Opinion: A Good Day for American IndyCar Drivers & Teams In Canada

When exciting American youngster Josef Newgarden, a kid from Tennessee who bucked the usual trend and opted to race in IndyCar rather than USAC sprints or NASCAR stockers, won his maiden IndyCar race at Barber Motorsports Park back in April, there was a sense that Newgarden, who’s always had pace, but has suffered from copious amounts of bad luck, was finally ready to swap the tag of ‘promising racer’ to ‘open wheel star’.

Then the ugly Month of May happened, and Newgarden was mostly a forgotten man the entire time the IndyCar Series was at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, except when he was involved in a serious accident leading up to qualifying.

It didn’t get much better after the IndyCar Series left Indianapolis, either. The optimism from April was gone, a distant memory. In fact, in three of the five races between Barber and this weekend, Newgarden finished twentieth of worse. Last week at the Texas Motor Speedway, the team suffered a double did-not-finish, with both their cars crashing out. The young American and his CFH Racing squad needed something to kick-start their mojo in the second half of the 2015 season.

Enter the streets of Toronto and this weekend’s Honda Indy, where Newgarden led home his teammate Luca Filippi for a memorable 1-2 finish, emulating what Porsche did at Le Mans, and giving his CFH Racing squad, owned by former racer Sarah Fisher, oil baron Wink Hartman and IndyCar oval specialist Ed Carpenter.

Whilst the CFH Racing 1-2 finish on the streets of Toronto might not reverberate around the motorsports world like Porsche’s feat at Le Mans did, it’s certainly big news in the IndyCar paddock, and a pleasing result for a small team who simply don’t have the same research and development budget or sponsorship that the Team Penske’s and Chip Ganassi Racing’s of the world can lay claim to. Not even Wink Hartman’s infusion of cash brings them up to the same level as the regular-front runners.

A timely yellow after a wet start to the race, some shrewd strategy calls from atop the pit box and good race pace late in the 85-lap event all came together perfectly to give Newgarden his second win of the year. He fought hard to keep Filippi and Team Penske star Helio Castroneves behind him, and made it to victory lane, the perfect way to wipe away the pain of a disastrous Month of May.

The race, a popular summertime event in Toronto, didn’t seem like anything other than a Team Penske benefit early, when Australia’s Will Power, driving with a fractured thumb, led French teammate Simon Pagenaud for much of the first third, and then became a wild free for all, for which the IndyCar Series is becoming more and more known for.

Sometimes all it takes is a weather event to spark a race to life, and the rain that had made the morning’s Indy Lights race a tricky, tiptoeing affair disappeared after about thirty laps of the IndyCar race, and the transition from a wet track to a dry one (and ultimately, back to a slightly damp one at the very end) jumbled up the running order, and on a street circuit that’s very conducive to passing and wheel-to-wheel dicing, the IndyCar Series put on quite a show in the closing stages, as rain again threatened the circuit. There was great racing through the pack, and Newgarden, not catching traffic at the right spots, suddenly had Filippi

It was a mature and calculated drive from Newgarden, surviving the wet, then the battles, and a wet track late. We’ve never doubted his ability behind the wheel, but there’ve been a few ‘rookie moments’ and more than a few doses of old-fashioned bad luck that’ve seen him have to wait the best part of three seasons for his debut win. Six races after taking the checkers at Barber, and after perhaps the most trying six weeks of his young career, it’s happened again. And, like at Barber, the result was an incredibly popular one.

Newgarden joins Juan Pablo Montoya and Scott Dixon as two-time race winners in 2015, and with a little less than half the IndyCar Series season left, there’s every chance that Newgarden, undoubtedly the face of the future of American open-wheel racing, will add to his total of wins.

Castroneves followed the two CFH Racing cars home in third, and Will Power was a solid fourth, in pain. He’s trimmed Juan Pablo Montoya’s championship lead to twenty-seven points.

The top eight finishers were Chevrolet-powered, and the best-finishing Honda was, yet again, Graham Rahal in ninth.

The IndyCar Series resumes in two weeks with a 500-mile race on the 2.0-mile Auto Club Speedway in Southern California.