ELKHART LAKE, Wisconsin – Leading the points since a victory in the season-opening Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg on March 10, Josef Newgarden takes a 25-point lead in Sunday’s REV Group Grand Prix at Road America (noon ET, NBC).
It’s the start of the back half of the season as nine races are completed, with eight remaining in 2019.
The 2017 NTT IndyCar Series champion doesn’t want to be considered “the favorite” for the 2019 title, but he believes his team deserves a place in the conversation.
“We approach the entire year the same,” Newgarden told NTT INDYCAR Mobile. “That is how my mindset has always been. A lot of people want to break it up as the first quarter or the first half or the second half. Really, every race is important. It’s an average of all of them. Each race, we treat the same.
“I sound like a broken record, but it’s about maximizing each weekend individually. Generally, if you are a strong team and you have strong race cars and you maximize every weekend of the season, then you should be in the championship conversation. You give yourself a good shot at winning the championship.
“That is how we started the year and that is how we are starting the second half of the season.”
Newgarden has had a remarkably consistent season: three wins, five top-three, seven top-five and seven top-10 finishes in the first nine races. The only times he finished out of the top 10 was a 15th in the INDYCAR Classic at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and a 19th after he was involved in a crash in the second race of the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix at Belle Isle.
From here, however, each race becomes magnified to a degree. It’s like in an NBA game: a foul in the final 30 seconds is remembered more than the same foul that sends a player to the free throw line in the first quarter.
“You can look at it that way, but because our championship is the culmination of an entire season, it’s completely different,” Newgarden explained. “If you wreck in the first race of the year and have a DNF in Race 1, you have already put yourself in a hole to start the year. It is different to me. I don’t know if it magnifies it any more at the end than it does at the beginning. Any race that you have, because it is all counted equally, it all matters.
“Any race you have a bobble, it hurts.
“People want to paint it as a worse picture at the end of the year, but in reality, it’s all the same. Every race, we have to be on it. We’ve already had some races where we didn’t maximize some points. Detroit Race 2 is probably the biggest known that everyone knows about. I threw away a lot of points there. The GP of Indy, we had more potential and we threw away some points there. We’ve already thrown away a couple on the board. We already have a couple of strikes. Each strike you get, adds up.
“The way I look at it, if you have a couple of strikes, you have less to give during the back end of the season. That’s the way I look at it.”
One of the most disappointing races for Newgarden was his fourth-place finish in the 103rd Indianapolis 500. Most drivers would be thrilled to finish fourth in the biggest race on the planet. But for Newgarden, he didn’t come to the Indy 500 to score a top-five, he wanted a victory.
“Absolutely,” he said. “We tried to win the Indy 500 and I was doing everything I could to win the race and the team was doing everything we could to win the race, but we finished fourth.
“In reality, we were a fourth-place finisher. Third or fourth was our potential for that day. If we had won the race, we would have been overachieving for the day on the 2 car. I wouldn’t say that for Simon Pagenaud. He had a race-winning car and he drove a race-winning race. For us, we looked to be a third- or fourth-place that day. That doesn’t mean you can’t win the race, but it tells me we maximized our performance for that day.
“Where you work at Indy is to have a race-winning effort and work to have a race-winning car. I think we were close to it. We were of so close. When you are so close and miss it, it hurts hard at Indy.”
The NTT IndyCar Series has two major prizes to the season. The first is the Indy 500 and the second is the NTT IndyCar Series championship.
So far, Newgarden continues to be part of that championship conversation.