Josef Newgarden said he intended to clear the air with Team Penske teammate Will Power as soon as he had an opportunity after a chain reaction that followed a late restart on Newgarden’s behalf resulted in Power crashing out of Saturday night’s NTT IndyCar Series race at World Wide Technology Raceway.
Newgarden led as the field lined up for a restart with 10 laps remaining but launched for the green later than the cars behind him expected, resulting in several cars checking up and Arrow McLaren’s Alexander Rossi slamming into the rear of Power’s car.
Power was clearly incensed as he returned to the pits, and while he took care not to name Newgarden specifically while describing the incident during the race broadcast, he emphasized that he believed that the blame lay with “whoever was leading.”
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“I’ll go talk to him immediately once I get done with you guys,” Newgarden said during the post-race press conference. “As soon as I see him, I’ll talk to him.
“I know Will pretty well. I get that he’s upset. He got wrecked out of the race. He’s a championship contender. When you get run into, especially after the night he had — he had a great night, a fast car, he drove super-well – he led two-thirds of this thing. Imagine how he feels. I get it. I get that he’s upset.
“I think he’s going to try to place blame wherever he directly sees it right off the bat. He gets hot quick. I think when you calm down and look at it, it’s probably not going to be exactly what he thought it was in the moment.
“But the point is, he’s going to be upset because this is not good for his championship. Believe me, the last thing I want to happen is for Will to get hit. I can tell you that right now.
“If I go and sit with my boss tonight, he’s going to look at me and say, ‘Did you do a good job tonight?’ I want him to think I did a good job every single night that I see him.
“I wouldn’t change much from my procedure. It’s not that different than what I’ve done in the past. I hate that Will got caught out in a situation tonight, someone running into him. It’s not fun.”
Newgarden admitted that he went late on the final restart. “It was definitely late,” he said. “I was trying to go as late as I could. It’s not that different of a restart than I’ve done before.” But he denied accusations made by Power in the immediate aftermath of the incident that he had been repeatedly speeding up and then slowing down.
“If anyone, especially on our team, wants to look at the data, you’re going to see a very consistent speed,” he said. This was verified by the series, which said that Newgarden’s speed remained at 80mph in the moments immediately prior to the incident.
Race control manages restarts by using the lead driver’s throttle data as the cue for when to return to green flag conditions. Newgarden admitted that he was waiting until as late in the restart zone as he possibly could before taking off, as he is free to do within the rules, but suggested that the green flag might have been shown early, which would have signaled to drivers in the line that it was time to accelerate even though Newgarden had yet to return to racing speed up at the front.
“What looked like happened is that it went green momentarily before I went, just momentarily,” Newgarden said. “I’m talking like half a second or a second.
“If it’s just that slight difference in timing, if race control goes green and I haven’t gone yet for just a second… I think people were trying to jump, which we’ve had a problem with, to be honest. We’ve had a problem with jump-starts the last two years. It’s a constant topic in the driver meetings.
“If there’s just a slight miscue there, I think people are very on edge on these restarts trying to get the run. It looked like it mistimed in the back, at least with one individual, and that’s what caused a problem.
“From my side, it’s the last thing you want to happen at the end. I don’t want to create a wreck. I was not trying to do that. That was not my intention. I don’t know that I’d do much different because it’s how I would do a restart.”