Scandal, disaster, Indy 500 win - Untangling Newgarden's weird 2024
Sat 12, Oct, 2024
Source: The Race
Imagine winning a second straight Indianapolis 500 but calling your year “disastrous”.
That’s exactly what Josef Newgarden labelled his 2024 IndyCar season, which resulted in his first drivers' championship finish outside the top five in his eight-year Team Penske career.
He joined the team in 2017 and promptly won the championship, won again in 2019 and then was second for the next three years in a row before 2023 matched 2018 where he rounded out the top five.
This year he was eighth in the standings, taking two wins and four podiums. But a string of poor results both inside and outside of his control impacted his year.
“You've got to divide it,” the ever-reflective and eloquent Newgarden said when asked to look back at the year.
“When it comes to the Indy 500 it's a super successful year. It could not be more successful for the entire team. So by that standpoint, it's very, very gratifying.
“In a lot of ways, what we sought out the most was to fix the Month of May, and we fixed every aspect of it this year. So it's hard to leave the year without being really satisfied as a team.
“Personally, in the #2 car, from a championship perspective, it's been a really sort of disastrous year. I don't know how I'd put it, other than disastrous.
“What I would say is, sometimes it's not your year and sometimes it's not your day. Those both have been true multiple times this season, and that's the way it goes. So we'll reset for next year, and try and try and be better.
“That's all you can do.”
The 500 win had extra significant this year as when he triumphed the year before he qualified 17th and certainly wasn’t expected to win the race from there. His Penske team had struggled - at least in terms of being held to its own impossibly high standards - especially in qualifying at the 500 since the aeroscreen device came in for 2020.
Penske at the 500, 2020-2022
Best qualifying: 11th (Will Power, 2022)
Best finish: 3rd (Simon Pagenaud, 2021)
Average qualifying across all cars: 21.27
Average finish across all cars: 15.82
The team had even faced the possibility of being ‘bumped’ (not qualifying) in 2021 with Will Power.
After years of work and amid a new technical partnership with AJ Foyt's team, Penske took its first pole since 2019 at this year’s event with Scott McLaughlin. And of course, Newgarden pulled off one of the most memorable overtakes in the event’s recent history passing Pato O’Ward around the outside of Turn 3 on the final lap of the race.
WHAT A FINAL LAP!
— INDYCAR on NBC (@IndyCaronNBC) May 26, 2024
Josef Newgarden and Pato O’Ward battled to the end in the 108th running of the #Indy500. pic.twitter.com/0QqbcbnfYl
Newgarden also contributed to the Penske team winning six of the 17 races this year - more than Ganassi, which won the title with Alex Palou - in an extremely strong year in terms of peak performance from the team.
But you don’t get to “disastrous” with all of those positives.
Of course, the pivotal point of the year for Newgarden and his team was the push to pass saga which led to him and McLaughlin being disqualified from the St Petersburg season opener for illegally using push to pass on restarts. Penske blamed some software being left in the cars from a test, which allowed push to pass to be used when it should have been switched off.
Newgarden was both the race winner and the heaviest user of the push to pass (McLaughlin used it for 1.9 seconds according to him, and Power didn’t use it), and in a tearful press conference at Barber the following month he bore his heart out claiming he thought there was a rule change.
Penske and Newgarden deserved their punishment, but if the team was deliberately trying to cheat, doing so in this way would have been among the stupidest attempts to do so in motorsport history.
All three Penske cars have onboard cameras and what the drivers were doing would have been spotted even if it did take a few races. By not self-admitting the issue, it didn’t do enough, and it broke the rules and deserved to be punished.
Newgarden was vilified in the aftermath, something we were reminded of recently in an emotional Instagram post where Newgarden paid tribute to Palou for not treating him differently, implying many in the paddock had.
Some in the paddock questioned Newgarden’s honesty and sporting integrity, which must have hurt.
Given just the season before, Newgarden had at times struggled to find the motivation to get in the race car such were his mental struggles across that year, imagine the impact of this scandal.
Especially as St Pete was supposed to be the debut of a new Newgarden less focused on all-out winning and chasing numbers and more focused on just doing his best and accepting some things are out of your control.
The push to pass scandal will no doubt have taken a much bigger toll on the Penske team and its drivers than we’ll learn in the immediate future, and Newgarden having already been in a rough place in 2023 and facing the brunt of negativity in this scenario can’t have been easy.
It felt like any race he wasn’t on the podium, he was either struggling or out of the race.
Newgarden’s 2024 travails
St Pete - disqualified
Barber - 16th, hit by Marcus Armstrong
Indy GP - 17th, struggled with car balance, clashed with Jack Harvey causing wing damage
Detroit - 26th, fuel probe issue early on dropped him back, ran over a hose in pits getting a drive-through penalty
Laguna - 19th, Drive through for improper pit exit, spun from the top 10 late on
Mid-Ohio - 25th, Had tyre graining and then two pit road speeding penalties
Milwaukee - 26th, 27th, clash with Ericsson in race one and taken out when on pole in race two
He couldn’t even rely on his heroic oval form this year with a host of incidents allowing McLaughlin to claim the title of the series’ best oval driver this year.
Given his struggles last year and everything he has gone through this season, it’s going to be the ultimate test of Newgarden’s efforts to become less results-focused and try to enjoy his career more.
“It’s something I've had to reprogramme,” says Newgarden.
“I’m very much a perfectionist, and I kind of go off the numbers, and the numbers are what matter.
“In reality, there's so much more outside of my control, outside of our control as a team, that isn't always reflected in the numbers.
“The good thing that always brings comfort is 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 #2 car. The potential in the #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. And if there's anything that keeps me excited, it's that.”
Newgarden sealed a contract extension after his 500 success - another upside of this season - and he still has the potential to go on and reach some of the biggest records in IndyCar’s history.
The icing on the cake of the torment of 2024 is that Palou has eclipsed Newgarden in terms of number of championships, and the three years spent finishing second to Scott Dixon, Palou and team-mate Power will hurt.
But Newgarden has to truly believe that he can disconnect the results and his performances. He’s much better than the eighth best driver in IndyCar, even in this season where he’s made uncharacteristic errors.
Whether he can rekindle his title-winning form will depend a lot on how he processes the 2024 season, and how he rebounds from it.
It may be the worst year of his career, but it might just be a necessary catalyst for turning things around.