The Josef Newgarden pile-on has gone too far… how did we get here?
- Archie O’Reilly
- Jul 14
- 14 min read
Do you really expect Josef Newgarden to be happy after the year he has had?
Not since the formative years of his ultra-successful IndyCar career has the two-time series champion and double Indianapolis 500 winner had a season this testing. From accidents and mechanicals, to execution errors and a loss of pace, everything that could have gone wrong appears to have gone wrong for Team Penske.
And for Newgarden, who finished an agonising runner-up in the championship three successive years from 2020 to 2022 after two titles in three years, it continues a trend in the wrong direction.
Fifth in the standings in 2023 marked his joint-worst finish for Penske; nearly sweeping the ovals, it was no disaster but still a regression. But looking to reset, recalibrate and bounce back for 2024, eighth in points marked his worst for Penske and personal lowest since 2014.
It was a year that appeared marred by a start-of-season scandal as Penske’s push-to-pass violation saw Newgarden stripped of his dominant St. Petersburg season-opening win six weeks after the event. He was in catch-up mode for the rest of the year, consistency waned and some scruffiness crept in on track.
It became ‘boom or bust’ for Newgarden. He was only in the top 10 eight times in 17 races - six of which were podiums and all top-seven results - and was outside the top 15 in all bar one of the rest.
A 12-year-in-waiting Indy 500 crown in 2023 softened the blow of a tough season. And again a year later, defending that victory - the first driver to do so in over two decades - put a shine on an otherwise uncharacteristically bleak year.
It has been an odd few years for one of IndyCar’s top talents - one that can probably be traced back to the three successive near misses in the championship.
They took a toll. How could they not?
“It gnaws at me for sure,” said Newgarden of his streak of runner-up finishes after the 2022 season. “It’s annoying, there’s no doubt. How could you not be frustrated by it? It’s normal.”
He echoed that again one year later: “Those three years finishing runner-up in the championship were tough. Those were very crushing.”
Newgarden came away from the Laguna Seca season finale in 2022 - recovering quite remarkably to second in the race after an incident in qualifying - rueing being too much on the back foot through the year. He beat teammate Will Power on the day but fell short by 16 points in the standings.
At the time, Newgarden regarded that as being a difficult season - and it was in many ways. But that threshold has likely been altered in the campaigns since.
In any case, you can certainly trace the start of the recent demise back to then. It was the beginning of an extreme combination of peaks and troughs that have since proliferated. Newgarden won five times to Power’s once that 2022 season but still came up short in points, owing to his inconsistency across the 17-race season.
“This year was most taxing because of the roller coaster,” Newgarden remarked after the 2022 finale. “It was one weekend we’d be winning the race, next weekend it was going sideways for one reason or another.
“It’s been a really tough year. It’s been good in a lot of ways but it’s also been really negative in a lot of others. I’m filled with a lot of pride because I think the world of everybody on this team. But I’m also filled with a little bit of relief.
“I’m happy to come into this off-season, reset, recharge and then figure out a way to just hit everybody harder next year. And I know we can do that. I know we can do better than this year. I just know we can. When we put it together, I’m telling you, just watch out. Because when we put it together, it’s going to be big.”
But things did not get better in 2023 - they started to spiral a little. Still though, even dropping three positions and not really ever being in the title picture for the first time in years, it did not feel like a cause for crisis. At least on the face of it.
But Newgarden has always very much been a perfectionist - he has not allowed himself to settle for anything but the best. After coming up short in 2022, he insisted this is something that he had learned to manage across his career.
“Mentally, [2022] was a little bit of a drain because the more success you find, the more you demand perfection from each race,” Newgarden admitted at that point. “So the more taxing it is when it’s not going correct.
“[The perfectionism] probably needs a little bit of tuning. But we know how to do that.”
It is that high standard that probably exaggerated the disappointment of 2023. Newgarden headed into the year channelling frustration of continually coming so close into motivation. He acknowledged he was not arrogant enough to believe it was easy but was focused on not only winning the title, but trying to not allow it to even be a worry come the finale.
The championship did indeed not go down to the final race for the first time in a decade-and-a-half. But it was Álex Palou who achieved the rare feat as Newgarden finished fifth and a sizable 177 points off the champion.
