Josef Newgarden was fastest in the final Indianapolis 500 practice on Friday but will roll off Sunday from the 23rd spot, a blunt reminder that a quick lap in practice does not automatically translate into starting position or race-day advantage.
Newgarden, a two-time Indy 500 winner in 2023 and 2024, said after final practice, "I put up a fast lap," and added, "I think we've been relatively solid all month.... We've just got to make sure it's right as Sunday comes around." The comments came as he sits fifth in the 2026 INDYCAR standings after six races, with one win, two top-fives and four top-10s so far this season.
The numbers underline why Friday mattered: Newgarden has already taken the only oval victory this year at Phoenix and carries the recent memory of a season-closing win at Nashville Superspeedway in 2025. Still, he finished 12th in the 2025 standings, and the team that surrounds him — Team Penske — has been through a public reset that included difficult conversations in October and November 2025.
Behind the scenes, Jonathan Diuguid took over the Penske INDYCAR operation last June. Diuguid, who served as Newgarden's strategist for the 2024 Indianapolis 500 win, said the driver benefited from an offseason break and a frank internal review. "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 [the opener at] St Petersburg ready to race." Diuguid added that the team had "some very difficult, very frank conversations through October, November, after the season ended last year," signaling a broad effort to recalibrate.
Newgarden has framed that recalibration in optimistic terms. In interviews this month he said, "I sense a good rebalancing in a lot of ways" and, bluntly, "I see the light at the end of the tunnel." He has also spoken plainly about progress: "I feel the progress." Those lines matter because they tie practice-day pace to a larger narrative — a driver and program trying to convert incremental returns into championship-form consistency.
Even so, the contrast between topping the speed chart on Friday and starting 23rd on race day is the story's friction point. Newgarden himself cautioned against over-reading a single fast lap: "That's really all it is. It's always there is positivity to that in that when the car can do that lap, that is a good thing, but that's not the whole story when it comes to our race car." Starting deep in the field will force Newgarden and his team to manage traffic, pit sequencing and the kind of strategic tradeoffs that decide the 500 more than raw straightaway speed.
For Newgarden, who also won the season finale at Nashville in 2025 and has two INDYCAR championships on his résumé from 2017 and 2019, the weekend is both a test of momentum and a moment to convert talk into results. He told reporters succinctly, "I’m ready to go home," words that read as personal resolve as much as a line about comfort with the car.
The Indianapolis 500 is scheduled for Sunday at 12:30 p.m. ET on FOX, and for Newgarden the immediate question is operational: can the speed he showed Friday be translated into track position and racecraft over 200 laps from a 23rd-place start? If the Penske overhaul and Diuguid's return to the top of the INDYCAR program are doing their work, Newgarden's fast practice lap will be more than a headline — it will be the start of the recovery he and the team have been chasing.
