Josef Newgarden's 2026 Rebound Heads To Pivotal Indy 500

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 ready to race."

Diuguid said the key for him was to allow Newgarden (and all the Penske drivers) to focus on driving. That he and the management team have to do their jobs to keep the drivers from worrying about managing any personnel and being more front and center in answering the questions of why the team is struggling, as it did last year.

"[We had] some very difficult, very frank conversations through October, November, after the season ended last year," Diuguid said. "Josef was able to tell me and a few others on his perception of the situation and where we needed to improve.

"And hopefully he would feel that we've responded to a large portion of those. We’ve got a strong development path. His focus has been improving his performance on road courses, street courses, and we've seen some light at the end of tunnel there."

Newgarden stresses some things haven’t changed in the sense of the quality of the people that have been put around him at Team Penske. Diuguid is his full-time strategist and Luke Mason has remained his engineer.

"You get to work a lot of different people in the group," Newgarden said during a news conference last week. "You always hope you get to work with different people in certain capacities. Jonathan was one of these guys, I would love to work with Jonathan. I had a great engineer already.

"Funny how it cycles around. You see strengths in everybody within this group. What I'm trying contextualize for you is that there might be movements within the organization, but to me it feels the same every day I walk in the door."

And he says that’s a good thing.

"I love being a part of this organization," Newgarden said during a news conference last week. "I love working with my teammates. That's really what drives me every day.

"We have a great group of people that are constantly pushing each other forward. ... I love working with the people on this team."