IndyCar: Four Drivers That Will Surprise You In 2017

Josef Newgarden

Josef Newgarden will replace Juan Pablo Montoya at Team Penske in 2017 and is coming off 2 impressive years at CFH Racing and Ed Carpenter Racing.  Newgarden won 3 races, one pole and 7 poles over the course of two years, attracting a lot of attention from multiple teams.

Newgarden, a Hendersonville, Tennessee native, suffered a horrible crash at Texas Motor Speedway in June, where Newgarden suffered a broken right arm and shoulder.

Josef Newgarden would return a few weeks later at Iowa in dominate fashion and go on to win the race. His only victory of the season.

What remains to be seen is if he can perform up to the level every week on arguably the best team in the series with arguably the best teammates and the fastest drivers in the series. He’s done that as a driver outside of Team Penske, but it’s very different as teammates. In a test conducted at Road America, Newgarden told motorsport.com he had a “blast”.

"“And yes, the car was a little different from what I was used to. The starting point was new to me in terms of where the car was at and the philosophy of how it needed to be driven. Helio [Castroneves] and Will [Power] have developed the car a certain way and then Simon [Pagenaud] has had his input in it. “From a setup standpoint you can build this car in a lot of different ways – different rollcenters, spring packages and so on,” Newgarden explained, “and there’s a lot of different ways you can drive the car with the setup options you have available to you. “So today I learned how my teammates drive the car and why they drive the car that way. Then there’s how I want to drive the car and how I can tailor it to me a little bit better. I had to go through that all day and it was a lot of fun, actually.”"