TORONTO -- When a driver wins their first IndyCar Series race, it's cause for celebration -- the realization of a driver's dream but only the beginning of a new opportunity. When a driver wins their second race, it validates their ability as a race winner and proves the first one was no fluke.
After scoring his second career victory in Sunday's Honda Indy Toronto, 24-year-old Josef Newgarden of Hendersonville, Tennessee, reached the validation stage of his career, but he is certainly not satisfied.
"Well, it helps, right? You get one win and people go, 'Oh, you won a race, that's great, but can you win more?' But I think two wins doesn't solidify it either," Newgarden said. "It is nice. I'm lucky enough to be driving an IndyCar, and to get two wins is really fortunate. There's not a lot of people that have won two IndyCar races, but I think if you really measure it, as a driver you don't want to win a couple of races. You want to win a lot of races, and hopefully more often than six or eight race periods.
"You want to win consecutive races, hopefully. I don't know if we're quite there yet, but I would like to get there. That's what you strive to do as a driver. It's nice to have two, but I don't think it means anything. It doesn't mean you're safe in a sport; I think you can always get kicked out. You never know if you're going to be here next year; you always got to prove yourself, and that case still stands, in my opinion."
Prior to Newgarden's victory on a cloudy, rainy day in Toronto, the only two drivers that had won two races on the 2015 Verizon IndyCar Series schedule were named Juan Pablo Montoya and Scott Dixon -- two of the giants of the sport.
"They're tough, though," Newgarden said. "I wanted to go back to the point that just because we got a couple of wins doesn't mean we're necessarily going to have more wins throughout this year. Penske has been difficult this whole season. They have been tough on their game, and Ganassi has been tough on the heels with Scott Dixon in particular, so that's not going to let up. It's not like we're going to get to the next race, and we are magically going to be better than those guys.
"I think we need to keep working. We need to go back to the shop. Texas was not a good event for us, and we're going to Fontana next, which is similar to a Texas-type race, so we've got a lot of work to do, but I have faith in our guys. We got a lot of smart guys. We have a lot of talented people. We can make it happen; we just got to make sure that we're not fooling ourselves that we're this 'super team,' because we're not. We gotta keep working just like the rest of the guys out there."
One of the great characteristics of a rain race in the IndyCar Series is the unpredictability of the race strategy and the circumstances. When the yellow flag waved on Lap 29 after James Jakes spun off course in Turn 5, Newgarden's team hit its fuel window for the race to play out in its favor.
"I used to think that it's better to be lucky than good, because I've seen a lot of people get lucky and win races, and you would think that's the better way to be, but I have had a lot of smart, intelligent people around me that have convinced me that's not the way you want to be," Newgarden said. "You want to be good over lucky.
"I'm not going to deny that that yellow for sure helped us win this race. It got us in position to be able to win the race, without a doubt. I don't think we've ever had that before, so, you know, if we got a little bit of luck to win today. Sometimes you need it, and I've seen many people get it before.
"Once we got into the position to win the race, you could see that we had cars to do, and that was the biggest factor for me. We weren't in position at the start of the race to try and really capitalize and win one, but we got there with a little bit of luck, and we still did the work we had to do to win the race so I was proud of our whole team.
"I think we had fast cars, which Luca (Filippi) proved as well, and we had good team effort. I mean, we had good pit stops, good strategy to get that done, and it all came together, so a little bit of luck but definitely a good performance, too."
Newgarden won for the second time this season and the second time in his career. He defeated teammate Filippi of Italy by 1.4485 seconds to give team owners Ed Carpenter, Sarah Fisher and Wink Hartman a first 1-2 finish since merging their operations at the end of last season.
Newgarden gave the combined team its first win in the April 26 Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama.
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