That is exactly how Josef Newgarden described his 2024 IndyCar season, which ended in his first drivers’ championship finish outside the top five in his eight-year Team Penske tenure.
He joined the squad in 2017 and instantly won the title, won again in 2019, and then finished second for the next three years in a row before 2023 matched 2018 and completed out the top five.
This year, he finished seventh in the standings, with two wins and four podiums. However, a series of negative performances both inside and beyond of his control hampered his year.
“You’ve got to divide it,” the ever-reflective and eloquent Newgarden observed when asked to reflect on the year.
“This year’s Indy 500 has been extremely successful. It couldn’t have been more successful for the entire crew. So, from that aspect, it’s quite satisfying.
“In many aspects, we tried to improve the month of May, and we did it in every way this year. So it’s difficult to end the year without feeling genuinely fulfilled as a team.
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“What I would say is that it is not always your year or your day. Both have been true several times this season, and that is how it goes. So we’ll start over next year and try even harder to improve.
“That’s all you can do.”
The 500 victory was especially meaningful this year because the year before, he qualified 17th and was not anticipated to win the race from there. His Penske team had struggled, at least in terms of being held to its own impossibly high standards, particularly in qualifying for the 500 since the aeroscreen device was introduced for 2020.
Penske at The 500, 2020-2022.
Best qualifying position: 11th (Will Power, 2022).
Best finish: Third (Simon Pagenaud, 2021).
Average qualifying time for all cars: 21.27
Average finish for all cars: 15.82
The club even faced the prospect of being ‘bumped’ (not qualifying) in 2021 by Will Power.
After years of preparation and a new technical cooperation with AJ Foyt’s team, Penske won its first pole since 2019 at this year’s race with Scott McLaughlin. Of course, Newgarden completed one of the most memorable overtakes in the event’s recent history, passing Pato O’Ward around the outside of Turn 3 on the penultimate lap.
Newgarden also helped the Penske team win six of the 17 races this year, more than Ganassi, which won the title with Alex Palou, in a particularly good year for the team’s peak performance.
However, given all of those advantages, “disastrous” does not seem appropriate.
Of course, the push to pass saga, which resulted in him and McLaughlin being disqualified from the St Petersburg season opener for illegally employing push to pass on restarts, was a watershed moment for Newgarden and his team this season. Penske accused certain software left in the vehicles after a test for allowing push-to-pass to be used when it should have been disabled.
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