1,000 Greatest Drivers: Josef Newgarden

Before turning heel, he was the best IndyCar driver for seven years.

There’s a lot to write about today obviously. First off, Newgarden’s long-time chief strategist and Penske President Tim Cindric got fired for his role in the attenuator cheating scandal. I always found Cindric to be one of the most overrated figures in racing history in general. He was given the credit for reviving Penske’s CART team in 2000 after they had gone winless in three of the four previous seasons. The question I always had is how much Cindric actually contributed or whether he was just there when it happened. It seems what actually revived Penske was firing Al Unser, Jr. when his alcoholism started to really get out of hand, hiring Gil de Ferran and Greg Moore (who was eventually replaced with Hélio Castroneves after Moore’s death), and most importantly replacing his terrible Penske chassis, Mercedes engines, and Goodyear tires with the dominant Reynard chassis, Honda engines, and Firestone tires. I think most of these moves except Castroneves were in the works before Cindric was ever hired, so I think a lot of times he gets too much credit for Penske’s comeback when I think it was already in the works based on all these other moves most of which were announced before Cindric took charge. I actually think Cindric has historically been a very bad strategist. It’s telling that he first attracted most race fans’ notice when he ran Max Papis out of fuel at the 1999 Michigan 500 (although at least it led to Paul Page delivering one of the all-time great calls in motorsports history…) These trends continued after he left the Rahal team and switched to Penske. I don’t know how many times Castroneves, Will Power, and Newgarden have dominated races and lost them on strategy because of bad Cindric calls with typically some Ganassi driver (almost always Scott Dixon, Dario Franchitti, or Álex Palou) winning in the end despite being slower simply because Mike Hull seems to be the only IndyCar strategist who actually knows how to do strategy. If Penske is smart, he needs to throw a lot of money at Hull RIGHT NOW because he has been Ganassi’s secret weapon for so many years now and I wonder if they become a second-tier team like Andretti or McLaren if he is no longer there… I also wonder what ramifications this will have for Austin Cindric’s NASCAR tenure. He’s admittedly been actually good this year, but he’ll never be great.

Then there was the NASCAR Hall of Fame induction where Kurt Busch, Harry Gant, and Ray Hendrick. I probably would have chosen another Harry (Hyde) over Gant, but I have no complaints here. What surprises me is how many people do. I guess people are against Kurt because they think there should be some sort of morality clause like the Baseball Hall of Fame has. But isn’t that the only Hall of Fame that actually has a morality clause? As far as I know it is and we all see how well that is enforced. Racism? Okay. Gambling? Unconscionable. Greenies? Fine. Steroids? Beyond the pale (unless you’re David Ortiz). Everybody is going to have different opinions on which actions are moral and immoral or which things should keep people out for moral reasons, so I think morality clauses for Halls of Fame are bad ideas to begin with. There is no other argument against Kurt. As for Gant, I get the impression that most people have way higher standards than they should for the Hall of Fame voting. Since it seems like all people want to do any time the inductees are announced is bitch about how mid they are even if they’re obvious inductees like Gant or Carl Edwards, I just shrug. Do these people think nobody should be in who was worse than Bill Elliott or something? Donnie Allison is already in and he didn’ even make the 50/75 Greatest Drivers lists. I don’t know, I support almost all the 75 Greatest Drivers’ inductions and I’m surprised most people seem not to (although I feel we’re at the point where we should be inducting more crew chiefs and engineers and fewer drivers right now). I honestly like seeing lots of people get honored and all the smug “Hall of Very Good” crap (what an obnoxious phrase) makes me prefer permissiveness. Who cares if it diminishes the honor? Because it feels like a lot of the drivers people think won’t deserve it are people with between 10 and 20 wins who never won titles like Gant and Ernie Irvan and Tim Richmond even though they were all better than a lot of drivers who did. Maybe if people actually evaluated careers based on performance instead of just looking at titles and wins and marquee race wins and nothing else, I’d be more inclined to set a higher standard, but I don’t want to see some deserving people getting snubbed with less deserving people getting in. Having said that, the biggest snub is Smokey Yunick and definitely isn’t any driver.

I missed the Danny Ongais post last night because I was off playing bar trivia again. Despite only playing by myself against a bunch of teams of six, I finished second and won a $15 gift card for the bar. Since I don’t drink and I also don’t eat most of the things they serve there, I wish I could just trade this in for cash to help me pay my next mortgage bill or power bill or something, but that apparently is not an option. I’m not doing this primarily to win anything, but to make connections to other local nerds so I can hopefully find some real world friends, which I haven’t had in years. I still have not found any full-time work, but I did contact a typing buddy who might have some transcription work for me and I wrote to the guy who runs the Fantasy Sports Writers Association (where I am a member) to see if he has any ideas for where I should be looking and he got back to me, but there isn’t much. My mom has finally been allowed back on solid food after months of being on a pureed diet so I can finally bring her food again, so that was a good thing. When I went to visit her yesterday, the bus I was riding crashed as it delivered a glancing blow to a car while navigating a cul de sac at the stop before my mom’s nursing home so I just walked from there. I wasn’t hurt and I doubt anybody was since the whole thing was at 10 mph, but I was a little worried about the car driver.

As for today’s driver, I’ve really been ahead of the curve on Newgarden for pretty much his entire career really. He was one of the first big stars to emerge after I launched Racermetrics in 2015, and I was really high on him right after he broke, even placing him in my top 50 and leaving Juan Pablo Montoya out even though he tied for the championship. Although I later changed my mind and gave Montoya an E- as well, I was on to something since after Newgarden replaced Montoya, he won as many races in his first year there (4) as Montoya did in all three of his years at Penske. Newgarden was also admittedly my favorite driver in 2015-2017 as well as he was the most exciting driver to watch and I still liked him years afterward. Zach Veach replaced him as my favorite driver for a while even though he was not good because I really admired his anti-bullying campaigns. But Newgarden was still my favorite of the big stars until he stuffed Romain Grosjean into the tire barrier at Toronto and said “Welcome to IndyCar”, seemingly envious that Grosjean had a higher profile and more popularity just because he raced in F1 even though Newgarden was better. I really didn’t like how all the drivers ganged up on Grosjean and basically ran him out of the series when I kind of feel he should be there and I felt even at the time that Andretti replacing him with Marcus Ericsson was a downgrade and I don’t think I was wrong. I was pretty much done with Newgarden after that (while still admitting he was a lot better than that year’s champion Will Power), and the various cheating scandals haven’t helped. As for the people calling him “the villain of IndyCar”, I’m still not there yet and I still think that’s probably Santino Ferrucci. But will I root for him again? No.

Just as I correctly forecast Newgarden’s rise before a lot of people did, I also correctly forecast his decline in my top 200 of 2022 list:

Nailed it. Pretty much dead on except that I am now 100% certain that Newgarden will never win a title again (I didn’t expect the falloff to be this severe) and also I was wrong to predict that it would be McLaughlin dominating this era instead of Palou, but I took a shot and at least I still mentioned him here. Just like Tony Stewart, Newgarden is a onetime favorite who I eventually got sick of. Much like Stewart was important to me in my early years as a fan on the early NASCAR Internet, Newgarden was important to me as an auto racing analyst because I seemed to understand and predict his career better than any driver, so I could’ve written this in my sleep.