Newgarden says he’ll be happy with 2017 regardless of title outcome

Despite the fact that an error on pitlane at the last race allowed Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda’s Scott Dixon to close within three points of him, Newgarden says he has kept calm because he’s already pleased with his first year in Team Penske.

After topping both practice sessions today, he told the media: “I'll be honest with you, if I drop the ball and totally ball it up this weekend, I'm still going to be pretty happy with this year. That's not to say that I'm going to settle for that or that I'm looking to settle for something like that.

“But the only way I think you can approach this is to get the most out of it and try and treat it like any other weekend. The moment you think, ‘Hey, this is championship week,’ you mess it up, you're not the champion. That can put you in a wrong place mentally.

“Every weekend we go into, like I was saying before, we try and win the race. We try and make fast cars and make good decisions; that's really all we can focus on. And if it works out, I'm going to be really happy for our whole group. It's something that Roger and Tim are making a priority right now. They want one of our cars to win the championship.

“But like I said, at the same time, I've also thought about it the other way – if I mess up or we have a bad day from a luck standpoint, maybe something out of our control, I'm still proud of this year. It's still going to be a learning year in a way that we can apply to future years, so either way it works out, I'm pretty happy with it.

“We'd love to win the championship, but it's been a great year for us all around, I think. That's probably why I've been a little bit relaxed.”

Newgarden, who has scored four wins this year, said that his hopes had been high from the moment he joined Penske that he could be a title contender in the last race, but he was not confident about it.

“Yeah, I hoped it, I thought about it,” he recalled. “I wasn't sure if it would happen, but I definitely hoped that would be the case. I think any time you come into a new team, you hope to hit the ground running. I was definitely nervous and somewhat cautious about it. I felt like we would need some learning time and some gelling period, and we've needed that.

“At times we've not been as strong as I think we could have been… but there have also been a lot of times where we’ve been strong and we've not needed as much learning time together, and that's been really great for us. I think either way this works out, I'm going to be really proud of the season we've had.”