With a sea of static and boring start, a central section of great strategic interest before the appearance of rain, and an absolutely electric night final sprint in the old style, Gateway delivered a remarkable experience as the penultimate race of the season and the last oval of 2022. In fact, it was relatively close to producing a surprise winner if the rain had come at another time, or if the test had lasted 10 more laps, but the checkered flag saluted Josef Newgarden again before anyone else.
In this article you will find the best moments in short format (five minutes) and long format (half hour summary), as well as different onboards and other alternative perspectives of a career that has planted the narratives for the final events of September. Of course, as a bonus track, we offer the relevant statistics left by this event, which were numerous and of great historical value in more than one case.
– Much of this article will cover statistics related only to the triumph of Josef Newgarden, which allowed him to reach certain unusual milestones in modern IndyCar. The most mundane, practically, are the total numbers to which it has added one more notch, this being the 25th career win and his 46th podium in IndyCar. He is now equal in number of victories to Gordon Johncock, champion in 1976 and three-time winner of the Indy 500, who was in 16th place in history.
More prominent is the fact that this is the fifth victory for Newgarden in 2022, an unusual number in recent times. From the six wins that Will Power achieved in his 2011 runner-up, the only example dated from the five wins achieved by Simon Pagenaud to win the championship in 2016. For the latest case featuring an American driver, you have to go back to A. J. Allmendinger and his five wins in the 2006 Champ Car season, prior to his rush to NASCAR with Red Bull.
Unlike these examples above where track wins dominated the stats, Newgarden has been much more versatile in its production, with two victories on the circuit and three on ovals. With his being the 53rd time that a driver has won at least five times in a year, this is only the 13th in which it has been achieved. repeating victories on both grounds. Since the arrival of the 21st century, dominated by ‘spec’ cars, only Dario Franchitti he was able to do it in 2009, with the opposite case: three wins on the circuit and two on the oval. The previous American driver who achieved it was Michael Andretti, with the same ratio, in 1996.
In his last 27 oval races, Newgarden has won ten times, with Scott Dixon next on the list with just four. Short ovals are clearly fertile ground: of his eleven oval victories so far, nine have come there, and in the last 17 races he has contested on these types of circuits. Four of those victories have been at Gateway, where this year he has won by third consecutive season, an achievement that had not taken place since Power did it between 2010 and 2012 in urban Sao Paulo.
Being an unusual event, it’s even stranger on an oval layoutwhere it had only been produced since 1984 on two other occasions: Dan Wheldon at the Homestead oval between 2005 and 2007, and Scott Dixon at the Nashville Superspeedway between 2006 and 2008. If we limit ourselves to American drivers, you have to go to the three consecutive wins of Al Unser Jr. in Vancouver between 1993 and 1995, and in oval to those of Tom Sneva between 1982 and 1984 in Milwaukee. If repeated in 2023, Newgarden would be the seventh case in history with four wins in a row at a specific venue (the first since 1991), and with a fifth in 2024 he would equal AJ Foyt’s record at Trenton in the first half of the 60s .
The scarcity of ovals in the calendar Compared to other times in the history of IndyCar (between 4 and 6 ovals for a decade), Newgarden’s numbers in this regard, although still far from the big brands, are truly impressive. With three wins to his credit this year, he is the first driver to do so since Scott Dixon won four times on the oval in the 2009 season., when there were still 10 on the calendar. A year earlier, Dixon did it five times, matching the best since 1979 previously achieved by Sam Hornish Jr. (2002) and Dan Wheldon (2005). Very far, yes, from the 10 of AJ Foyt in 1964.
Throughout history, twenty drivers have achieved at least 20 victories in IndyCar, being Newgarden only the seventh that accumulates at least 10 both on the circuit and on the oval along with legends like Mario and Michael Andretti, Bobby Rahal, Franchitti and the still active Dixon and Hélio Castroneves. In turn, he is among the 20 drivers who have won at least eleven times on the oval, he is the ninth who needed the fewest races (60) and only five drivers won on more ovals than him in the same period racing. In ‘recent’ years, he is only surpassed by the 51 it took for Sam Hornish Jr. (2003) and the 58 for Wheldon (2006). At the top of that table, drivers from the 1950s such as Jimmy Bryan (34), Johnnie Parsons (38) and Tony Bettenhausen (44) reached eleven oval victories in less than 50 races, as would Mario Andretti (47) a decade after.
– Beyond the Newgarden party, we must not lose sight of the second position of David Malukas. At 20 years, 10 months and 14 days, the American rookie became the 15th youngest driver in history to climb to a podium, the ninth youngest among Americans and the twelfth youngest on the oval. He beat Greg Moore’s first podium finish at Surfers Paradise 1996 by two weeks, but fell a month behind Sam Hornish Jr. and his podium finish at Las Vegas 2000. In turn, He has also beaten Christian Lundgaard’s recent podium early for just over a month.
His podium was also the first in 2022 for Dale Coyne Racingwhich narrowly avoided what would have been its first empty season in this regard since 2015. One-time championship Minardi, founded in 1984, has earned 27 podiums in its entire history, but only four of them have come in ovals, including the team’s first in 1996 under Roberto Moreno at Michigan. Since then, and until the case of Malukas, only Justin Wilson had achieved it with his victory in Texas 2012, and Ed Jones with his third place in the Indy 500 in 2017.
– Scott McLaughlin earned his sixth podium of the season, four of them in the last seven races. Added to his first podium finish of 2021, the New Zealander has scored four in nine oval races, compared to three he has in 23 circuit races. Two places behind him, Takuma Sato achieved his best result of the year in fifth position, completing the second double top 5 in Dale Coyne Racing history after the one achieved in Detroit 2013 (victory by Mike Conway, third Justin Wilson), and the Canadian Devlin DeFrancesco achieved his best result on the grid (9th) and race (12th) in his lackluster rookie season.
– Bad times continue to run for polemen in IndyCar. With Will Power finishing sixth, this was the 14th consecutive race without a victory from the first starting positionequaling two other historical streaks that culminated in 1978 and 1999. The following three references to reach, yes, are somewhat further away: 23 races without a victory from pole between 1947 and 1949, and another 21 in two separate cases (1959-61, and 1997-98). As for ovals, this is the twelfth in a row without a victory from pole: since Fontana 2014, only two of 44 oval races have been won from first place (Simon Pagenaud at the 2019 Indy 500 and Newgarden at Iowa 2020).
– After the historic pole 67 with which he equaled Mario Andretti’s record, and the aforementioned sixth place, Power retains the lead: he lost three points again, just the ones he now has an advantage with Newgarden. Both Scott Dixon, 14 points behind, and Marcus Ericsson (17 points behind) continue to rely on themselves in the final rounds of Portland and Laguna Seca to clinch the title. A luxury they no longer have Alex Palou (43 points)Scott McLaughlin (54) and Pato O’Ward (58), who will need to leave the next event with a disadvantage of less than 50 points to continue with options in the final test.
Photos: IndyCar Media