CHEVROLET RACING IN THE VERIZON INDYCAR SERIES
ABC SUPPLY 500
POCONO RACEWAY, LONG POND, PENNSYLVANIA
TEAM CHEVY DRIVER QUALIFYING RECAP
SATURDAY AUGUST 20, 2016

Josef Newgarden Leads Chevy IndyCar Contingent in Qualifying at Pocono Raceway
Team Chevy Drivers Capture Five of Top-10 Starting Positions for ABC Supply 500

LONG POND, Penn (August 20, 2016) – With an average speed of 220.195 mph and a total time of one minute and 21.7456 seconds, Josef Newgarden qualified second for the ABC Supply 500 at Pocono Raceway. Newgarden will start the No. 21 Fuzzy’s Ultra Premium Vodka Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet on the outside of the front row.

Helio Castroneves will start the No. 3 Hitachi Team Penske Chevrolet in the fourth position, right behind Newgarden on the grid.

Five Chevrolet IndyCar Aero Kit with integrated 2.2 liter V6 engine drivers will start in the top-10 for the 200-lap/500-mile around the 2.5-mile triangular oval. Will Power, No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet will start eighth. Tony Kanaan, No. 10 NTT Data Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet will roll off ninth and Ed Carpenter, No. 20 Fuzzy’s Ultra Premium Vodka Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet will start in the 10th position.

Other Chevrolet drivers start as follows: Simon Pagenaud, No. 22 Menards Team Penske Chevrolet – 14th; Juan Pablo Montoya, No. 2 Penske Trucking Team Penske Chevrolet – 15th; Charlie Kimball, No. 83 Tresiba Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet – 16th; Max Chilton, No. 8 Gallagher Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet – 17th ; Sebastien Bourdais, No. 11 Team Hydroxycut KVSH Racing Chevrolet – 18th and Scott Dixon, No. 9 Target Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet -19th.

Mikhail Aleshin (Honda) won the pole. Takuma Sato (Honda) and Carlos Munoz (Honda) complete the top-five starters for Sunday’s race.

NBCSN will telecast the 200-lap ABC Supply 500 live at 3 p.m. ET Sunday. Also, the INDYCAR Radio Network broadcast is available on network affiliates, indycarradio.com, RaceControl.indycar.com, the INDYCAR Mobile app, Sirius 212, and XM 209.

