Josef Newgarden is confident that he will have a good start to the season with Team Penske, after joining the team from Ed Carpenter Racing.
The 26-year-old thinks he will have a better time in his first season with the team than Simon Pagenaud had in 2015. While Pagenaud joined a new team of people inside Team Penske, Newgarden is joining the team that has worked with the No. 2 car.
“I don’t foresee it being a problem,” Newgarden told Motorsport.
“Everyone has a different case, so in Simon’s, for instance, they had to build a new team. He’s talked about the difficulty of them having to add a team, different people.”
Newgarden joined IndyCar with Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing in 2012 and stayed with the team when they merged with Ed Carpenter Racing. He won his first race in IndyCar at Barber Motorsport Park in the 2015 season, picking up two more wins since then.
“With me, it’s going to be a different ball of wax. I’ve got an existing team on the #2 car program. They’ve been in place for a while, so that shouldn’t be as big of a shuffle from the team side.
“It’s going to be more me learning how the team operates, gelling with my engineer very quickly. That’s going to be the biggest difference for me, It’s hard to predict how it’s going to go. I think all signs point that we could have a very good start to the season.”
The 2017 IndyCar season will start on March 12 when the series returns to the Streets of St. Petersburg in Florida.
