Newgarden dominates Iowa opener to cut Ericcson’s points lead

Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden took his fourth Iowa IndyCar win in the first race of the weekend at the short oval in a spectacular performance that must have baffled his rivals as he lapped everyone up to and including sixth place.

Newgarden took the lead on lap 21, after Jimmie Johnson – who would impress later – spun and brought out the first caution which allowed a number of drivers to pit and carve back through the field on valuable fresh tyres.

Full course yellow is out for this spin (and no contact!) by @jimmiejohnson.

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Pato O’Ward (after the first stops) and Marcus Ericsson (through the middle of the race) took turns in challenging Newgarden but Will Power was never far behind and took over the charge on lap 137 of 250.

Having touched on the race start, team-mates Newgarden and Power both know how important championship points are and battled each other extremely hard at the start of the long final stint set up by Ed Carpenter’s crash after 164 laps.

On the restart from that final caution, Scott McLaughlin dropped to the pits on the restart with a loose right-rear wheel from the pitstops, which in turn promoted Alex Palou who had a great middle to 2/3rds of the race, having struggled to move forward like his team-mates Ericsson and Johnson early on.

Palou passed O’Ward on that restart to take third with a low racing line on the track, but struggled relatively early into the stint while O’Ward was resurgent after gathering himself up.

O’Ward passed Palou and Power in the final stint and made the most of Newgarden struggling to navigate traffic to close down a two second gap as the pair put over 12 seconds on Power and lapped everyone up to fifth place.

But Newgarden just looked comfortable in any scenario and situation at what is his best track, and O’Ward fell back in traffic as Newgarden streaked to victory by 6.1s. Newgarden’s win enabled him to jump from fourth to second in the drivers’ championship and close to within 15 points of Ericsson.

Ganassi’s Palou lost third to Power with 10 laps to go and fell back further when he lost his car at Turn 3, and a great save limited the damage as he fell to sixth.

Jumping ahead of him were Ed Carpenter’s Rinus VeeKay and Ganassi’s Scott Dixon who both didn’t look like they had cars capable of that at the beginning of the race but raced hard and made adjustments to take a top five.

Behind Palou, Romain Grosjean was another driver struggling in the first stint but came all the way back through to seventh after working on his car through the stops to finish as the best Andretti car.

Marcus Ericsson was fighting Newgarden for the lead on lap 134 – they even touched – but by lap 163 he was being attacked by Scott McLaughlin while trying to lap Simon Pagenaud and almost hit the wall if not for a brilliant save.

Ericsson couldn’t regain the form that had him much higher earlier in the race and took eighth. He maintains the championship lead even if Power finished further ahead.

Rahal Letterman Lanigan duo Graham Rahal – who was swamped on the race start – and Christian Lundgaard worked forward to take a top 10, the rookie Lundgaard having started 20th.

Johnson took 11th having run in the top five late on but his aggressive high-line tactic clearly took the pace out of his tyres, and perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that Dixon was the only Ganassi driver able to extract strong pace at the end of the race on the long stint.

WHAT A MOVE, @JIMMIEJOHNSON!

The @CGRTeams driver goes three-wide around Jack Harvey and Devlin Defrancesco. #INDYCAR

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Johnson did make a spectacular number of passes including a three-wide attempt to lap traffic around the outside of Turns 1 and 2.

Despite thrilling early on by pitting at the first caution and racing to the top four, Colton Herta was comfortably on for a top 10 or perhaps even a top five until he couldn’t engage the clutch in a pitstop and went six laps down.

Race Results

Keyword: Newgarden dominates Iowa opener to cut Ericcson’s points lead