JOSEF NEWGARDEN PRESS CONFERENCE TRANSCRIPT

THE MODERATOR: We’ll go ahead and begin our Verizon IndyCar Series post qualifying press conference. Joined now by our driver starting second in tomorrow’s race, Josef Newgarden.
Josef, this is your best career start at Pocono. A pretty good start. You’ve been strong on ovals this season. Take us through qualifying.
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: Yeah, we’ve been good here. You know, I think we were good last year here, too, when we qualified and raced.
It’s tough being second. I think, first off, just congratulations to Mikhail and Schmidt Peterson Motorsports. They were obviously very tough to beat. They looked strong in practice. They showed that in qualifying. I think it was going to be tough for us to get them.
Yeah, I feel like we did have an opportunity. I think what we rolled out with, we rolled out to the grid with setup-wise on the car, maybe would have been enough. You never know. I mean, you’d actually have to go do it and prove it.
I think we might have had enough if we stuck with our original settings. I was pushing the team really hard to change that at the last minute. We were watching the qualifying session progress. Just wanted to add a little bit. I think a lot of people were kind of all over the map. Maybe if we didn’t do that, we would have had enough today. I feel like it’s kind of my fault.
Still good with second. You can’t be mad about that. We got a good spot. But you like those small victories. Pole is a small victory. Love to be able to do that for your crew. It’s tough when you’re that close and you miss it by so little.
THE MODERATOR: Obviously this year you have the win at Iowa. You had a really strong performance at Indy, great performance at Texas until the very end there. What has been the turnaround for you on ovals this year?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: You know, I don’t know if we’ve had a big turnaround. I think we were second place last year here. Pretty good. Second place at Iowa last year. I don’t know if I’d call it a big turnaround.
It’s certainly been a nice progression. Places where we’ve been, for instance, I think we qualified here fourth last year. Places where we’ve qualified fourth or fifth, we’ve just moved up a little bit. Places where we finished second, we just kind of finished first. That’s what you want to do each year. I think that’s been a nice progression for us.
We all have great oval cars. All of us at the month of May we were strong throughout. Texas would have been another great race for us. Disappointing we won’t be able to run there. That’s another spot we would be good, too.
I think it just speaks to the performance of the team. In general, we have good racecars, but we have very good cars on ovals, too.
A nice little progression, that little bit of bump in performance.
THE MODERATOR: Questions for Josef.
Q. Josef, you mentioned setup. Your teammate Ed is in row number five. Setup-wise are you running similar or identical cars?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: We’re slightly different. I think we have some different preferences on the car. Overall we’re pretty close from a global picture. I think some fine-tuning details are different between us. We like a little bit of differences, yeah.
Q. Josef, looks like you got a little bit of cloud cover right as you were getting ready to go out. Can you talk a little bit about how much that maybe helped you.
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: It kind of looked like it was getting cloudier throughout the qualifying session. To me it started out somewhat sunny, then just got more and more cloudy as the session progressed.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if it got a little bit quicker. I think that can generally help you with track temperature around here. Really any oval, as you get to the middle of the day, you start to get a little bit of clouds, drop the track temp down three to four to five degrees, it’s always a little helpful for grip and sometimes for speed.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if that helped me at the very end just slightly.
Q. Are you even going to go to Texas or take the weekend off? How hard is it going to be to take that in?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: Well, I guess the way we’re running it, technically I’m in the hospital. I’m going to try and lay pretty low during the weekend. I’m going to be there supporting the team. Obviously if it stays the same going into next weekend as it is now, I’m going to hope Ed wins the race.
We’re restarting lap 71 or whatever it is. I’m in the hospital. I’m going to hide under the covers and watch the race and support Ed.
Q. That being said, should you go out and win on Sunday, how odd will it be for you to not be in a racecar the week after you had won a race?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: I mean, I don’t know if it will be odd. I’ve kind of just accepted it.
Look, you have to look at this two different ways, right? If Texas just played out, I would have been crashed out of the race. That’s what it would have been.
If you look at it from that angle, that if the rain didn’t come, they finished the race, this would have been a done thing, right?
It’s only odd because it’s never happened before. This is so unprecedented. That’s the only way it makes it kind of odd, you know.
So if you look at it the first way I’ve said, it’s not that weird. I already finished where I finished there.
It is tough coming back later. It’s very different. Everyone’s going to have different stuff, probably different setups. They’re going to learn something. Guys that weren’t good before might be a little better now, different engine, different tub. From that angle, it’s a little strange, yeah.
Q. Do you have a contract for next season?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: Not yet, man. I hope I get hired. I feel like I say that every year. Goal number one is getting hired. I’m serious, you know. If you get hired to drive a car professionally, that’s already a big achievement. That’s goal number one.
Where it’s going to be, I don’t know. I’ve got a great team right now. I’m really happy with Ed Carpenter Racing. I hope we can win this championship. I think it’s going to be very difficult for us, but it would be cool if we could do that. That’s kind of my sole focus right now.
Q. Josef, what type of race do you expect tomorrow? Last year’s was very intense. You were seven wide at one point on a restart. You went from fourth to first on the opening lap. Do you expect the same type of a race tomorrow?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: Yeah, I don’t see a huge difference. I think similar to the Indianapolis 500, the big change for us is the dome skids obviously. That’s been the largest difference between the cars from last year to this year on this specific track. It’s the same thing as Indy.
