Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Newgarden, Herta win in season finale
MONTEREY, Calif. — Josef Newgarden wrapped up his second IndyCar championship and burst into tears — an odd reaction for a steely-nerved race car driver who rarely shows emotion.
The outburst of emotion took him by surprise and shocked his fiancée, who had never before seen tears from Newgarden.
“I never cry. Ever. Even my fiancée is a little disturbed,” said Newgarden. “And it was a good cry.”
It was nearly two hours after his championship drive Sunday around Laguna Seca Raceway and Newgarden was still a bit emotional. Talking about the moment he collapsed into his crew members arms, choking back tears, he again nearly broke down.
“It just feels like a big weight. A big weight has been lifted,” Newgarden said.
He won his second championship in three years with a smooth drive in the IndyCar season finale, where he played it safe and watched rookie Colton Herta dominate to the win.
Newgarden needed only to finish fourth or better to give Roger Penske his 16th IndyCar title. His drive clearly indicated he wouldn’t get aggressive and risk throwing it away, settling in for an eighthplace finish to beat teammate Simon Pagenaud by 25 points in the championship race.
It wasn’t the way he wanted to race, though.
“I knew the points in my head, I can tell you that, I knew exactly where we were,” Newgarden said. “I was very aware of what was going on. I thought we were going down a rabbit hole and it wasn’t the hole for us to go down. We were shadowing [Alexander] Rossi, that’s what we were doing. I just really tried to stay around him all day, and I wasn’t sure we were going down the right hole.”
The championship gave Team Penske a season sweep of the crown jewels of IndyCar; Pagenaud won the Indianapolis 500 in May for Penske’s record 18th victory.
Pagenaud was frantically chasing Scott Dixon and Penske teammate Will Power in the closing laps to get a shot at Herta — Pagenaud’s only real chance at winning the title — but settled for fourth in what will still go down as a career-defining season. His sweep of all the events at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May earned him a contract extension that Penske confirmed before the race had been completed.
“I gave it a try,” Pagenaud said. “We still won the Indianapolis 500, the team won the championship, that’s a good year.”
Newgarden went into the race, which was worth double points, trying to hold off Rossi, Pagenaud and Dixon for the title. But he controlled his own destiny and knew he’d need an awful race and one of his challengers would likely need to win to prevent him from wrapping up the title.
Now that’s he’s got a second championship, the Tennessee native said he will go to work on the most important goal for all Penske drivers. Power and Pagenaud are both Indy 500 winners; Newgarden is winless in that event.
“It means I’m still a loser on the team,” Newgarden said. “There’s one thing that Roger likes a lot, and that’s Indy 500s. And I’ve been working on it.”
Nobody had anything Sunday for Herta, who led 83 of 90 laps.
The 19-year-old rookie upstaged the championship race the entire weekend by continuously leading the speed charts. Then he won the pole Saturday an hour after Andretti Autosport said it was pulling Herta inside its organization next season in a fifth full-time car.
“We were really quick,” said Herta. “It was so cool to be here, everything just went so smooth.”
Herta added he will be chasing the IndyCar championship next season when he moves tiny single-car Harding Steinbrenner Racing into the Andretti camp.