By the time he was 20, Simon Pagenaud, the son and grandson of grocers, had been in charge of several departments — video games, produce, cheese — at the family’s E.Leclerc supermarket in Montmorillon, France, his hometown.

Pagenaud, who had competed in a Formula Renault as a teenager, wanted to race cars for a living, but his family did not have the money or the contacts for such a passion. Christian Pagenaud, his father, did not want to hand Simon a blank check to race, either.

“You’ve got to have partners to finance you, buy your way in,” Simon Pagenaud said in an interview after winning his first Indianapolis 500 in May. “That’s the only way you can make it to the top. Once you’ve shown your potential, then you might become a professional. I basically had to find money to go racing at a high level with the best teams. My dad said: ‘You can’t just go to people and ask for money. It’s not going to work. You’re going to have to find sponsors.’”

With input from his father, Pagenaud decided the best way to raise money was to start his own racing school for business owners at his home racetrack, Circuit du Val de Vienne, about 25 miles southwest of Montmorillon and 250 miles southwest of Paris.