Josef Newgarden's spontaneous celebration with fans shows his ecstasy over elusive Indy 500 win
INDIANAPOLIS — Josef Newgarden is hopping out of the car that just won the chaotic 2023 Indianapolis 500 and stomping toward the crowd. He’s not walking, not strolling. He’s stomping his feet, boom-boom-boom, only we haven’t seen the real explosion.
It’s coming, but what we’re watching right now is some combination of ecstasy and relief from Newgarden, who came into the 107th Indy 500 as the best active IndyCar driver never to win the race, and probably – given his two IndyCar series titles by age 28 – the best IndyCar driver, ever, without a Borg-Warner Trophy.
Newgarden’s got one now, his cherubic face coming soon to a large sterling silver trophy near you, and he’s feeling the ecstasy, feeling the relief, as he stomps toward the crowd. He doesn’t want to celebrate alone. He spent so many weekends here as a boy, his parents driving him from Tennessee through Indianapolis to race go-karts in New Castle, and that’s who he wants to join him on his celebration.
He wants to celebrate with Indianapolis.
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Problem is, there are two fences between Newgarden and the crowd. You know about the first fence, the one Helio Castroneves climbs every time he wins here. He gets to the top, where the fence starts bending back toward the track, and stops. No going over that fence. Behind that? Another fence.
No problem, as it turns out. Josef Newgarden has already pulled off one magic trick, surviving the madness of three restarts in the final eight laps, a dozen or more drivers believing they have a shot. Cars are bumping and grinding and flipping upside down. Tires are bouncing across the track, toward the stands, into the parking lot.
Here comes the final restart, on the 199th lap. Newgarden is behind defending champion Marcus Ericsson, and Ericsson is doing that dragon thing he does, the same move he used last year to hold off Pato O’Ward. Ericsson dives down the track, almost into the infield, trying to deny Newgarden the chance to draft. Newgarden is supposed to follow Ericsson – he’s not supposed to stay on the outside, floor it and pass Ericsson – but that’s what he does on Lap 200.
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And then Newgarden gives it back to Ericsson, giving him the dragon, using it to hold off Ericsson and win and now he’s stomping toward the crowd, boom-boom-boom, and the fence is in the way and Newgarden doesn’t care. He’s at the base of the fence, peeling it back, climbing over the concrete and slipping under the fencing and approaching a second fence. This one’s waist-high, the kind of fence in your backyard, and he’s hopping over it and now he’s in the crowd, walking among them, making his way deeper and deeper into the people until he can go no farther.
We are watching a dream come true. Josef Newgarden has just won the Indianapolis 500, and he has found a way into the heart of the crowd, into the heart of Indianapolis.
Josef Newgarden feels every emotion
Out in the crowd, a man of the people after this victory, Josef Newgarden is walking back to the fence, to his team, and seeing his crew coming for him. They’re climbing that fence like Helio, like a whole team of Spidermen, and Newgarden is climbing it back just to howl with his guys.
Until he sees Tim and Ashley. They found the gap in the fence, too.
Team strategist Tim Cindric, who knows better than anyone Newgarden’s talent and desperation to win here, is there and Newgarden’s hugging him.
“I’m so happy!” he’s shouting to Cindric above the roar of the crowd. “Thank you!”
Newgarden releases Cindric and spots his wife Ashley, and she’s crying and now Josef’s crying and you wonder what their conversations about this race have been like. You know those talks will be happier going forward, but right now everyone’s crying, the release of four hours of stress and emotion.
It wasn’t easy on the crowd, either. Couldn’t have been. The weather was perfect for the biggest crowd since the sellout of the 100th running in 2016, easily 350,000 people in this facility, and if an emotional Tony Kanaan tribute wasn’t playing on the scoreboard before his final race, if a tire wasn’t bouncing into the bleachers, if the race wasn’t stopping and starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting – all in the final 15 laps – then this was happening:
A bee storm.
Think I’m making this up? Nobody’s imagination is this good.
At some point during the race a handful of bees decided the bleachers next to the media center, practically overlooking the finish line, was a fine place to congregate. At first it was a few bees, annoying but whatever, but word must’ve spread because soon every bee within a 30-mile radius was here, hovering menacingly above the fans in Section 44. Some fans were moving away and others were fanning the air, shooing any bee within reach. Eventually, once it seemed clear the bees were interested in something just above the crowd — probably an ice cream cone left by one of us media slobs — the crowd ignored the chaos overhead to focus on the chaos on the track below.
Eventually the bees got bored and started forming makeshift hives, minus the hive. It was thousands of bees, landing on the underside of the upper deck and then growing downward, like an icicle grows downward. And then it was another hive, and another, and another.
Seriously this was unsettling.
But nothing — not the bees in Section 44, not the shenanigans on pit row — could distract from the magic of this finish. It was four different drivers with a real shot at winning in the final 15 laps, from Ericsson to Santino Ferrucci to Alexander Rossi to Newgarden, of all people, finishing his charge from 17th to the lead.
Newgarden led just five laps, less than seven other drivers on the day, but with three top-five finishes already here, this was his attitude coming into Sunday.
“If I get a chance to win the race, I’m not coming back with a top-five result,” he said. “I was going to win the race, or I was heading into the wall. I wasn’t here to finish second or third or fourth. I was here to win.”
And then he did it, the newest Indy 500 champion stomping toward an opening in the fence near the finish line.
“An access point where you can crawl under,” he said. “It looks like it’s closed, but there’s a way to go through.
“I knew exactly where the gap was,” he said. “You just can’t beat the Hoosier hospitality. The energy people bring here, it’s second to none. I just wanted to be a part of it. It was something that would be a dream come true.”
And then he was chugging milk and dumping it on his head and visiting with sponsors and coming to the media room, charming us with humor and humility and kindness and emotion, losing his composure when he talked about his wife. And when that was over, when Josef Newgarden walked out of the media room, he left to an ovation.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.