Newgarden ignores the praise, still feels the pressure

The guy we all knew was going to be a success at Penske because he was a success at Ed Carpenter Racing scored his first win for his new team in only his third start with them. And with an average finish of fifth so far this year, and holding down third in the points table, Newgarden surely has to be considered a championship contender.

But he insists it’s not false modesty that has left him surprised by his smooth integration into The Captain’s crew, and his rapidly developing relationship with race engineer Brian Campe.

“I didn’t think we’d need to take long to have just a decent run,” he tells Motorsport.com, “but to get to the point where we hopefully are title contenders, I thought was going to take longer.

“Each weekend we seem to get stronger as Brian and I gain more experience together. You know, we can talk about what we’ve done separately over the last three to five years, but until we encounter things together, experience them together and resolve them together, it’s really hard to build up the type of relationship to become dominant.

“So I’m hoping for us that relationship keeps improving; I do think that each weekend we get better and I definitely feel we should be in contention because I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at what we’ve done in the first portion of the year. With the way IndyCar is now, I think you have to be consistent and you can’t have many bad weekends. I’d say Phoenix was one of those bad weekends [strong pace stymied by two broken front-wing endplates] so to come out of there still with a ninth, that’s not too bad. All four races so far, we’ve been in the Top 10.”

The race at Barber Motorsports Park was a significant breakthrough, and not just because he ended up in victory lane. It was one of Josef’s teammates, Will Power, who appeared to have the race in his pocket until picking up a puncture in the closing stages, but even had he finished a couple of seconds behind the 2014 champ, Newgarden had already made two very convincing statements.

The first was that, despite a slight stumble in qualifying and winding up seventh on the grid, he could overcome that disadvantage by working with Campe to try something novel and start the race on the primary tires, and then execute with strong pit-in/pit-out laps that vaulted him forward onto the tail of Power. The second was that Josef was completely at ease with gaining positions on track, including making a bold pass on a teammate, Simon Pagenaud, and an even bolder and more opportunistic one on Chip Ganassi Racing’s four-time champion Scott Dixon.

“It was aggressive driving on a couple of those moves,” Newgarden recalls, “but I’d say aggressive-to-fair. We didn’t overdo it. But we had been hounding Pagenaud for a lot of laps and needed to get by because we were quicker. That was one of those moves where you have to be more forceful and take away the other guy’s part of the racetrack. And yeah, it was the same with Dixon. But none of us had any problems about it afterward – or not that I’m aware of.”

Job done, race won, you might imagine this has lifted the burden of hype that surrounded the Tennessee native’s move to the legendary Penske squad. But Newgarden insists that the higher profile role in which he finds himself after five years with Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing and Ed Carpenter Racing never increased his need to succeed.

“I definitely don’t think too much about that,” he says, “because I naturally expect the best from myself. I think any racecar driver will – or should – tell you that they believe in their own abilities to the nth degree. Fernando Alonso believes he’s the best racecar driver on the planet because… he’s Alonso! I think any good driver believes in himself like that; you almost have to.

“So I expect good things from myself at all points and so I’ve always had that pressure from within. Obviously if others are saying good things about me, I take it as a compliment… but not as something that adds yet more pressure.

“It doesn’t matter which team you’re with, you need to do the job well or you’ll get booted out of the seat unless you’re bringing a large budget and footing the bill. So going to Penske doesn’t add more pressure, even despite all their accomplishments.”

Preseason, Newgarden admitted that the one exception to that way of thinking might occur at Indianapolis in May. Racing for the team owner who has 16 Indy 500 wins can do that to anyone. But here he is, just three weeks out from the biggest race of his life, and Newgarden says he has two conflicting perspectives.

“You can think of it as, ‘Hey, I’m racing for Roger Penske; I’m one of five guys expected to deliver this month.’ Or you can look at it as, ‘Hey, I’m driving for Roger Penske and we’re going to be given everything we need to win the race.’ That second way of thinking can really put your mind at ease. You know that we won’t have forgotten anything, we’ll be as prepared as it’s possible to be.”

Newgarden has tended to shine at IMS, and only last year he spoiled the Honda block party on the front row and was also top Chevy finisher on race day. Despite being the newcomer to Roger’s team and therefore the guy most rapidly having to learn The Penske Way, a methodology only understood and appreciated fully from the inside, it would seem like the legendary 2.5-mile oval could be one place where Josef contributes more than usual in terms of technical direction.

“I dunno, man; Penske already does quite a lot right at Indy!” he chuckles. “It’s always tricky in terms of where and how you find speed there. I mean, yeah, I have my knowledge of how I drive the car and how it’s set up, but it will be interesting to see how the team prioritizes the methods of getting speed. All I can bring is how I like to drive the car and what’s worked for me in the past, and hopefully that translates to the team’s approach.”

The one cloud on the horizon for Newgarden is the possibility that Honda has maintained or even increased its advantage in superspeedway trim.

“There’s a lot of speculation,” he says, “and that test we did alongside the Honda teams at Indy doesn’t really answer anything. No one knows who was running in which setting.

“But I do know that we’ve never worked closer with Team Chevy, we have all the faith in the world in what they can do. They’ve delivered time and time again over the past five years, and so that gives us a lot of confidence.

“Honda’s gonna be tough, like they were last year. Are we going to have enough to get it done against them? I don’t think we’ll know until maybe the middle of the first week of practice, when we start really diving into things. But I do have confidence that Chevy, like Penske, will have left no stone unturned.”

The same applies to Newgarden. While he may continue to surprise himself, we mere observers can congratulate ourselves on predicting whatever success comes his way, this year and beyond. For Roger Penske and Josef Newgarden, joining forces was emphatically not a leap of faith.