Not only that, Newgarden was usurped by third-year Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin, who took the team’s honours third in points.
Following on from 2023, it became apparent all was not entirely well in the Newgarden camp. He never fell out of love with IndyCar, so to speak, but his enjoyment had started to fade a little. Much of that likely stemmed from that pressure of perfectionism and, as he theorised, overloading himself with responsibilities.
So there came an off-track revolution ahead of the 2024 season, including the Newgarden-instigated abandonment of the popular ‘Bus Bros’ YouTube show with McLaughlin. The pair had held an extremely close relationship but there was a sense from Newgarden that something had to shift away from the track.
It is fair to say he was left searching after the trials and tribulations of 2023.
“I pared down a lot of things, which I think has been productive personally,” Newgarden said ahead of the 2024 season. “I’ve tried to refocus my task list and my priorities. And from that standpoint, it’s been really, really positive.
“Not that I wasn’t working on my core objectives in the past or last year but I think there was definitely room for improvement and trying to create some better focus in areas. That was really my intention by some of these changes.
“In a lot of ways, just to be transparent, I want to get back to loving this. Not that I didn’t love it in the past, but I think when you get bogged down by too much, then sometimes the joy slips away. I’m excited to get back to why I started doing this, why I started going racing.”
Newgarden was chasing clarity on what was actually most important to him objective-wise. He felt things had maybe become too complicated and his ambitions clouded. In 2024, simplicity - racing and working with the team - was going to be key.
But it is hard not to get stuck in the cycle of “a never-ending process of trying to stack success on to one another” in elite sport. It has always been Roger Penske’s mentality that simply ‘good enough’ is not good enough. There is always that quest to impress.
“It did start becoming a job,” Newgarden added last year. “This is how I make my living and it’s how I provide for my family. It’s not a gruelling job - anyone would be lucky to be in the position that I’m in. But it’s a very difficult job because it’s purely results based. You’re either here or not here based on your results. You’re either winning or you don't have your seat.
“It’s hard to find that enjoyment factor. I’d always had it. I’d learned how to thrive in the pressure and still enjoy the job. It just slipped away at one point. I was buried with a lot of other things and I just tried to simplify my life and get back to happiness.”
The start to 2024 could not have been better with a pole and resounding victory in St. Pete. A fourth-place result at Long Beach - a race that could have seen another victory if not for final-corner contact with Colton Herta - solidified the view that Penske and Newgarden had started to turn their non-oval fortunes around.
And maybe it was a weight-off approach that was helping Newgarden. No longer was he thinking anything but a championship was a disaster. If he did not win on any given weekend, there would always be the next.
It is hard to ever truly let go of perfectionism. But while striving to be the best he could be, Newgarden was no longer allowing himself to see it as as much of a catastrophe if perfection was not quite achieved. He reevaluated things.
“I’ve had to let go of that mentality,” Newgarden said after St. Pete last year. “There’s no sustainability in my perfection. I’m definitely a perfectionist. I’m an introvert but I get hyper-fixated on just trying to maximise everything.
“My mentality was, in a lot of ways, win or nothing all the way throughout my career. But from a bigger picture standpoint, I just don’t think that’s sustainable. I’m not going away from my passion and my desire but I’m trying to recentre my enjoyment in what I do.
“I’ve had to tell myself: ‘It’s alright. It’s not going to be perfect.’ You’ve got to remove that expectation. Simply put, I just wanted to be happier again being at the track and enjoying the job and the process. I’ve let go of some of the perfectionism.
“It’s never going to fully go away. I look at 17 races and I go: ‘How do we win 17 races?’ You lose one race and you already are mourning the one race you lost. You just can’t live on that hill for that long. It gets you a little bit lonely.”
Unfortunately for Newgarden, the script went off-piece the day after Long Beach. Leading the way in the championship after two races, everything came crashing down with the late-awarded disqualification from St. Pete.
The 2024 season snowballed from there. The Indy 500 and Gateway wins were highs, but left to recover from the early points loss, Newgarden never truly regained reliable form.
He never really reaped the rewards of his altered approach.
