Josef Newgarden said he would work things out with his Team Penske teammate Will Power at the earliest opportunity after a late restart by Newgarden caused a chain reaction that led to Power’s retirement from the NTT IndyCar Series race at World Wide Technology Raceway on Saturday night.
Newgarden was in the lead when the field lined up for the restart with ten laps to go, but started the green later than the cars behind him expected, causing several cars to brake and Arrow McLaren’s Alexander Rossi to crash into the rear of Power’s car.
Power was visibly upset when he returned to the pits, and although he was careful not to mention Newgarden’s name when describing the incident on the race broadcast, he stressed that in his opinion the blame lay with “whoever was in the lead.”
“I’ll talk to him as soon as I’m 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 understand he’s upset. He got knocked out of the race. He’s a championship contender. When you get hit, especially after the night he had – he had a great night, fast car, he drove great – he led two-thirds of the race. Imagine how he feels. I get it. I understand he’s upset.
“I think he’s going to try to put the blame where he sees it. He gets heated quickly. I think when you calm down and look at it, it probably won’t be exactly what he was thinking at the time.
“But the point is, he’s going to be upset because this isn’t good for his championship. Believe me, the last thing I want is for Will to get hit. I can tell you that right now.
“When I sit down 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 night I see him.
“I wouldn’t change much about how I do things. It’s not much different than what I’ve done in the past. I hate that Will got himself into a situation tonight where someone ran into him. That’s not funny.”
Newgarden admitted he left too late on the last restart. “It was definitely late,” he said. “I tried to leave as late as possible. It’s not a big difference from the restarts I’ve done before.” However, he denied Power’s accusations immediately after the incident that he repeatedly accelerated and then decelerated.
“If anyone, especially on our team, looks at the data, they’ll see a very consistent speed,” he said. This was confirmed by the series, which said Newgarden’s speed remained at 80 mph in the moments immediately before the incident.
Race officials manage restarts by using the leading driver’s throttle data as a signal for when to restore green flag conditions. Newgarden admitted he waited as long as possible in the restart zone to get going, which he was free to do within the rules, but suggested the green flag may have been shown earlier, which would have signaled to drivers in line that it was time to accelerate, even though Newgarden in the lead had not yet returned to racing speed.
“It looked like it turned green just before I left, just briefly,” Newgarden said. “I’m talking about half a second or a second.”
“If it’s just that little time difference when the race control turns green and I haven’t started for a second yet… I think people were trying to jump and that was a problem for us, to be honest. We’ve had a problem with jump starts for the last two years. It’s a constant topic in the drivers’ meetings.
“If there’s just one small mistake, I think people are very nervous on these restarts and trying to get the run right. It looked like there was a mistake at the back, at least with one person, and that caused a problem.
“From my point of view, that’s the last thing you want at the end. I don’t want to cause a wreck. That’s not what I was trying to do. That wasn’t my intention. I don’t know if I would do much differently, because that would be a fresh start.”
