Josef Newgarden received a last lap duel with Pato O’Ward to turn into the primary back-to-back winner of the Indianapolis 500 in 22 years on Sunday.
Newgarden’s victory capped an eventful afternoon on the Brickyard that noticed the beginning delayed by 4 hours attributable to extreme storms and the race interrupted by a number of cautions.
But the drivers managed to get in all 200 laps across the 2.5-mile oval, however solely simply with the race ending within the Indiana sundown proper earlier than the 8.15pm (1.15am GMT) curfew.
Newgarden gave the group of over 300,000 an American winner on the US Memorial Day weekend vacation. Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott Dixon was third.
“I’m just so proud of this team,” Newgarden, who took a $440,000 bonus for successful back-to-back Indy 500s, stated. “They crushed it – crushed it.”
Beginning on the entrance row alongside polesitter Scott McLaughlin and 2018 Indy 500 champion Will Energy, Newgarden ran close to the entrance of the pack all day.
However on the finish the battle got here right down to the last-lap shootout with O’Ward, Newgarden sweeping previous the Mexican’s Arrow McLaren to turn into simply the sixth driver to win back-to-back 500s and the primary since Helio Castroneves in 2001 and 2002.
Newgarden’s triumph marked staff proprietor Roger Penske’s twentieth win of the ‘Best Spectacle in Racing’, albeit coming with a whiff of scandal.
At the same time as Newgarden celebrated chugging from the normal quart of milk he took a second to hit again at critics who’ve labelled him a cheat after his victory on the season-opening IndyCar race in St Petersburg was forfeited for unlawful use of the push-to-pass characteristic that offers drivers a horsepower increase.
An investigation by staff proprietor Penske, who additionally personal the IndyCar collection and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, resulted in Newgarden’s disqualification and sanctioning of a number of officers together with the race outfit’s president Tim Cindric and race engineer Luke Mason.
“They can say what they want, I don’t even care,” Newgarden stated. “We worked our tails off.
“Luke, Tim, they don’t seem to be right here right now however they’re an enormous a part of this.”
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