As he entered the press conference room for 2025 pre-season media day, there was a familiar feel to his remarks about having to evolve a little again but also radiating positivity. There was a keenness to extract the good from the bad.
“It was a dynamic year,” Newgarden said of 2024. “It was a year of great highs - there were multiple strong points to it - but then there were some tremendous lows. Very volatile and rocky. But I would say transformative, if anything. It was a really good year to go through.
“It makes me excited about 2025. It ended up being a really positive year for the way everything transpired, even the waviness of the year. It just put us in a good spot to come out firing in 2025. I don't have many more adjectives for it; it was just very up and down.
“So many good things to take from it. Certainly Indy was the biggest highlight, but a lot of positives all around. Even within the negatives, they all turned into positives I thought.
“You’ve got to get better every year. Certainly I think as humans we’re trying to constantly evolve and be better prepared or be in a better spot year after year. After a season like 2024, resilience is a word that comes to my mind. I think we have tonnes of it.”
Newgarden studied the metrics. While it did not always translate into results, he felt like the potential was there in 2024. In his words, they were dealt choppy water and had to rediscover calmer seas for 2025.
But the swell has only become greater.
Heading into the Iowa Speedway doubleheader weekend - Newgarden’s home away from home as a six-time winner - he was sitting 19th in points. Aside from 23rd in his rookie season in 2012, Newgarden has never finished worse than 14th in points.
Even McLaughlin - off the back of successive third-place finishes in points - was outside the top 10 and Power the only Penske car inside in ninth. For the team, it has been a year riddled with issues - shortcomings in the usual ‘Penske Perfect’ standard of execution and somewhat of a pace deficit at points, but also an inexplicable amount of misfortune.
Newgarden is the most extreme case of this. He opened the season well in St. Pete with third place, albeit with a fuel mishap, but failed to finish five times subsequently.
After the season opener, he only finished in the top 10 once - 10th at Barber - before the Indy 500, where he was looking to become the first driver ever to win the race three times in succession. But there was actually a noticeable calm to Newgarden throughout May.
“I’m just happy to be here,” he said. “I wake up happy. It feels like Christmas. It’s just the best. I feel like I’m looking back in my life while still living it. I know we're going to look back on this and feel so cool about what we were able to do. It’s been so fun.”
But again, things capitulated. Newgarden was sent to the rear of the starting order, along with Power, due to the modification to the cars’ attenuators, which also saw the three most senior members of Penske’s IndyCar leadership team fired that race week.
There was no performance gain - it was a safety violation instead - but the narrative of a ‘cheating scandal’ grew again.
Still, despite the unsettlement, Newgarden’s race was outstanding. He carved his way into the top five from the rear of the field before the midway point and looked primed for possibly the most fabled Indy 500 victory of all-time.
But then came a mechanical failure. Brutal.
And it feels since then, while it was pressure-off in many ways in May, Newgarden has not quite been the same in his demeanour. In the wake of Indianapolis, he finished ninth in Detroit but followed that with a streak of three retirements. It undoubtedly takes its toll.
For a Penske team that was winless in 11 races, which is their longest drought since a 15-race run spanning 2007 and 2008, the Iowa weekend - a track which they have had largely on lockdown - was a perfect opportunity to turn around their fortunes.
Qualifying was excellent for Newgarden - a pole and fourth-place start his best two qualifying results of the season. Finishes of second, third and fourth for the team in Race 1 - a pair of podiums taking a tally of only three in 10 races to five for the season - marked a return to form on the face of it.
Newgarden led 232 laps, taking his all-time tally to 2000 laps led at Iowa - the first driver to lead that many at a single track - but was jumped by Pato O’Ward in the final pit cycle. So suddenly, his and the team’s best result of the season felt like a loss.
It felt like no cause for celebration. Newgarden was irate on the radio post-race, cursing IndyCar’s package and waving a middle finger.
“F**k that,” he exclaimed. “F**king lame a** package.”
And things did not get much better in Race 2. Newgarden was by far the quickest driver in the field once again, making his way from his fourth-place start into a controlling lead by Lap 65. But in an image befitting of his season of almost laughable misfortune, just as he dived in for his first pit stop, Marcus Ericsson hit the wall directly behind him.
