NEWTON, Iowa — With Josef Newgarden scoring his sixth career victory at Iowa Speedway and sweeping the doubleheader Hy-Vee IndyCar Race Weekend, maybe they should rename the town “Newgarden, Iowa.”
NASCAR may be the official owners of the track and Penske Entertainment may have leased the facility, but Newgarden owns Iowa Speedway, due to his latest triumph in Sunday’s Hy-Vee One Step 250 presented by Gatorade.
Not even a late race caution and a restart with three laps to go was enough for anyone in the field to catch the Team Penske driver from claiming his sixth career win at Iowa and his fifth-straight oval win. That matches A.J. Foyt in 1964, as well as Al Unser in 1968 and 1970.
It was also Newgarden’s 29th career NTT IndyCar Series win, tying him with the great Rick Mears of Penske Racing.
Click here for the full race results.
Newgarden led 212 laps in the 250-lap race. Teammate and pole winner Will Power led 30 laps and finished 0.7050-of-a-second behind Newgarden’s No. 2 Hitachi Chevrolet.
Alex Palou of Chip Ganassi Racing, who entered the weekend with a 117-point lead in the NTT IndyCar Series standings, finished third after starting 12th on what he considered to be his biggest obstacle to a second IndyCar championship. Palou also finished eighth on Saturday.
Combined with Newgarden’s doubleheader sweep, Palou’s lead is now 80 points with five races remaining.
There were eight lead changes among six drivers. There were also 1,168 total passes including 379 for position.
“It was a different twist today,” Newgarden said. “It was by no means easy. Today was different. We thought it would have a different twist and it did. We have a really good baseline race car here. It’s impossible to win here without a really good race car and we always seem to have it.
“It was great day. I feel really happy today. Yesterday I felt incomplete. That’s the only way I can put it. When you have a doubleheader and you feel like you have a great car underneath you, finishing day one it just doesn’t feel finished. Today I feel like we’re done now. We can leave.
“Today’s win, we’re done. We can leave here now feeling good.”
Felix Rosenqvist of Arrow McLaren was fourth and Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin rounded out the top five.
Chevrolet took four of the top five positions. The highest finishing Honda was Palou.
There were three cautions for 37 laps. The most serious incident came when the rear wheel on Sting Ray Robb’s Honda came off following a pit stop on Lap 157. The pit crew was unable to tighten the rear-wheel retaining nut before he left the pits.
When the wheel came off, it bounced in front of speeding cars on the track, narrowly avoiding getting hit and launched into the air, similar to what happened in this year’s Indianapolis 500 when a rear wheel was launched over the safety fence.
IndyCar officials disqualified Robb and the Dale Coyne Racing entry from the race for the incident.
“As soon as I left, I saw one of the crew guys throwing his hand up like something was wrong,” Robb explained to NBC’s Nate Ryan. “I didn’t have any communication on the radio, so I was like I’m going to go out. I didn’t see anything wrong. He sent me and then threw his hand up. So, I didn’t know what the issue was.
“Someone said good recovery on the radio as if I stalled it, but I didn’t stall it. I kept going. I realized it was loose about pit exit. The pit limit marker there. As soon as I saw it, I was trying to get back around. We had the same thing happen yesterday. And it was the right rear. And with the pressure on the right rear, it stays on, left rear it just doesn’t work like that.
“I understand the series’ call to pit us, and set us down for the day, but it’s just frustrating. Horrible ending to a bad day. I’m kind of glad that it happened because it makes something tangible of something that’s wrong in the team.”
Robb never pulled onto the banking because he knew the car was about to lose the wheel, but “the tire did.”
Robb was also fortunate the wheel was not hit by another car.
“It was close,” Robb said. “I was watching in my mirror. As soon as it left off, I got on the radio and was shouting at the guys to tell someone. They pulled out the yellow as quick as they could, but you had cars doing 180 mph around this place, it comes up on you pretty quick.”
Just like Sunday, Newgarden’s Chevrolet was the class of the field.
But the end of the race included a late race caution after Ryan Hunter-Reay’s Chevrolet brushed the Turn 4 wall with 10 laps to go.
IndyCar Race Control threw the yellow flag, but told the drivers that in the interest of fairness, nobody could pit for fresh tires.
There was some confusion about the policy. The green flag waved with three laps remaining and Newgarden maintained his lead. Palou, however, had a great restart and was able to race his way to a third-place finish, and maintain his firm grip on the NTT IndyCar Series lead.
“Yeah, that was cool,” Palou said. “I knew that we were the last car on the lead lap, so I could risk it a little bit more. If I had an issue with something, I was not going to lose a position. I went on the outside, had a good restart. Went on the outside of Scott McLaughlin, and I think Felix Rosenqvist was battling with Power and just to the narrow, and I got to the inside of him into three.
“So, yeah, it was a pretty good restart.”
Palou finished the weekend with an eighth-place finish on Saturday and a third place on Sunday at a track where he expected to struggle.
“It was a place and a weekend that I was not looking forward to even before starting the season because it’s a place I struggle personally to place,” Palou said. “As a team we know we need to find a little bit more, which we did. Yeah, I was still struggling a lot. I’m super happy with the podium today and with the P8 yesterday.
“I’m looking forward to the next couple of races, which we know that we have a good car, and I have a lot of confidence that I can extract kind of the same from what we have.”