ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — At Team Penske, when one driver wins, the whole team wins.
But the look on Josef Newgarden’s face last September told a different story.
It was at WeatherTech Raceway at Laguna Seca and Will Power had just won his second NTT IndyCar Series championship last September. Newgarden, who all but threw away his chance at the championship with a mistake that left his car stranded during the previous day’s qualifications, had dug a deep hole before the final race of the season had even started.
Newgarden did everything he could to win the championship, but with Alex Palou running away with the race by nearly 30 seconds, and Power settling in for a third-place finish, second place wasn’t good enough for Newgarden to win a third NTT IndyCar Series title.
During a season where Newgarden had five wins, Power had the advantage with consistency.
Newgarden finished 16th in the season-opening Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, 14th in the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama, 25th in the GMR Grand Prix at Indianapolis, 13th in the Indianapolis 500 and 24th in the second Iowa race when he crashed while leading the second race of the doubleheader.
Those were all finishes that kept Newgarden from the championship.
By comparison, Power’s only finishes out of the top-10 were 15th-place finishes in the Indianapolis 500 and the Honda Indy Toronto, a 19th-place finish at Road America and an 11th-place on the streets of Nashville. Power’s only win came in the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix, but he had two second-place, six third place and three fourth-place finishes.
“I have no gripes with the points system,” said Newgarden. “I think everyone is working within the same rules, right? I don’t know that I have a lot of feelings towards it. I think it’s fine the way it is. We won five races, but we had some races that weren’t good. We can’t have things like Iowa race two, can’t have the engine penalty at Portland. There are one or two others that I won’t mention that could have been, should have been different.
“There’s no secret to how do you change that result? We all know where it was. It’s just a matter of getting it all right in one year.”
As Power soaked up the accolades of the championship, Newgarden had the look of bitter disappointment on his face. At times, his eyes welled with tears.
He had given it all he had, but that wasn’t enough to change the outcome.
With the NTT IndyCar Series season to open with Sunday’s Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, Newgarden still feels the sting of losing the championship.
“Honestly, I don’t feel that different leaving Laguna, where I was kind of at mentally there, my statements, what I was projecting,” Newgarden said last month before IndyCar Spring Training in California. “I feel very similar to that place. Not a lot has transpired between now and then. Just in the same spot, ready to get back going, improve where we can, be better in areas where we need to be, put a good season together.
“I don’t think we’re going to change much. I don’t know that we need to change anything as far as our approach or process. I think everything that we’re doing is what we need to be doing. IndyCar just has that intangible side to it where you just can’t predict everything. You do need a little bit of the tides to favor you at times. It’s preparation, hard work, maximizing each day, then timing needs to be on your side. Sort of the tides need to flow for you.
“I think most everything went well for us last year. There were just too many events, just a couple too many races that didn’t go our way that we needed to.”
As the series has become so competitive, the driver who wins the championship can’t afford to have many bad races.
“I think you can have a bad race; you just can’t have three or four of them,” Newgarden said. “Three or four is a lot. It depends on the year.”
Newgarden believes what happened in 2022 stays in the past. One season does not dictate what will happen the next.
“I think the complexion of each year is different,” said Newgarden, who won NTT IndyCar Series championships in 2017 and ’19. “It’s always been hard for me to assess things by comparing year to year. They’re all different. There are some years you probably could afford three or four bad races. Last year was not a year that you could afford that.
“It depends on who’s having a great year. Sometimes people just have a good run, and nothing seems to go wrong for them. That’s just the nature of the beast.”
Newgarden won a title his first season with Team Penske in 2017. He finished fifth the following year and fought back to win another championship in 2019.
Newgarden has finished second the past three seasons.
“It gnaws at me for sure,” Newgarden said of the streak of second-place finishes. “It’s annoying, there is no doubt. How could you not be frustrated by it, right? I think it’s normal, very frustrating.
“I try and take the frustration and just put it into motivation. How are we going to build a bigger gap where that’s not even possible? I don’t even want to be messing with it at the end of the year.
“In an ideal world, if we get to the end of a season where we don’t have to mess with the gap, if we can just get that out of the way, that would be ideal. That’s where my mindset is at, how do we get to that place where it’s not even on the table, it’s just done.
“I think I’m not arrogant enough to believe that that’s easy. It seems near impossible these days to do that. I think that’s valid. It’s very difficult to do that. I understand that. But I still want to find a way where we can get to a place where we don’t have to mess with it.”
Though the season starts Sunday in St. Petersburg, the Indianapolis 500 is already on Newgarden’s mind.
“Indianapolis is obviously the most glaring example of where we can continue to push forward,” he said. “There are other areas where we’ve excelled better, but Indianapolis is still a weak point for us.
“It’s the No. 1 objective. There’s just no excuse for it. We have to be better at Indianapolis, full stop. It’s not from a lack of trying. I can tell you it wasn’t from a lack of trying last off-season. We thought we were going to be exactly where we wanted to be. I think we made tremendous progress, but we weren’t fully there. We’re doubling down again. No excuses.
“We’ve got to make it better.”