Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden in the No.1 Hitachi Chevrolet was delighted with his second win of the 2020 NTT IndyCar Series season in race 2 of the Bommarito Automotive Group 500 at World Wide Technology Raceway on Sunday.
The Tennessee native came from second to claim his second win of the year. Speaking following the action he said:
This was all a pit stop victory right here for me. We got pretty dicey with Will (Power) and Pato (O’Ward) there on track. My guys have been amazing in the pits. They have put me into position every time. It was really fun racing Pato out of the pit. That was for the win right there, that race when we went side by side out of the pit exit. He did an amazing job. He’s going to do great things in this sport, so good job to him. It’s a smaller crowd; we weren’t allowed to have as many people here, but thank you to everyone who came out. I hope you enjoyed your Sunday, and hopefully you enjoyed the race. This was all down to my team. Team Chevy did an amazing job. Great to have Hitachi on the car this weekend. They’ve been good luck for us. Really proud of my team. They won the race. I didn’t win it; they won it.” (About pursuit of seies leader Scott Dixon): “Well, we can’t give up on it yet. Yesterday was a pretty big blow. We’ve been pretty bitten by bad luck this year. The yellows have really gone against us probably three or four of the eight races, so what are you going to do? Sometimes it comes your way; sometimes it doesn’t. I feel like this year they really haven’t come our way, but that’s racing. You’ve got to hopefully get on a good cycle, and maybe this will be a little kickstarter for the end of the season for us.”
Will Power in the No.12 Verizon Chevrolet started the race from third and was happy with a third place finish saying:
I felt like we had the car to win. Obviously, it’s a traffic game. I’ve got to thank all of the guys. The Verizon 12 car Chevy was really strong today. We had great stops, great car. The strategy certainly didn’t work out obviously at the end, but still very happy to get a podium.” (About your bad luck this season): “We’ve certainly had a lot of potential this year and very strange year. But I feel very fortunate that I get to drive the Verizon car, and we get to do this and can actually have some fans here. It’s a fantastic job. Obviously, we’d love to win, but it wasn’t today
Simon Pagenaud in the No.22 Menards Chevrolet came home in 16th place and speaking following the action he said:
Yeah, the whole weekend didn’t go well. Yesterday really put us on the back foot, and we didn’t get to really feel the race car. Today, Turn 1 just obviously got us shuffled and sandwiched and didn’t want to end my race in the first corner, so I slowed down and lost all momentum. It caused a freight train around me. We had a really good car the whole race; we were just stuck at the back. I was super happy with the Menards Chevy, but I think we had one of the fastest laps of the race. We just got stuck in the back, so let’s regroup and go to the next race. I guess it’s that kind of a season where you just have to take every race as it comes.”