Last year, Josef Newgarden had his breakout season, turning himself in a race-winning contender with race runs near the front of the field. However, throughout the season, he continued to come up close in snagging that victory. This year, though, he’s on a roll as he picked up his second win of the year on Sunday in the Honda Indy Toronto.
Though not only was a win for Newgarden on Sunday, but his CFH Racing teammate Luca Filippi finished the event in the second spot. Newgarden says that’s a direct result of combining the resources of Ed Carpenter Racing and Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing over the off-season.
“I think they were strong divided; they’re stronger together, and now that we have a couple of results, I don’t think we can let off the gas, so we still got to be on top of our game,” he commented. “We weren’t really positioned where we wanted to be at the start of this race, and then getting in position sorta midway through there is what I think helped us achieve the victory, and Luca set a pace, and we got to keep working because there is a lot of good teams, and it’s difficult to do this on a regular basis, so I don’t think this is necessarily going to mean we can get more and more wins throughout the year. We just gotta keep working to do that.”
The organization put together the right combination of strategy and speed, having a yellow flag fall right where they needed it for the startegy to come together as needed. Some may say that for Newgarden, it was better for him to be lucky than good to win, as evident by the flag falling where it did. However, he says he’d rather be good than lucky, as being good allowed him to capitalize on the opportunity and win the race.
“I’m not going to deny that that yellow for sure helped us win this race,” he added. “It got us in position to be able to win the race, without a doubt. I don’t think we’ve ever had that before, so, you know, if we got a little bit of luck to win today. Sometimes you need it, and I’ve seen many people get it before. Once we got into the position to win the race you could see that we had cars to do, and that was the biggest factor for me. We weren’t in position on at the start of the race to try and really capitalize and win one, but we got there with a little bit of luck, and we still did the work we had to do to win the race so I was route of our whole team.”
The victory brings a bonus bit of satisfaction for Newgarden and CFH Racing, though, as the month of May was a struggle for the organization. As a result of Newgarden and Ed Carpenter flipping at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, they lost two cars. Combined with only one top-10 finish in the previous five events entering Toronto, it feels good for Newgarden to get some redemption.
“We lost two cars, which was a big deal, kinda put us on a back foot for the 500. We still got a couple of Top‑10s, which was really good for us points wise, and we still finished okay, but just not the month we wanted to have,” he commented. “Obviously May is the biggest month for IndyCar, and it was arguably our worst month so far, and that was tough for us. And we weren’t able to rebound in Detroit and definitely weren’t able to redound in Texas, so now it was cool that we were able to get back on a rhythm, and hopefully we can continue to do that instead of falling into a slump again last time after winning.”
While some may have thought he’d only one-win wonder, the second win gives some solidification. However, is it enough quite yet? Newgarden says they have more work to do moving forward.
“It is nice. I’m lucky enough to be driving a IndyCar, and to get two wins is really fortunate,” he said. “There’s not a lot of people that have won two IndyCar races, but I think if you really measure it, as a driver you don’t want to win a couple of races, you want to win a lot of races, and hopefully more often than six or eight race periods.
“You want to win consecutive races, hopefully. I don’t know if we’re quite there yet, but I would like to get there. That’s what you strive to do as a driver. It’s nice to have two, but I don’t think it means anything. It doesn’t mean you’re safe in a sport; I think you can always get kicked out. You never know if you’re going to be here next year; you always got to prove yourself, and that case still stands, in my opinion.”
Newgarden added that whether than rest on the success, they need to go back to the shop and keep working as they’re not magically going to get better. He used Texas Motor Speedway as a spot that they need to improve on, with their oval program, after struggling there or else they’ll go to Fontana and have the same type of run.
“So we’ve got a lot of work to do, but I have faith in our guys,” he continued. “We got a lot of smart guys, we have a lot of talented people. We can make it happen, we just got to make sure that we’re not fooling ourselves that we’re this “super team” because we’re not. We gotta keep working just like the rest of the guys out there.”
