Josef Newgarden Makes Bold Statement With Repeat Indianapolis 500 Victory
By Susan Wade
Unfairly left to shoulder public responsibility alone for a Team Penske cheating scandal last month, Josef Newgarden faced the media, the NTT IndyCar Series, and fans dutifully and humbly. But the 2023 Indianapolis 500 champion knew the only way to restore his racing reputation was to let his actions and his driving skills speak for him.
He took that bold first step Sunday, giving a thrilling finish to faithful fans who outlasted a severe storm of another sort. Newgarden passed super-popular Mexican driver Pato O’Ward on the final lap of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 to become the first driver in 22 years to score back-to-back victories at The Brickyard.
Determined and defiant, Newgarden triumphed in the intensely dramatic, brashly aggressive 108th running of the Memorial Day Weekend classic for the Penske organization’s 20th victory at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
After dashing into the grandstands, vaulting fences, and embracing as many of the estimated 330,000 fans as he could, the two-time winner said, “They can say whatever they want after this race – I don’t care.”
“That’s the way I wanted to win, right there,” Newgarden said, as across the yard of bricks, O’Ward, was crushed by his second runner-up finish in three years.
O’Ward shares heartache of finishing second again
“It’s hard to put it into words. I’m proud of the work that we did today. We recovered, we went back, we went forward, we went back. Some people are just driving like maniacs. It was just such a stressful race. We had so many near-race-enders and just so close again. So f—— close,” the Arrow McLaren driver said with swollen, red eyes and tears streaming down his cheeks. “This place doesn’t owe me anything. Oh, man – this is so painful when you put so much into it, and then two corners short.”
Newgarden, whose victory margin was .3417 of a second, called O’Ward “a champion. He drove like a champion. He’s just as deserving. He easily could have won the race. When you don’t win, it hurts. I came here 11 times and left with a broken heart.”
O’Ward said, “I put that car in certain points where I didn’t know if I was going to come out the other end and in one piece because I just want to win this race so freaking bad. It owes me nothing, so every time we come back, there’s always a smile on my face to have another opportunity.”
“Josef is a great competitor. I’ve raced wheel to wheel with him so many times. He’s obviously one of the stars in the series, one of the strong ones,” he said. “I knew it was going to be a fight until the end. I really thought that I did everything in my power to get it done.” He said he’s “fine. It’s been a tough month. So much goes into this race. I think I’m somebody that wears my heart on my sleeve. I don’t really hide anything. It’s just when you’ve come so close and it just doesn’t seem to — you just can’t seem to get it right, it’s just a lot of emotion I would say.”
Newgarden said Sunday’s result was “gratifying” and not just because he earned a $400,000 bonus from Borg-Warner for his repeat victory. “Someone had to reset the bank,” he joked. Rather, he attributed much of his satisfaction to the quality of O’Ward’s driving skill, that his winning Turn 3 move “doesn’t work” without the integrity and quality of a racer such as O’Ward.
Larson fares well in first half of ‘double’
Kyle Larson, the heralded NASCAR champion, drove respectably to an 18th-place finish blemished only by a pit-speed penalty before he flew off to Charlotte to compete in the Coca-Cola 600 Sunday evening.
“He’s been a joy to have here,” Newgarden said. “I think it speaks volumes about the Indianapolis 500 that he stayed.”
Larson said he would love to compete at the 500 again next May.
The lead changed hands 49 times among 18 drivers, and when his celebration calmed down, Newgarden said, “It was full on.” And his strategist, Jonathan Diuguid, who stepped in for this race (while team president and strategist Tim Cindric and engineer Luke Mason served their suspensions) said, “We were on offense for the last 60 laps. It will be an iconic race. It was non-stop action.”
Like the Sunday-morning storm literally washed away dirt and debris, another, historic Indianapolis victory, figuratively speaking, washed away a lot of the same for Josef Newgarden.
NOTES:
MASS EVACUATION – About an hour and a half before the scheduled start of the race, the estimated 330,000 fans were asked to vacate the grandstands and seek shelter immediately because a severe storm was on its way. That’s about the equivalent of evacuating an entire city the size of Honolulu in a matter of minutes. As soon as the rain stopped, fans flooded back to their seats. The race started four hours late under sunny skies. But it featured shifting shadows and changing ambient and track temperatures as it had to beat a mandatory cutoff of 8:15 p.m.
NEWGARDEN RULE? – Josef Newgarden has proven he is accountable for his actions. But he deflected blame or credit for the new rule the NTT IndyCar Series announced two days before the race.
