Josef Newgarden reckons the exit of his Team Penske race engineer and ex-Red Bull Formula 1 aerodynamics and electronics expert Gavin Ward to Arrow McLaren SP is “without a doubt, a loss”.
But he’s hopeful an engineer with more IndyCar and oval experience can actually boost his title chances.
Ward joined Red Bull in its first F1 season for work experience (he’d applied to Jaguar) while studying at university, but the team quickly snapped him up and he went from developing electronics to race engineering then aerodynamics, reporting directly to Adrian Newey.
He left Red Bull for Penske in 2018 and in his first full season as Newgarden’s engineer, they won the 2019 title together.
Ward now joins emerging Penske rival Arrow McLaren SP to oversee both of its cars in a technical director role.
Newgarden’s new engineer still hasn’t been announced and Penske has been working on a resulting restructure for some time.
“It’s definitely not ideal, I wouldn’t say,” Newgarden told The Race IndyCar Podcast.
“I feel like we’re certainly losing a strong member of our team, someone that was close to me, obviously very personal to my programme, but I think, essential to our entire programme.
“Having said all that though, the big philosophy at Team Penske – or sort of a cornerstone of the way we operate – is that the team is not built off one person. And that really rings true.
“You come into the operation, you see how they work, so if we lose a man here or there, the strength of the team doesn’t crumble, and I don’t think that will happen.
“We have really incredible people across the board and what I like about the team is, we don’t become siloed.
“So it’s still going to be the same programme, even just losing Gavin. And we’re going to be plugging in new people to that.
“So I think more where my focus is: how do we get the new guys up to speed? How do we get them kind of indoctrinated into our process, our thinking and what’s worked for us, and then try and take the good from them as well, and their outside perspective and kind of add it into what we’ve been doing?
“So yeah, it is without a doubt, a loss. I think a lot of Gavin, he’s a really great guy, good engineer.
“But I also just feel incredibly energised right now.
“I’m so pumped to have a little bit of new energy in the team. It puts me on my game a lot more.
“When you have a new engineer to work with, you’ve really got to be on top of it to make sure you’re explaining everything from your side, making sure you’re conveying your feelings. That can just get lost after a couple of years where you just get comfortable with somebody so the energy for me right now is kind of winning the day, if you will.
“That is exciting me more than anything.”
Newgarden was on fantastic form on the The Race IndyCar Podcast, and he spoke seriously and with depth about topics such as American drivers to Formula 1, how his confidence in the team has grown, and what it’s like to work within the structure of the famous Penske team.
And, when discussing Ward, Newgarden also allowed his sense of humour to come through as he declared of taking on Ward’s new team: “I’m gonna bury him, he’s gonna be buried every race I see him, we’re gonna put ’em down!”
While the pair started working together in 2019, Ward had joined the year before and shadowed Newgarden’s then engineer Brian Campe, giving Ward the perfect introduction to IndyCar.
While Newgarden’s new engineer – believed to be ex-Pratt & Miller member Eric Leichtle – is understood to have joined Penske last year, Newgarden says this is a different situation with its own positives and negatives.
“This is definitely different than Gavin’s arrival,” says Newgarden.
“To your point, when Gavin came in, we had the opportunity to go through the motions together for an entire season before it was really lights, camera action, and we had to do our own thing.
“That was a great way to bring Gavin on board our process. He had a lot more going on coming into IndyCar, though. He’d never been in the United States racing cars or engineering. He hadn’t seen our world, there’s definitely some differences to Formula 1.
“So even though he had this vast knowledge, for him, learning the differences between Formula 1 and IndyCar was a really big task. So that year was really crucial for that.
“Coming in with a new engineer this year is going to be a little different on my side. I don’t even know that we’ve fully announced or decided, who’s going to be on what car.
“But having someone that’s going to be more IndyCar oriented, where they’ve got the background in IndyCar, they kind of understand the drill, that will be a big help. And so I think from that standpoint, it’ll be different but it’s a very short turnaround, that’s the one thing that we’ve got this off-season, we’ve not had a lot of testing.
“We’re literally going to do one live test day before we show up at St Pete.
“So trying to rely on the sim and just trying to make sure we’re communicating over a couple months and communicating well enough so that when we get to St Pete we can hit the ground running pretty efficiently, that’s going to be the hardest part.
“So that is going to be very different than the way it went down when Gavin joined the group.”
Newgarden discussed the upcoming season, how becoming a father could affect his racing career, the dynamics of Team Penske and even being team-mates with JR Hildebrand on the latest episode of The Race IndyCar Podcast, which you can listen to here.
