Newgarden’s Indy Win Lifts the Weight of Expectations From His Shoulders
Josef Newgarden - 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500 Presented By Gainbridge - By: Joe Skibinski
Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden has had his heart broken before at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Determined that this year was going to be different, Newgarden passed reigning champion Marcus Ericsson on a final lap shootout to win Sunday’s wild 107th running of the Indianapolis 500.
“Today we had an opportunity to win the race, and I wasn't looking to take anyone else out of the race, but I was going to put my car on the line to win. I was either going to win the race or I'd end up in the wall. I wasn't here to finish second, third, or fourth today. I was here to win.
So I just did everything I could at the end there.”
Josef Newgarden - 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500 Presented By Gainbridge - By: Travis Hinkle
For Newgarden, it ended 11 years of frustration at Indy and set off a wild celebration at the yard of bricks. Newgarden climbed from his Shell-sponsored Team Penske Chevy, crawled between a gap in the fence used by photographers, then jumped a short fence to celebrate his first Indy win with the fans in the grandstands.
What looked like an act of spontaneous, unbridled joy was actually something Newgarden had planned for a while.
“Yeah, I knew exactly where the gap was. I'd been over there many, many years. I've seen that photo, hole spot, and really it's just like an access point that you can crawl under. It looks like it's closed but there's a way to get through. I knew exactly where I was going at the end of this race.”
“I planned to go higher in the stands, but it quickly got a little out of control, and I thought, maybe the best thing is for me to leave again. I hugged a couple people. I felt the energy, and I'm like, I need to get out of here.”
“But it was really cool. You just can't beat the Hoosier hospitality, the energy that people bring here. It is second to none when it comes to a sporting event.
“I've always known that, having the privilege of being here many, many years and seeing it, and I just wanted to be a part of it. It was always something that would be a dream come true to be able to do that.”
Josef Newgarden - 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500 Presented By Gainbridge - By: Walt Kuhn
Now that Newgarden has an Indy 500 win to go along with his two NTT INDYCAR SERIES championships, he says it’s difficult to compare the two.
“I think this feels more relieving. There's no doubt that this was a bigger weight.
“I think I'm still in the camp that the championship is tougher. In a lot of ways it is, because there's so much more that goes into it.
“This is the single-most difficult race in the world to win. I'll stand by that. There's no doubt. If you're looking at a single event, you cannot beat the difficulty of the Indy 500.
“But I don't know how you compare the two. You're looking at one standalone versus a championship, and putting a championship together, I think, is very, very difficult. You really see the best rise to the top. You see the best team, the best pit stop performance, consistently it adds up over a year, and it's very difficult to do that.
“They felt very different. I just don't know that -- I classify them as different things. I think internally I feel differently about them.”
Even though he now has an Indy 500 win on his record, Newgarden doesn’t believe that makes him a more complete driver.
“I mean, I don't. I'm going to be honest, I don't feel different -- the only thing I feel is the weight of what everyone else wants to put on you because they think the Indy 500 has to be won.
“I think about all the drivers that probably should have won this race that never won it, and it doesn't make a difference whether they won it or not. Their career is still fantastic. It's more just a shame that it didn't work out for them.
“That's really how I feel about the event. I'm not here to take anything away from it, but I don't like looping it into the category that you have to have it to be complete. I don't feel differently as a driver because today happened, I just feel less weight.”
“I think this feels more relieving. There’s no doubt that this was a bigger weight.”
According to Newgarden, that relief extends to everyone on his crew as well.
“Well, I think it's gratifying for the entire team. There should be a tremendous amount of pride across the entire Team Penske group because we've had a tough go here the last three, four years, and we've had a lot of questions to answer every day.
“After every qualifying weekend we've got to come and put a brave face on and say that we just didn't fully get there.
“I knew this year, similar to last year, but even better this year, that we had a good race car and a car that could win the race, and I wasn't worried about where we qualified.
“Of course we wanted to be on the front row, and if possible qualify on the pole, but it's very gratifying for all the work that's been put in.