The caution came out and Newgarden was trapped a lap down, eventually finding himself in the mid-teens as everyone pitted under the yellow. But the King of Iowa Speedway fought his way back with authority, leading again by Lap 241. But lightning struck twice.
A mere five laps after his final stop, which had already seen him undercut by David Malukas, the caution came out and undid Newgarden’s race again - for another Andretti car suffering a right-front tyre failure as Colton Herta hit the wall.
From the battle for the win, Newgarden found himself 10th. This time he was unable to make headway and, on a day where he could have easily won, 10th was where he finished. Through no fault of his own.
It was another disastrous day for Penske, with McLaughlin and Power both out of the race before Lap 21 - again completely innocently. The team’s winless run is now at 13 races.
Cue Newgarden narrative swirling again. Because a ‘bad guy’ portrayal has grown to compound his struggles.
Admittedly, he was downcast on the podium after Race 1 and snappy, concise and visibly unhappy in the post-race press conference. Power joked sarcastically that “Josef loves to answer questions at the moment” as he gave a host of short answers - a moment of levity that drew a rare smile from his downbeat teammate.
“He’s seething,” Power emphasised. “Seething.”
That was understandable in the face of defeat after domination. But such tight-lippedness has become a trend for a driver usually so welcomely eloquent, talkative and candid with the media. Even after going quickest in qualifying, he gave only a 15-word answer to FOX.
The weekend prior at Mid-Ohio, he came under fire for ignoring Kevin Lee’s two requests to speak after qualifying. To his credit, he spoke to television after every competitive session at Iowa. But at the moment, he seems to speak little at best - or otherwise not at all.
Drivers are not contractually bound to speak and you have to respect their decision. But actually, more than it being some big controversy or cause for criticism, as someone who has often praised his conduct in the media, I am personally more worried about Newgarden.
This is not the Newgarden we know.
“This year for him has been quite different to what it’s been in the past,” O’Ward observed. “I see him very differently, to be honest. His attitude and everything is definitely not the Josef that I’ve always praised.”
This is not the happy-go-lucky Newgarden we are accustomed to. Frankly, it is impossible to expect that after the year he has had. No matter past success, it is going to wear you down; the normality of success to Newgarden probably makes the absence of it all the more tough.
But there is such a marked difference to the Newgarden that bounded into media day in January and took control of moderating the Zoom call. That freeness has faded as the year has progressed and the toils have intensified.
There has grown a pile-on for his perceived grumpiness and glumness. But why?
Ask yourself: what do you do if you see someone downcast, struggling and having a tough time in everyday life? Do you just jump on them and deride them?
Of course not. You rally behind and support them.
It is often seen as a different scenario for a sportsperson in the limelight. But why is it different? That should not be the case. Empathy should not just go out of the window.
You cannot help but feel the pile-on has exacerbated the situation. All the frivolous chat of Newgarden being a ‘cheater’ and the unfair degrading of his character. Maybe it is no wonder he does not want to speak; he is under the microscope and cannot seem to win.
There has been a continued villainisation of him within the IndyCar world. A past hero has found himself suddenly booed and derided - and for no particularly justifiable reason.
Understandably, a self-admitted introvert, he is not someone naturally able to embrace the figure of a villain. And you do not blame him for that. Who really wants to be the bad guy? You certainly do not grow up wanting to be that; you grow up wanting to be a role model.
And Newgarden has been that role model.
But it has been spun into the contrary. Complete ignorance of the Newgarden who stays back after autograph sessions to make sure everyone leaves happy. Complete ignorance of the Newgarden who visits fan parties on the eve of the Indy 500.
The whole anti-Newgarden agenda has gone unnecessarily far. He is going through a tough time, clearly. It has been a battling three years bound to have its adverse effects. But from the outside, you cannot help but feel Newgarden is being wrongly torn down.
He is passionate about his craft - everyone in his position is. It means so much and that is a special part of sport.
So when it is not going well, how can you expect anything but frustration? And in the face of these trying times, why is the instinct to pile onto and scrutinise those raw emotions?
In a refreshing age of accepting, embracing and supporting shows of emotion, such scrutiny feels like a distinct regression.
It is about time people have a bit more empathy.
