Team Penske has won the IndyCar Series title once again. That in and of itself may not come as particularly surprising, given that the team has done precisely that fourteen times before. But this time it was a new driver who took the title – in his first season with the team, no less.
That driver is Josef Newgarden, the 26-year old Tennesee native who's been racing in IndyCars since 2012, after winning the Indy Lights championship the previous year.
Newgarden had won three IndyCar races before switching to Penske, and added four more to his roster this year – more than any other driver on the grid, including his defending champion teammate Simon Pagenaud.
For the 12th year running, the championship battle came down to the last race of the season, held this year at Sonoma. And it was all but guaranteed to go to one of the four Penske drivers in contention going in, joined in the title fight only by Chip Ganassi's Scott Dixon.
The team put Newgarden on a conventional three-stop strategy, Pagenaud on four, assigned Will Power to cover Newgarden's back, and Helio Castroneves to hound Dixon. The strategy worked, with Newgarden leading the first half of the race and Pagenaud the second. At the end of a largely uneventful race (caution-free for the first time in Sonoma history), Pagenaud ultimately won, with Newgarden in second – but that was enough for Newgarden to seal the championship, eighteen points ahead of Pagenaud.
With that, Newgarden became the first American to win the championship in since Andretti's Ryan Hunter-Reay in 2012. Last year's champion Pagenaud is from France, and both Dixon (champ in 2013 and '15) and Will Power ('14) are from Australia. It marks Penske's 15th open-wheel title (three in the current iteration of the series) and Chevy's fourth consecutive title, with Honda having last won in 2013.
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