If you look at Indy as a reference, it wasn’t too dissimilar of a race from ’15 to ’16. I don’t think you’ll see a big difference here. I think at the start it’s going to fan out pretty good. You get that because of the drag. You have such a long drag from the start/finish to turn one. When we’re all bunched up, you’re going to fan out pretty wide still.
I got to think you’re still going to see some guys saving fuel at the beginning. You’re going to see some people moving to the back of the pack. Then as you get towards those last 50, 60 laps, it’s going to be really hectic with movement at the front.
Q. Josef, you had a pretty young start to your driving career. You’re one of the younger stars in the series. Have you ever thought about what you might have done, what future career you might have if you weren’t in a racecar? Secondly, are you optimistic about still being a contender for the title even though you’re going to miss Texas?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: Are you asking what would I be doing if I wasn’t driving a racecar?
Q. Yes.
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: Geeze, I don’t know. It’s a great question.
I’ll tell you this. I consider JR Hildebrand a very smart individual. I asked him the same question, Did you ever think about what you were going to do?
JR told me he didn’t really have an idea either. He would have done something different, obviously. But I think for us drivers, when you get an opportunity to potentially make this a career, you put everything you have into it. You just kind of have to. It’s such a short time in your life to make it happen, why not go for it? That’s kind of what I did.
I’m not sure what I would be doing. I would hope I’d still be involved in racing in some aspect. I think a lot of guys that aren’t driving, if they think about the fact they weren’t driving, I think they’d try and be in racing still. I don’t know. I’m not sure I have a great answer for that.
With regards to the championship, I feel confident that we still have a shot. But we got to win out. We got to have a really good race here. We got to be really good at Watkins. Sonoma is obviously the most important. We’ve got to win Sonoma.
If it all goes according to plan, even with Texas, yeah, I think there’s a possibility. And you never know, IndyCar might change their mind. There could be some magical thing. We go to Texas, and they’re like, For the fans, we’re just going to restart this whole race over. Maybe it’s going to be awesome and I win Texas, too.
You never know. We got a week. We got a week to talk to them still, right? Everyone feeling that in here? Yeah. All right! Not really, but I’m feeling it. That’s what matters.
Q. Mikhail wins the pole today. It seems that every session this year, his confidence level has gotten more and more. How legitimate of a race driver has Mikhail become?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: I think he’s super legitimate. I think it starts with his team. He’s with a great group. I know them pretty well. I got to drive Lights for Sam, not for Rick, but for Sam. I think they have a great team.
James shows that. He’s a great driver, too. Shows they have a great group.
I think for Mikhail, he’s a great driver. He’s pretty daring, particularly on ovals. There’s not a lot that spooks him, which can be unnerving when you think about it. At the same time it’s very good for being able to get the most out of a racecar.
I think he’s a super talented guy, great car control, really nice, super nice Russian guy. Not saying that Russians aren’t nice, but I think he’s a super nice guy in general.
So I think he’s a great driver. As you said, he gets better and better the more seat time he has. That’s kind of how IndyCar works. You get more seat time in this series, the better you get. I think you’re probably seeing a bit of a product with that with him.
Q. This morning two of the most qualified drivers in the field both had incidents, Juan Pablo Montoya, Ryan Hunter-Reay. Ryan didn’t get a chance to qualify. How unusual is that, that the defending winner of this race isn’t going to be able to qualify and has to start at the back?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: Well, it happens, right? I think we were all surprised with how many wrecks we had this morning. But it’s all part of it. I think it shows it’s been a little bit trickier today. I think everyone was really scratching their heads in qualifying with what they needed. Probably not everyone laid it all out on the line. Even me. I’m a victim of probably not laying everything out on the line today because of the way the day went.
I think it shows that it was hard today. If you didn’t see it in qualifying specifically, I think it was hard to put two laps together and make a fast car around here this weekend.
Q. You just said a minute ago to keep your chances alive in the championship, you have to win Sonoma. How hard will be the pressure in Sonoma?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: I feel pretty good about it. I think I got a great team, as I’ve said. But the pressure’s not on us. The pressure’s on Simon and on Will at the moment to be really good and maintain that lead.
You look at it both ways. For those guys, you could also say the pressure’s not on them, if you’re them. But I think they’re in the tougher spot. They got to be perfect throughout. We can kind of go out and attack, not make stupid mistakes, I should say not take unnecessary risks, but we can afford to get a little bit more aggressive than those guys.
If it all works out, it can still work. We can potentially win the championship. So I feel good about it. I feel pretty cool going into these last couple races.
Q. Josef, starting second, you were second at Indy, second at Iowa, is this a place where you can be at least okay with being second on the grid or do you still hate it?
JOSEF NEWGARDEN: I think the tough thing is they’re small victories, right? It’s great for the crew. It’s great for the engineers. It’s great for the driver. Everyone loves the small victories, poles, fast laps. You like to be dominant in the series.
It’s nice if you can get those, and it is tough when you qualify second. We have to have qualified second like 10 or 12 times within the last four or five years.
It’s not a bad thing, but it is tough. You want to get those small victories. We just missed out, so… It is what it is at this point. But I think for this type of track, with the race tomorrow, I’m not dissatisfied about starting up front. It’s a good place to be around this track.
THE MODERATOR: Josef, thank you very much. Good luck tomorrow.