Newgarden cruises in St. Pete
Team Penske driver wins NTT IndyCar opener
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – How do you know when a driver has a rocket ship for a race car? When he’s bummed even after qualifying on the front row.
That was exactly how Josef Newgarden felt after notching a spot on Row 1 alongside pole-sitter and Penske teammate Will Power for Sunday’s Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg. That’s how good the car felt this weekend, Newgarden explained. And that’s how much of a “perfectionist” he is.
“If you drive for Team Penske and ... you have a winning car or a pole car, you’re not satisfied with anything but that,” the 2017 series champ said. “You know, it’s not that it was the end of the world, but you want to be able to get the most out of the car and yourself in any given day, and if you fall short of that even just slightly, it’s disappointing.”
Fortunately for Newgarden, he didn’t have to leave the track disappointed two days in a row.
He took advantage of everything the No. 2 Team Penske crew gave him, cruising to what amounted to a runaway victory Sunday in the NTT IndyCar Series season opener.
Newgarden led a race-high 60 laps and opened up a 9-second lead over the competition before ultimately winning by nearly 3 seconds. The only real tense moment for the 28-year-old Tennessean came late in the race came when Scott Dixon started making up ground while he was trying to lap Marco Andretti. Andretti made him work, but ultimately Newgarden slid around him and cruised to the checkered flag.
Dixon, the defending series champion, had to settle for second for the fourth time on the streets of St. Pete. Unfortunately for him, the race remains a white whale, as he’s never won here in 15 tries.
“We always come to these races to win, and we came up a little bit short,” the five-time champion said. “But it was still good points for us and hopefully we can keep maintaining that.”
Meanwhile, Power led 17 laps and might have led more if not for an ill-advised pit stop early in the race. While leading, Power was called into the pits by his team, which was anticipating a full-course yellow when Sebastien Bourdais pulled off track with a mechanical issue.
Unfortunately for Power, the yellow never came, and he could never make up the ground he lost, settling for third.
For Newgarden, a win was the perfect way to kick off the campaign, especially in light of how frustrating the end of the last one was. After beginning the 2018 season as hot as he finished his championship-winning 2017 season, Newgarden fell into a slump, at least by his terrifically high standards.
From May onward, Newgarden registered only one top-three finish, a win at Road America. He only fell outside of the top 10 three times in that 12-race stretch, but when you’re flying the Penske banner, top-10s simply aren’t good enough.
“We just — we were either feast or famine last year,” Newgarden said. “It was win or nothing pretty much. Or it was top-10s, but for us, that’s not good enough. You’ve got to be on the podiums when you’re not winning the race.”
So while Newgarden will certainly enjoy the spoils of Sunday’s victory — a championship lead and two weeks of bragging rights over the rest of the series — in a way, Newgarden has already moved on to Circuit of the Americas.
The key to the season, Newgarden said, has to be consistency. Winning is great, but as he learned last season, it can’t be win or bust. There has to be something in between. He will of course go to COTA in two weeks determined to go back-to-back, but the more important mission will be to deliver another sturdy performance.