importance that a typical points-paying event at a new track simply wouldn’t carry.
A Track That Waited to Matter Again
North Wilkesboro’s return to a points-paying Cup Series slate closes a gap that stretched back to 1996, and Wallace himself will be on hand as grand marshal for Sunday’s Window World 450. The track spent years hosting exhibition and All-Star events after its 2023 revival before NASCAR finally slotted it back into the regular championship calendar this season, giving Cindric’s throwback a stage that wasn’t available even a year ago. None of the current full-time Cup Series drivers have ever competed in a points race at the speedway, meaning Sunday marks new territory for the entire field, not just for one driver honoring one legend.
For Wingate, Thousand, Brooks and Munari, the scheme isn’t just a paint job to admire from the garage. It is a rare public acknowledgment that the sport’s history lives in the hands of people who never had their names called on television, printed instead in gold letters on a fender for one night. Cindric will be the one driving it, but he’s clear about whose weekend this really belongs to.