In a prepared statement, the series said, “The dashed white line from the exit of Turn 4 to the pit entry attenuator will be officiated for Sunday’s race. Cars that have left-side tires past the dashed line will be penalized unless entering the pit lane, for incident avoidance or in an obvious attempt to avoid a closed pit lane and return to the racetrack.
In accordance with INDYCAR penalty guidelines, INDYCAR can impose penalties that include:
- Drive-through penalty
- If at the conclusion of the race, a time penalty equal to a drive-through penalty
- If under yellow condition, the car is ordered to the rear of the restart lineup.”
It also clarified restart procedures: “In collaboration with NTT INDYCAR SERIES teams and drivers, the 2024 restart line designated in the last corner will not be implemented at the 500. As in previous years, cars may begin racing (including passing) at the declaration of a green condition.”
Asked how he felt about having a rule named for him, Newgarden said, “I don’t know that it’s named after me. I know it was published as that. In reality, it’s happened quite a bit over the last couple years. I think this style of racing really crept in. If you want to date it, probably back to [Juan Pablo] Montoya in 2015 is where it started creeping in.”
He spoke about today’s style of racing. “The way we compete and the way the cars draft is very, very difficult to find an advantage. You can be at points just exposed when you’re sitting in the lead and you have cars behind you,” he said.
“I think last year was a combination of historical approach, but also reaction. I mean, I knew immediately when I went into turn three and I saw where Marcus [Ericsson] was positioned, he was very tightly tucked behind me, I thought, ‘Man, the opportunity for him to get back behind me before the line was pretty high. I knew the rules at that point with the line. They weren’t policing it. You had to use it,” Newgarden said.
He said he believes the ruling “is unanimously liked. We’ve all wanted it to change. It’s good they’re going to be doing that now. I don’t know that it will change the racing style too much, but it will certainly change that little portion.”
ERICSSON FRUSTRATED AGAIN – Marcus Ericsson, the 2022 Indianapolis 500 winner, was perturbed last year by the final-lap shootout format that saw his dreams of back-to-back triumphs at The Brickyard fizzle. He called it “an unfair and dangerous end to the race.”
This time around, his frustration came right away . . . in what he might regard an unfair and dangerous start to the race. He and Pietro Fittipaldi were collateral damage from Tom Blomqvist’s inexperienced-rookie spin on the opening lap. Ericsson was fuming about his über-early exit, then couldn’t stop saying, “I can’t believe it”: “I can’t believe it. It’s unbelievable. It’s just so frustrating. I don’t know what to say. We had to work so hard. The team did such a good job rebuilding that car. We fight it all last weekend, we fight it all week to be good, and then this happens. It’s just — I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
It was just the first of four dismal incidents for Andretti Global by Lap 114. Kyle Kirkwood, the team’s best qualifier at No. 11, received a pit-violation penalty for punting Callum Ilott into Ed Carpenter’s pit box while Carpenter was attempting to swoop in. Colton Herta, a pre-race favorite seeking his first Indianapolis 500 victory, spun on Lap 86 and made contact with the wall. He thought he was done for the day, but the team was able to repair the nose cone in the garage area and put Herta back into the mix. Then on the Lap 114 restart, Marco Andretti, son of team owner Michael Andretti, fought his car all the way into a spin and a wall-smack with the left rear tire.
DIXON RAISES EYEBROWS – Ryan Hunter-Reay won this race 10 years ago, but any chance he had of repeating vanished on Lap 107. He made a 360-degree spin through the grass, avoiding heavy traffic, but Scott Dixon made contact with him as Hunter-Reay was almost cleanly off the track.
Already wary of his Dreyer & Reinbold/Cusick Motorsports Vensure Chevrolet since the final pre-race practice Friday, Hunter-Reay said once he collected himself, “I was shocked on both fronts. I mean, I’ve been racing Scott Dixon for probably close two decades, and I’ve just never really seen anything like that on a super speedway. So yeah, it was a shock. And we had been racing each other clean, so I’m not really sure what that was all about. He knows I was there. I don’t know where, I don’t know where he is going and how that’s not a penalty beyond me, I don’t know.
“But I had my hands full today. We really struggled with the car’s balance. We threw some changes at it. I knew at Carb Day I needed something really aggressive to go forward and we took a risk on it and man, it was loose. It was a handful,” he said. “Just too loose in the race, but we were coming back a little bit there. And yeah, that was an odd one from Scott. Very, very confusing. And same with Race Control.”
Dixon said he “felt bad” about his part in the incident and called Hunter-Reay “a good friend.”
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