Wounded Newgarden “missing link” no more in Gateway win
- Archie O’Reilly
- 1 hour ago
- 8 min read
It was not your ordinary Victory Lane celebration. No elaborate clambering atop the car and certainly no jump or emphatic embrace. Instead, as he rose from his cockpit, Josef Newgarden followed a brief fist pump by gingerly perching on the side of his No.2 machine.
He sat with a beaming smile as his team greeted him, as any lowkeyness was not for lack of enjoyment of what was, after a rough few weeks, an extremely rewarding victory. But forming much of what amounted to this success being particularly satisfying, this was a driver still facing the effects of battle scars from a fortnight beforehand.
The weekend prior, only one week on from the offending Indianapolis 500 crash, the rough-and-tumble streets of Detroit had provided Newgarden one of the most challenging weekends of his racing career. While not disclosing the exact ailment confining his left foot to a medical boot, there was little hiding the struggle an obvious injury presented.
From the outset, once it was decided that the services of on-standby Porsche Penske sportscar ace Felipe Nasr’s services would not be required, it was a weekend of survival.
For Newgarden to salvage a 10th-place finish after qualifying over one second off the pace on a 1.645-mile track was a creditable result. On such a brutally bumpy circuit with heavy braking zones to test his injured foot, he could have easily sat sidelined but instead fought through the pain barrier to pick up a valuable chunk of points.
“I appreciate the team having my back and letting me go to work last weekend,” Newgarden reflected. “They went to work; they did a lot for me. It’s frustrating when you’re in a race like that, you can tell the car has the potential to do more, the team executed in a way that should have produced more.
“It’s tough when you’re the missing link. I hate that. I don’t want to be that. It was the reality of the situation. [But] we got through it together.”
Following Detroit with a visit to the 1.25-mile World Wide Technology Raceway (WWTR - or Gateway) oval, where he was a five-time winner in 10 starts, Newgarden knew there was ample opportunity to rebound and end a five-week on-track stretch on a high note.
Albeit having ditched his solitary crutch, he was still walking wounded. Though at one of his and Team Penske’s happy places, he knew he could build much greater comfort.
“It’s not Detroit. Enough said. That was the big difference. Nice, smooth oval,” Newgarden smiled. “We knew this was going to be a different story.”
He was undoubtedly keen to rectify the story penned one year ago, too, when his evening at Gateway ended upside down on the frontstretch from the race lead. He had been left helpless when Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Louis Foster came sliding down the track with damage, pinned against the pit wall and sent into an inverted state.
It had been a boom-or-bust story at the track in recent years, with four wins and two 25th-place finishes for Newgarden in his previous six visits. But he encountered no such strife en-route to claiming his sixth overall win at the track - and fifth in seventh attempts.
“It was nice to not flip. I enjoyed that part of it,” Newgarden laughed. “I did do a sick rail grind [in 2025 at Gateway], okay? I’ve got a dope highlight reel. I’m going to be honest with you guys, if I stop tomorrow, there’s a cool list of things I’ve done.
“I wrote a car off at Road America in The Kink; you haven’t lived until you’ve done that. I don’t know how many people have done a rail grind at Gateway. I’ve F’d up and hit a curb on Turn 4 in Indianapolis, smoked my foot. Put that in the highlight reel.
“It’s been good. Nice to come back and get a win this weekend.”
This latest victory - Newgarden’s 15th on an oval shorter than 1.5 miles, as he continues to reign as the king of the discipline - was an eventful one. Not least because, after the second red-flag period for damp conditions, he mistook win-fighting Christian Rasmussen for a backmarker as he duelled out front with the Ed Carpenter Racing (ECR) driver.
The Dane went on to finish third but twice overtook Newgarden for the lead across an eight-lap stretch, even prompting Newgarden’s strategist Jonathan Diuguid to believe his driver was allowing Rasmussen to lead in order to hit his fuel number.
“I messed it up. That’s going to be in the debrief… I’m going to be made fun of for that,” Newgarden joked. “I got a little confused. It’s my fault. I was going to let him go: ‘He doesn’t matter. I’ll just follow him.’ I still didn’t know he was on the lead lap [at the finish].
“That is why when he came up to the podium, I am like: ‘What are you doing here? How did you get here? You were a lap down.’ I think he got a little offended by that. I’m so glad that I repassed him. He was kind of in the way. I thought he was the lapped car and [ECR teammate Alexander] Rossi was the one that I was going to fight.”
Down the stretch and for much of the race, Newgarden’s primary battle was fought with Andretti Global’s Marcus Ericsson, who alongside Newgarden emerged as one of the two strongest protagonists all night long under the Gateway lights.
