After 250 gruelling laps of the bullring in Iowa it was Josef Newgarden who came out on top, beating teammate Scott McLaughlin to victory lane in Iowa, reviving his diminishing championship hopes.

Newgarden displayed class and precision as he won for the 5th time in his career at the Iowa Speedway, pulling off his race plan to perfection and leading home teammate McLaughlin to underline Team Penske’s control over the track.

Behind the two Team Penske cars was the Arrow McLaren of Pato O’Ward, ahead of Marcus Ericsson in the leading Chip Ganassi Racing car. The two can take some comfort in the fact that they were clearly the strongest out of the remainder of the field, remaining the only non Penske 2 cars on the lead lap at the chequered flag.

Will Power had taken a stunning double pole position for both Saturday and Sunday’s races, but had to resign to fifth after tyre struggles in the final stint saw him slip behind his teammates, as well as O’Ward and Ericsson.

Scott Dixon was 6th for Ganassi, whilst Kyle Kirkwood fought his way through the pack and up to 7th. Championship leader Alex Palou came into the weekend with a vast points lead, but scored his joint worst result of the season to finish 8th. Takuma Sato took over Marcus Armstrong’s Chip Ganassi Racing car aptly to come home in 9th, and Alexander Rossi battled his way up the field to finish 10th.

Newgarden keeps faint championship hopes alive

After Alex Palou’s complete and utter domination of the 2023 NTT IndyCar Series, hopes of an 18th season with the championship decided at the final race ran thin heading to Iowa. But there was 1 man who knew this was his opportunity to turn the season on its head.

Palou’s advantage over Josef Newgarden before Iowa was an enormous 127 points, but with 108 points on offer throughout the double header weekend, king of Corn country Newgarden knew this was his time to strike.

With a mix of clean driving, precise overtaking, and remarkable speed, Newgarden picked his way through the pack to eventually take the lead on lap 121 from teammate Will Power. From then on, he remained unthreatened and held off all the challengers at the restart following Graham Rahal’s shunt.

Although a brief challenge came from teammate Scott McLaughlin in the closing laps, the Kiwi driver never got close enough to mount a serious threat to Newgarden, allowing him to take his 4th consecutive win on ovals in the series, and continue his 100% record of winning on every oval track in 2023.

After Palou’s eighth place finish in Race 1, the lead he possesses in the championship has been cut to 98 points, with all eyes on how tomorrow’s race will shake out.

Penske flex short oval strength leaving other teams in their wake

It was not just Newgarden who produced moments of genius on a fine Saturday in Iowa. Will Power started the morning strongly, taking his 69th and 70th pole positions in the series, with laps so strong they were a full mile an hour faster than teammate McLaughlin, and a full 2 miles an hour quicker than the fastest non Team Penske driver.

For both Power and Mclaughlin, they can take some solace in the fact that they both scored top 5 finishes in reasonably tough racing conditions. The tyre wear around a short oval such as Iowa is so extreme that drivers who pitted were running over 25 miles an hour faster than drivers on tyres that were on their last legs in a 50 lap stint.

For Mclaren and Chip Ganassi Racing, they just simply did not have the pace to compete with Penske over the course of a race distance, as their drivers had to manage tyre saving with overtaking lapped traffic. Penske had the edge in all departments on Saturday, and O’Ward and Ericsson in particular will have to fine tune their race cars in order to keep up with Penske and their dominance.

Ericsson and O’ward will know that they are not too far off, after they managed to remain on the lead lap throughout the race, but challenging Penske was ultimately out of their reach on Saturday, despite some brilliant moves from the pair of them.

Tyre wear and traffic prove major factors in intense race

The Hy-Vee Homefront 250 recorded over 1200 overtakes throughout the race, and whilst this may sound like a huge number, most of these were leaders negotiating their way through lapped traffic.

Team Penske and Newgarden are the experts at this skill, and displayed it once more for when Newgarden was in traffic, he gained significant time over his rivals who found passing flowers cars difficult on such a short oval.

