Josef Newgarden was the fastest driver in final Indianapolis 500 practice Friday, then said he was ready to leave the speedway and wait for Sunday. He will start the race in 23rd, far from the front row, but the No. 2 Chevrolet showed enough pace to make him one of the drivers to watch when the green flag drops.
“I put up a fast lap,” Newgarden said. “That’s really all it is.”
That lap mattered because Newgarden is trying to rebuild momentum after a difficult 2025 season and a search for rhythm that has stretched into this year. He won the season-ending race at Nashville Superspeedway in 2025, but he was only 12th in the standings. Six races into 2026, he sits fifth with one win, two top-fives and four top-10s, a steadier line than last year but still not the kind of dominance that defined his best seasons.
Newgarden has the resume to know how quickly Indianapolis can change a career. He won the race in back-to-back years in 2023 and 2024, both times with late moves that turned him from contender into winner. He also owns INDYCAR titles from 2017 and 2019, and his only oval victory so far in 2026 came at Phoenix. That record is why Friday’s practice speed drew attention even though the starting spot is deep in the field.
“I think we’ve been relatively solid all month.... We’ve just got to make sure it’s right as Sunday comes around,” he said. “I sense a good rebalancing in a lot of ways. I see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
There is a straightforward reason the team believes the turnaround is real. Jonathan Diuguid took over the INDYCAR operation last June after an overhaul of the Penske INDYCAR leadership, and he was Newgarden’s strategist for the 2024 Indy 500 win. The two spent much of last fall confronting what had gone wrong. Diuguid said there were very difficult, very frank conversations through October and November after the season ended last year, and that Newgarden had come back changed.
“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 said. “And I truly believe he did have an offseason reset, and he showed up at St Petersburg ready to race.”
That reset has shown up in the results. Newgarden said he felt the same progress in the car and in the group around it. “I thought we had great speed in the race at Long Beach,” he said. “I feel the progress. I feel like we’re getting back into a rhythm and a lot of respect.”
The tension is that Indianapolis rarely rewards speed alone. Newgarden has won here by reading the race at the right moment, not by leading every lap, and he is again starting too far back to count on an easy path. But Friday’s practice did not look like the work of a driver merely hanging on. It looked like a contender with a cleaner team structure, a faster car and a familiar belief that the race can still come to him.
For Newgarden, the question now is not whether he has the résumé to win another Indianapolis 500. It is whether the reset he wanted after 2025 has finally turned into a race car and a result that match it.