The Swede, who is without an IndyCar win since the St. Petersburg opener in 2023, led a field-high 114 laps, compared to Newgarden’s 53 laps led. First taking the lead on Lap 47, he was pursued by Newgarden for much of his time at the head of the field, including slight contact between the pair in a side-by-side exchange on the race’s first restart.
“You’ve got to give a lot of respect to Marcus. He did a tremendous job,” Newgarden said. “He was super fast. I think he’s become a great oval driver in this series. If anything, I should have left him a little bit more room. I got a little bit high.
“Thankfully, these cars, we’ve seen they’re very robust. Even a light touch doesn’t normally result in much. That’s why you also see such close, hard racing. It’s just the nature of IndyCar these days. It was a good fight. He drove a great race.”
Ericsson spent much of his preparation for the event, alongside his spotter, studying video of Newgarden. And for much of the race, his decisiveness in traffic and ability to pull away at the front of the field was reminiscent of one of the sport’s greatest-ever short-oval drivers.
But come crunch time, it was Penske who capitalised on pit cycles and Newgarden who exhibited his typical control. He had led only one lap before Lap 204 but only failed to lead the five laps dropped to Rasmussen from that point onwards. With the 260-lap race run in its entirety, despite the pair of rain stoppages, the cream rose to the top.
“I’m just glad we went the distance. With the rain, it almost turns it into a casino,” Newgarden judged. “Me and Marcus were pretty close on performance. It turned into a track position game at the end because we were so comparable.
“It was going to come down to execution. The team executed when we needed to. That’s what ultimately pulled off the victory. Everyone stayed composed. It was a methodical win.”
Inside the car, there was a serenity from Newgarden. Where Detroit superseded the task of driving with a broken clavicle - sustained in a crash with Conor Daly at Texas Motor Speedway - a decade ago, Gateway was a return to some normality.
“Everything felt pretty good,” Newgarden described. “The car was great. I felt good tonight. I felt spicy in the car. Tonight was not hard. It was an easy night with the team.
“I’m just happy for the team. They deserve it. It’s been a hard stretch for everybody in the paddock. All of us are working incredibly hard to get to this point. A win at any point, especially after this stretch, is super rewarding. That’s what I’m most happy about.”
This latest victory - the 34th of his career - draws Newgarden level with Al Unser Jr. in ninth place on IndyCar’s all-time wins list. But rather than fixating on any records, now in his 10th year with Penske, Newgarden enjoys celebrating the effort that fuels those successes.
Especially after the team’s worst season since 1999 last campaign, which included Newgarden finishing 12th in the standings - his worst finish in points since 2014 - he is relishing the rebuilding process ongoing at Penske. And with two victories in the first half of the season, having also won at Phoenix Raceway, he appears in a happier place himself.
“My reaction is more I enjoy working with the individuals around me,” he insisted. “That’s no disrespect to the win list. You’re not going to find someone that is more competitive than me. I very much know the stats [for] anything you want to look at in IndyCar.
“[But] I enjoy my time with my team. I like working with the team. So when I think about victories or I think about the amount of time I’ve been in the sport, that’s what I really lean on now. I like showing up to the track and try to do a great job - we did that tonight.
“It’s fun to go racing. It’s fun when we have fast cars. It’s fun when we execute. I just want to see us do that more often going forward. We’re in a pretty good place. We keep building momentum in a lot of ways as a team. What we expect from ourselves, we’re building a lot of that back, which is great to see this year.”
Newgarden’s six top-10 results through nine rounds in 2026 already draws him only one adrift of his top-10 tally from the entirety of last season. There has still been some streakiness - the Arlington and Long Beach weekends subpar - but he is a much-improved sixth in the championship and only 78 points shy of his 17-race tally from 2025.
To make further inroads on those ahead in the standings - currently 104 points off Álex Palou’s points lead for Chip Ganassi Racing but only eight points behind Arrow McLaren’s Christian Lundgaard in fourth - his oval form does need to be translated elsewhere.
Newgarden has won 11 oval races since his last non-oval win at Road America in 2022, while he has not stood on a non-oval podium since St. Pete last year. A fourth-place finish on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course last month was an encouraging development, though, as his and Penske’s revival continues.
“I love short oval racing - I don’t think that’s a secret,” Newgarden conceded. “But I like everywhere we go. I actually look forward to the places that I suck at the most. Wherever I’ve had a bad result, I look forward going to the most because I want to rectify the problem.
“IndyCar is a game that you have to be super versatile in. You’ve got to be very well-rounded as a team, nimble. You’ve got to be good everywhere. It exposes the weakness if you’re not good everywhere. We have to make sure that we’re excellent everywhere we show up.”
There is more ground to be gained for the two-time champion to be a title contender again. But even walking wounded, there are glimmers of that version of Newgarden returning.
