Josef Newgarden became the first driver since Helio Castroneves in 2001-02 to win back-to-back Indianapolis 500 races. Newgarden passed Pato O’Ward on the final lap of the May 26 race to earn a repeat victory.
Earning the 20th Team Penske Indianapolis 500 victory in a race in which the organization swept the front row for the first time since 1988, how does Newgarden view the overall season when the collective team won eight of 17 races but Scott McLaughlin was the top Penske point scorer in third?
“I think you have to divide the season,” Newgarden said. “When it comes to the Indy 500, it’s a super successful year. Could not be more successful for the entire team. For that same point, it’s very, very gratifying. I think in a lot of ways, it’s what we sought out the most was to fix the Month of May, and we fixed every aspect of it this year.”
Team Penske entered the 2020 NTT INDYCAR SERIES season with two consecutive “500” wins by Will Power in 2018 and Simon Pagenaud in 2019. Newgarden also was the defending series champion.
However, Penske drivers qualified 13th, 22nd, 25th and 28th in 2020 at Indy and finished fifth, 11th, 14th and 18th. That was a precursor to a frustrating four years in the biggest race of the season where the 11th-place start by Power in 2022 was the top Team Penske “500” grid position between 2020-23.
The team led 25 combined laps among the 800 race laps during that four-year span.
That’s why the 2023 Newgarden victory, when Newgarden climbed from 17th at the start, could have masked the deficit. The team led six laps that day, with the other finishing positions being 14th and 23rd.
To Newgarden’s point, Team Penske continued to seek improvement and led 92 of 200 race laps last May, in addition to sweeping the front row in qualifying. But Newgarden dipped in other areas throughout the remainder of the season. His only other win came at World Wide Technology Raceway after he earned four victories in 2023.
Newgarden finished eighth in points, his worst championship finish since 2014. Since he joined Team Penske in 2017, Newgarden had finished first, fifth, first, second, second, second and fifth, respectively.
“Personally, for the 2 car from a championship perspective, it’s been a really disastrous year,” he said. “I don’t know how to put it other than disastrous. I guess what I would say is sometimes it’s not your year or sometimes it’s not your day, those both have been true multiple times this season, and that’s the way it goes.”
Case in point was qualifying on the front row for both Milwaukee Mile races on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 but getting caught up in crashes both days. Newgarden and Marcus Ericsson had a racing incident on Lap 146 of the first 250-lapper, and a day later, Newgarden was punted from behind on a waved-off start to the race.
Newgarden also finished fourth April 21 in Long Beach, but late-race contact while battling for the lead with Colton Herta in the final corner cost him a potential top-two result. Detroit was a disaster, finishing 26th after qualifying third. At WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, Newgarden was fifth on a late-race restart but dropped his tires off track and slipped to 19th. In Toronto, problems on pit road dropped him from a podium finish to 11th.
Between bad luck, costly mistakes and the Push to Pass penalties wiping away a season-opening victory at St. Petersburg, Newgarden is happy for a reset in 2025. He will attempt to become a three-time champion in 2025 and the first driver to win three consecutive Indianapolis 500 races.
“I’m very much a perfectionist,” he said. “I kind of go off numbers, and the numbers are what matter. But in the reality, there’s so much more outside of our control as a team that aren’t always reflective in the numbers. The good thing that always brings comfort, and that maybe I've always personally had comfort in, is that the people in the know, people that are inside the team, know what we're doing well, and know what we're achieving across the year, regardless of the results.
“I come back to what keeps me motivated is the potential on the No. 2 car. The potential in the No. 2 car is so much higher than what people are seeing. I don't want to sound like a broken record and continue to use that line, but it's true: We've still not reached our ceiling. That keeps me excited. We’ll reset for next year and try to be better. That’s all you can do.”