At just under 0.9 of a mile, the Iowa Speedway offers a driver no chance to relax, and with 28 cars in the field, finding clean air to protect tyres was almost impossible. As a result, such strong wear on the tyres meant that the undercut was an incredibly powerful tool, used to perfection by Newgarden.

The only hiccup suffered by the #2 Hitachi Chevrolet driver was with 6 laps to go, as a battle between Kyle Kirkwood, Augustin Canapino and Santino Ferrucci (who ironically were all on completely different laps) allowed Mclaughlin to catch up from 3 seconds to 1.1 in the space of half a mile.

Newgarden was irked by such a frustrating incident, saying in his post race interview that ‘they (lapped cars) always run the leader hard, and that’s the name of the game’

‘It’s legal, but it’s a little frustrating at times and it has gotten worse, it was much worse here than I have ever had it’.

Hy-Vee put on stellar event, but RLL cars fail to back it up

Once again, Hy-Vee have pulled off another brilliant event for all to enjoy in Iowa. The combination of music stars, awesome atmosphere and an Indycar double-header has packed out the facility. Hy-Vee are also the primary sponsors of Indycar’s most recent winning team, as Christian Lundgaard drove the #45 car to victory lane in Toronto.

However, their performance this weekend was lacklustre, qualifying only as high as 13th for race 1. Although Graham Rahal will start 6th for race 2, RLL struggled to find any kind of race pace on the short oval.

Jack Harvey fought his way to the fringes of the top 15, but Lundgaard struggled for balance in his car, and Graham Rahal found the wall on lap 152 to bring out the only yellow of the day.

The team and Hy-Vee will be hoping for a better day tomorrow, but they will have to put their heads together and come up with something special in order to put in a performance that can challenge the front runners.

All the action continues tomorrow, as Newgarden will look to take even more points off Palou!!

Race Result:

Position:	Driver:	Team:	Classification:	Points:
1	Josef Newgarden	Team Penske	1:33:40.4758	53
2	Scott McLaughlin	Team Penske	+3.3755	40
3	Pato O’Ward	Arrow McLaren	+9.6072	35
4	Marcus Ericsson	Chip Ganassi Racing	+14.6385	32
5	Will Power	Team Penske	+22.4025	32
6	Scott Dixon	Chip Ganassi Racing	+1 Lap	28
7	Kyle Kirkwood	Andretti Autosport	+1 Lap	26
8	Alex Palou	Chip Ganassi Racing	+1 Lap	25
9	Takuma Sato	Chip Ganassi Racing	+1 Lap	23
10	Alexander Rossi	Arrow McLaren	+1 Lap	20
11	Romain Grosjean	Andretti Autosport	+1 Lap	19
12	David Malukas	Dale Coyne Racing with HMD Motorsports	+2 Laps	18
13	Felix Rosenqvist	Arrow McLaren	+2 Laps	17
14	Helio Castroneves	Meyer Shank Racing	+2 Laps	16
15	Callum Ilott	Juncos Hollinger Racing	+3 Laps	15
16	Augustin Canapino	Juncos Hollinger Racing	+3 Laps	14
17	Rinus Veekay	Ed Carpenter Racing	+3 Laps	13
18	Jack Harvey	Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing	+3 Laps	12
19	Colton Herta	Andretti Autosport with Curb-Agajanian	+4 Laps	11
20	Christian Lundgaard	Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing	+4 Laps	10
21	Conor Daly	Meyer Shank Racing	+5 Laps	9
22	Devlin DeFrancesco	Andretti Steinbrenner Autosport	+5 Laps	8
23	Ryan Hunter-Reay	Ed Carpenter Racing	+6 Laps	7
24	Ed Carpenter	Ed Carpenter Racing	+7 Laps	6
25	Sting Ray Robb	Dale Coyne Racing with Rick Ware Racing	+8 Laps	5
26	Santino Ferrucci	A.J. Foyt Enterprises	+9 Laps	5
27	Bejamin Pedersen	A.J. Foyt Enterprises	+15 Laps	5
28	Graham Rahal	Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing	Retired (Lap 143)	5