Indianapolis Motor Speedway (Speedway, Ind.) — Josef Newgarden won the season-ending race in 2025 at Nashville Superspeedway and still just appeared to want the season to end.
“I’m ready to go home,” he said after the win.
His mannerisms appeared of a driver who might have been over it, either at Team Penske or INDYCAR as a whole. The driver of the No. 2 Chevrolet had won the Indianapolis 500 in back-to-back years (2023 and 2024). He had won INDYCAR titles in 2017 and 2019 but was 12th in the standings in 2025.
Now, six races into 2026, Newgarden seems relatively happy. He sits fifth in the standings with one win (the only oval race so far at Phoenix), two top-fives and four top-10s in six races.
He starts the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday (12:30 p.m. ET on FOX) from the 23rd spot but was fastest in the final Indy 500 practice Friday.
“I put up a fast lap,” Newgarden said Friday in the post-practice news conference. “That’s really all it is. It’s always there is positivity to that in that when the car can do that lap, that is a good thing, but that’s not the whole story when it comes to our race car.
“I think we’ve been relatively solid all month. … We’ve just got to make sure it’s right as Sunday comes around.”
That’s Newgarden. If he has confidence, he isn’t going to totally show it. Maybe he wants his competitors to think he could be a little bit down and out. He knows what he can do — he made dramatic passes at the end of both of his wins in 2023 and 2024.
He enters this Indy 500 feeling good. And the way he talks and his mannerisms indicate he’s feeling better about his INDYCAR situation and his team. Of course, another Indy 500 win would give even more of that feel.
“I sense a good rebalancing in a lot of ways,” Newgarden said about the Penske program in talking to me and other reporters last week. “I see the light at the end of the tunnel. In so many respects, I see speed. I thought we had great speed in the race at Long Beach. … I feel the progress.
“I feel like we’re getting back into a rhythm and a lot of respect. So that’s, that’s a good thing. I think that’s what needs to happen. In a lot of ways, we just need to continue to get better throughout the year. If we can do that. I think we’ll be in a good place by the end of it.”
Newgarden entered 2026 rejuvenated and adamant that he was happy at Team Penske, an organization under the leadership of Jonathan Diuguid, who took over the INDYCAR operation last June after an overhaul of the Penske INDYCAR leadership.
Diuguid served as Newgarden’s strategist for the 2024 Indy 500 win. And he and Newgarden had some tough discussions in the offseason.
“If you ask anybody, he was probably cold at the end of last year, but I think he was under a lot of different stresses and things like that and just wanted to have offseason reset,” Diuguid told me last week. “And I truly believe he did have an offseason reset, and he showed up at [the opener at] St Petersburg able to race.”
Diuguid stated the important thing for him was to permit Newgarden (and all of the Penske drivers) to concentrate on driving. That he and the administration workforce should do their jobs to maintain the drivers from worrying about managing any personnel and being extra entrance and middle in answering the questions of why the workforce is struggling, because it did final yr.
“[We had] some very troublesome, very frank conversations by way of October, November, after the season ended final yr,” Diuguid stated. “Josef was in a position to inform me and some others on his notion of the state of affairs and the place we would have liked to enhance.
“And hopefully he would really feel that we have responded to a big portion of these. We’ve obtained a robust improvement path. His focus has been enhancing his efficiency on highway programs, road programs, and we have seen some mild on the finish of tunnel there.”
Newgarden stresses some issues haven’t modified within the sense of the standard of the folks which were put round him at Group Penske. Diuguid is his full-time strategist and Luke Mason has remained his engineer.
“You get to work quite a lot of completely different folks within the group,” Newgarden stated throughout a information convention final week. “You at all times hope you get to work with completely different folks in sure capacities. Jonathan was one in every of these guys, I’d like to work with Jonathan. I had a fantastic engineer already.
“Humorous the way it cycles round. You see strengths in all people inside this group. What I am making an attempt contextualize for you is that there may be actions throughout the group, however to me it feels the identical each day I stroll within the door.”
And he says that’s a very good factor.
“I like being part of this group,” Newgarden stated throughout a information convention final week. “I like working with my teammates. That is actually what drives me each day.
“We’ve a fantastic group of individuals which can be consistently pushing one another ahead. … I like working with the folks on this workforce.”