“I know firsthand how much effort has been poured into the last two, three years to figure out how we win this race again, and for our standard, we don't show up here to be average. There's nothing given; Indy doesn't owe anybody anything. It doesn't matter how many 500s you have. It doesn't matter what team you are. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It isn't an easy place to succeed at.
“I don't think we came with an ego, and to work through the difficulty the last three, four years, this victory is a win for all of us on our team, and it's very gratifying for every member that's put the time in.”
Josef Newgarden and Team Penske crew - 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500 Presented By Gainbridge - By: James Black
Over the years, Newgarden has put pressure on himself to win the 500. After all, when you drive for team owner Roger Penske, who’s now won 19 500s, it’s expected you have success at Indy. And each year he didn’t win the 500, that burden of expectations became heavier.
“I'll be honest, it's annoying. It's been terrible. It is mentally draining to be here for three weeks and just to know that you really only have one opportunity, and it comes down to today, and that's the day you've got to be perfect and great and everything has got to work out.
“So you spend all this time and effort, and it's really just a mental grind to work through that.
“The more you've been here, the more it's not worked out, the more that grind really starts to gnaw at you.
“I don't necessarily subscribe to the fact that if you don't win the 500 your career is a failure, but I think a lot of people really view this race and this championship with that lens, that the 500 stands alone, and that if you're not able to capture one, then the career really is a failure in a lot of ways.
“It's impossible to not recognize that or to absorb that from people when you're here, and I just didn't know if circumstance would ever work out where it would really come to be where we could win the race.
“I just said -- especially after '19, where I did have an opportunity to win the race and we fell short, I said, if I'm ever in a position again to win this race, I'm not coming back with a top-5 result. I just don't care what happens. You come here to win the race, and we're going to do that.”
Josef Newgarden - 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500 Presented By Gainbridge - By: James Black
So it was with a different mindset that Newgarden approached this year’s 500.
“In a lot of ways it was nice to just be -- look, I just went out there and drove today. I knew I had a pretty good car. I was pretty happy with Fast Friday.
“(Race engineer) Luke Mason did an amazing job. We basically just went back to our test car from the April test where our car was so good, and we had never run that car again in May, and we were both looking at each other laughing, like what are we doing.
“We left that test and said, if we have this car, we're winning the 500. That's what I said. We never ran the car until Carb Day.
“We ran that car, and I said, okay, you did a good job; we're going to be just fine here.
“I didn't study a lot. I typically, like, pour over every detail. I don't leave a lot of stones unturned. But I was just pretty relaxed. I was like, you know what, I'm not going to overthink this. I'm not going to overdo it. I've been here before. I think I know how you need to win this race.
“I'm going to relax and I'm going to show up and go race on Sunday, and that's what I did. I just came with kind of a carefree attitude and just tried to trust my natural instinct.
“It worked, so I was pretty happy.
“It was so much more than that, obviously. I'm kind of simplifying my own personal -- my internal messaging, but there's a lot more than that. The amount of -- I'll come back to the team side, but the amount of effort and timeline to get to this point really makes everything happen.
“But just from a personal stance I think that was the right approach for me this year.”
“The more you’ve been here, the more it’s not worked out, the more that grind really starts to gnaw at you.”
Over the years, Newgarden has felt the ups and downs of the Speedway. Frustrated at finishing third in 2016 and elated at winning on Sunday, Newgarden claimed that wide range of emotions is simply because it’s the Indy 500.
“There's no denying that Indianapolis, this is the most difficult motor race in the world to win. It's the pressure that builds this entire month. You have so much time to potentially get it right, and it comes down to really one day to be perfect.
“You can have a good qualifying. You can have a good Fast Friday. You can have good Carb Day. If you're not good on Race Day, it's all for nothing.
“That's what makes Indy so terribly pressure filled but terribly difficult, too.
“I think that's what has made it special today to win it. I just feel overjoyed for the amount of work we put in this month.
“On the flipside, when you don't win it, that's what makes it so demoralizing. You pack up, you say we lived here for three weeks and we put everything we had into this and it didn't work out. It just breaks your heart. It's broken my heart every year.
“And so I feel -- I just feel amazing now that it didn't break my heart this year.”
The scars of a winning battle - 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500 Presented By Gainbridge - By: James Black