Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden in the No.2 Shell Powering Progress Chevrolet taking victory in the 107th running of the Indianapolis 500 presented by Gainbridge on Sunday resulted in several significant milestones for the team and their partners.
Team Penske’s 19th victory was the Greatest Spectacle In Racing. It was also Roger Penske’s first win as owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Starting the race from 17th place on the grid, Newgarden made steady progress throughout the race as the Tennessee native carved his way through the field and, in doing so, was also able to avoid some of the carnage that occurred throughout the 200-lap race.
Newgarden’s margin of victory over 2022 Indy 500 winner Marcus Ericsson of .0974s was the fourth closet finish in Indianapolis 500 history. The race win was also a landmark victory for Penske’ss partnership with Shell and Pennzoil as it was their 100th victory together across all competitions since 1983 across NASCAR, INDYCAR, SuperCars, CART IndyCar, and USAC. It was Penske’s first victory at the Brickyard since 2019, when Simon Pagenaud won. It was Chevrolet’s 12th Indianapolis 500 win.
History was made in Sunday’s race as Kaitlyn Brown became the first female across-the-wall crew member to win the Indianapolis 500, a feat not lost on long-time Team Penske President Tim Cindric who spoke about the work that Kaitlyn has done with Team Penske who took part in a post-race press conference at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Sunday:
Yeah, obviously Kaitlyn came — she had been on our NASCAR team. First of all, I signed her up. I’m her agent going forward. So I told her all the notoriety she has, she’s going to have to have an agent, and it might as well be me. She came to us on the NASCAR program and just wanted to work on race cars. When Beth Paretta’s program started up here we told everybody internally what was happening there and wanted to know if there were any females that wanted to be part of that program, and she was the first one to raise her hand and say, hey, I want a chance. We watched how hard she worked at it. They came in at 5:00 in the morning, doing pit stops before the rest of our pit stop practices started internally, and she worked her butt off. She earned the whole respect of the crew, and obviously we had some of our mechanics on that crew while it was here and they said, look, she deserves a chance on these cars if she wants it. And then she worked really, really hard to earn her way and earn her spot changing the left front tire on Josef’s car. She’s solid. She is solid. She’s all business. I think she has the opportunity and really the work ethic to be one of the top people at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I think her runway is really long, and if she’s patient and she continues to be in the right place and do the things she’s doing now, kind of the sky’s the limit for her.