IndyCar: Josef Newgarden seeking first truly great month of May

By Asher Fair | May 8, 2019

INDIANAPOLIS, IN - MAY 25: Josef Newgarden, driver of the #1 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images) /

IndyCar championship standings leader Josef Newgarden is seeking to record what would be the first truly great month of May of his career.

No driver has had even close to as good of a start to the 2019 IndyCar season as Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden has.

The 28-year-old Hendersonville, Tennessee native won the season opener on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida after leading 60 of its 110 laps, including 59 of its final 60, and he finished in second place in the season’s second race at Circuit of the Americas, which had never previously hosted an IndyCar race.

He then went on to finish in fourth place in the season’s third race at Barber Motorsports Park. Having won three of the last four races at the track and finishing in third in the other heading into this race, this impressive fourth place finish, which came after he started the race all the way back in 16th, was actually considered quite lackluster.

Newgarden responded from his “lackluster” fourth place finish with a career-high second place finish in the most recent race on the streets of Long Beach, California.

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He finished behind only Andretti Autosport’s Alexander Rossi, who won the race by 20.236 seconds after leading 80 of its 85 laps, giving him the largest margin of victory in an IndyCar race since Scott Dixon won the race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in the 2009 season by 29.780 seconds.

With four of the 17 races on the 2019 schedule in the books, Newgarden sits atop the championship standings and has sat atop the standings after each of the season’s first four races. He has scored 166 points so far this season, and he leads Rossi in second place by 28 points. Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott Dixon sits five points behind Rossi in third.

In a season that has been largely dominated by Honda drivers, Newgarden leads the championship standings as the only Chevrolet driver in the top five, and he has been the highest finishing Chevrolet driver in each of the season’s first four races.

But Newgarden has never truly had a great month of May, as the two tracks at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, Indiana, the road course and the oval, are statistically two of his worst tracks. He has recorded just one top seven finish in a combined 12 starts at these two tracks.

Of the 16 tracks that are on the 17-race 2019 IndyCar schedule, Newgarden entered the season having competed in 14, as he had never competed at Circuit of the Americas or WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.

His average finishing position at Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s 13-turn, 2.439-mile (3.925-kilometer) natural terrain road course and its four-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) oval are his worst two average finishing positions at any track. His average finishing position in five starts at the former is 16.00 and his average finishing position in seven starts at the latter is 17.43.

Meanwhile, Newgarden’s worst top finish at any track on the schedule is his top finish at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course. He finished in 11th place in the races at the track in the 2017 and 2018 seasons. He was penalized twice in the former for speeding in the pits, and he made a way too aggressive pass attempt in the latter late in the race that resulted in him spinning out.

Newgarden’s top finish in the Indianapolis 500 is an impressive third place finish in the 100th running of the race back in 2016, but other than that, he has finished higher than 19th in the race only twice, and those other two finishes were nothing to write home about. He finished in ninth in the 2015 Indy 500 and eighth in the 2018 Indy 500.

In the five seasons that the race on the track’s road course has been held as the race immediately before the Indy 500, the only season that he recorded an average finishing position of higher than 12.00 in these two races was last year when he recorded an average finishing position of 9.50.

That said, Newgarden has already proven this season that he can have success at tracks where he had struggled in the past.

He entered this year’s season opener having never finished in the top six on the streets of St. Petersburg, and his average finishing position at the track was a lackluster 13.14, which was his fourth worst average finishing position at any track on the schedule. His top finish of seventh place at the track, which he recorded in the 2018 season, was his fourth worst top finish at any track on the schedule as well.

As noted above, he ended up dominating that race.

With a solid lead in the championship standings heading into this year’s two races at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Newgarden, who has been a man on a mission through the season’s first four races, will be seeking his first truly great month of May to keep himself on pace to win what would be the second championship of his IndyCar career and his second championship in the last three seasons.

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How will Josef Newgarden perform in this year’s races at Indianapolis Motor Speedway throughout the coming weeks? The race on the track’s road course, the IndyCar Grand Prix, is set to be broadcast live on NBC beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET this Saturday, May 11, and the 103rd running of the Indianapolis 500 on the track’s oval is set to be broadcast live on NBC beginning at 11:00 a.m. ET on Sunday, May 26.