INDIANAPOLIS – Dennis Reinbold couldn’t stand the pain. For the local car dealership maven turned IndyCar team owner, the roar of engines, the skidding of tires, the visualization of crew members shuffling like worker bees cut like a knife when he didn’t have a horse in the race.

Reinbold made a special trip out to the Streets of St. Petersburg for the 2014 series-opener, reasoning that as the team owner of Dreyer and Reinbold Racing — even with just a one-off Indy-only effort planned that year — Florida was the place to be that weekend.

He remembers crossing the bridge over Tampa Bay and nearing the street course, but as he entered the pits, that familiar burst of adrenaline that normally came when something was on the line didn’t arrive. Reinbold wasn’t used to feeling like a glorified spectator as a 15-year veteran of the paddock, and he suddenly realized there wasn’t anything for him to glean from watching the season-opener in person for a team that wouldn’t race for more than a month.

So he left.

“And I haven’t been to another race that we haven’t participated in since,” he told IndyStar this week. “My love for racing, it’s so hard to explain. But it’s just part of you, and you just get so much enjoyment at the track and being part of racing.”

Six years later, he’ll return to St. Pete, undoubtedly with a cheeky grin and a steely focus, the culmination of a long journey back toward IndyCar relevance. Reinbold announced this week that his team, which has run as an Indy 500-only team each of the past six seasons, will participate in a minimum of three races in 2020 with six-year series veteran Sage Karam.

At the moment, those races will include St. Pete, Toronto and the 500, along with a planned second car in the 500 that the team has fielded each of the past two Mays at IMS. Although paperwork hasn’t been finalized, J.R. Hildebrand will likely fill that seat after racing each of the past two 500s while teamed up with Karam, Reinbold and company.

The plan ahead for Team Reinbold

The team’s owner was quick to note that sponsorship money is the lone thing holding Dreyer and Reinbold Racing from a more expansive program as soon as this year. Results in those three races could open even more doors, he said.

Then again, that’s been the story ever since his team had to shutter just five races into its 2013 campaign on the heels of Oriol Servia’s 11th-place finish at IMS without the capital to continue. The fact that sponsorship money and dedication is on the rise for Reinbold’s team is a testament to his resolve and faith in playing the short game for more than half a decade.

“We’ve got a lot to learn,” said Reinbold of his team’s scheduled test next week at Sebring International Raceway, their first on-track time with a prototype of this year’s aeroscreen design. “We’ll just see how it goes. We’re going to be out there three days, and it’s just a matter of collecting data nonstop, sorting through and figuring out what we have to know.”

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Hitting the track in the winter has been all but foreign for Reinbold’s drivers and crew since 2014, when a series of business deals, rather than on-track performance, tore down the support of his team from the inside. They were victims of the failed Lotus engine fiasco in 2012, when the engine manufacturer’s return to the series lasted a single season. Lotus and DRR severed their seasonlong engine deal that year after four races due to lack of performance. From there, Servia strung together four top-five finishes over six weekends in a Chevy-powered machine. Sponsorship issues the following year only magnified the issues.

“We had tough circumstances in 2013, and it was hard to come back from that, financially,” he said. “We realized: ‘It doesn’t make sense to continue right now. Let’s regroup and just focus on Indy the next year or two.’ And that mindset continued and rolled over however many more years now (four).”

“But did we want to expand and keep growing? Of course.”

Sponsors eager to invest

The green light he had been waiting half a decade for came in sponsorship meetings this offseason. Reinbold is quick to clarify that those meetings took place before the stunning reveal of Roger Penske’s purchase of IMS and the IndyCar series from Hulman and Co. Although certainly enthused about The Captain’s new job title, Reinbold's team didn’t need to ride Penske’s coattails for sponsors to see the potential the team owner has held faith in all this time.

He said the team plans to unveil its full sponsorship plan for 2020 in the coming weeks.

“They wanted to do more, and they saw IndyCar as a growing entity within the world of motorsports,” he said. “They see the growth.”

Trust in Sage Karam

Reinbold also believes in the prospect of Karam as a budding star who just needs additional support and opportunities to reach his full potential.

He showed flashes of it early on, particularly in his IndyCar debut at the 2014 Indy 500, where as a steely 19-year-old he recovered from the car losing its ability to shift midway through the race. A roadblock that could have derailed those with years more experience didn’t phase Karam.

“I trust Sage implicitly. I can see the talent is there,” Reinbold said. “He goes to shut the car off and refire it, and you can hear him calmly talking through it as we’re all holding our breaths. He drove all the way up to sixth, and even after coming out of the pits, like 21st, he drove back up and finished ninth.”

Karam ventured off for a partial-season run with Chip Ganassi Racing in 2015, when he finished fifth at Fontana and earned his first career podium with third-place in Iowa. Ever since, he has bided his time with annual runs at IMS with Reinbold, holding a best finish of 19th a year ago, which he followed up with a two-race stint with Carlin later in the summer.

In a series with constant driver shuffling among the young and midlevel talent trying to find the type of traction that can create, or at least prolong, a career, Karam is unique in the five seasons he has spent waiting patiently for his second big shot, alongside Reinbold. That dedication to the team’s slow, winding journey back has really meant something to the team owner and has, in a way, helped keep the ship and Reinbold’s dreams afloat.

His only win as an IndyCar owner came all the way back in 2000 during DRR’s series debut with Robbie Buhl at Walt Disney World Speedway. Since, he has longed to make another appearance in the winner’s circle — this six-year stretch just the latest hurdle.

Their 2020 plans, Reinbold said, are a very targeted step in eventually returning to full time. With sponsors pushing for a Toronto appearance, adding another street course with St. Pete made perfect sense in helping them gradually build back familiarity with IndyCar as a whole — one step at a time.

Those roads Karam will scream around in March provide an all-too-perfect symmetry, too.

“Whenever the month of May starts, and I’ve driven through that tunnel, it’s like ‘I’m so blessed to be back here,’” Reinbold said. “But everywhere, that’s how you should feel. That whole other gamut of emotions, you need to feel that, too.”

Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown