"It's hard to hold him back" - Team Penske boss urges Josef Newgarden to adopt championship mentality for 2025

Tim Cindric, the President of Team Penske's IndyCar effort, has given his star driver Josef Newgarden the best mental direction to take in order to win the 2025 championship. Though the No. 2 driver has won the last two Indy 500s, his position in the standings has only worsened over the past three years.

Newgarden is a proud bearer of two IndyCar championships that he won in 2017 and 2019. In the three seasons following his second title, the Tennessee native consecutively finished runner-up. In 2023, he took his maiden Indy 500 victory in his 12th attempt but dropped to fifth in the standings by the end of the year. The landslide continued in 2024, with him finishing further down in eighth place in the standings.

Ahead of the 2025 season, Tim Cindric has advised Josef Newgarden to look at the bigger championship picture to ensure greater success for both him and Team Penske.

“(Josef) needs to focus on the championship mentality if that’s the overall goal. Early in his career, he understood all that. He’s a guy who’s tenacious, and it’s hard to hold him back, and he has to want to put his mind in a championship mentality, and when he does that, we’ll be in a good place this year," Cindric said via IndyStar.

Newgarden won three races last season, the first of which he was stripped off for illegal use of the push-to-pass system. Moreover, he had seven sub-15th place finishes, which ended his title chances.

Josef Newgarden weighs the importance of winning the Indy 500 versus an IndyCar championship

The 108th Running of the Indianapolis 500 - Source: Getty

Josef Newgarden is one of the few IndyCar drivers who won both the ultimate prizes the series has to offer - the Indy 500 and the championship. This puts him in a great spot to assess which achievement feels more important to a driver.

During IndyCar's media days, the Team Penske driver was asked about this very difference and the gratification that each milestone brought along.

"Winning the championship is certainly a different task than winning Indy. It's so hard to compare the two. One is a single event that's a big buildup, it's a lot of time commitment throughout the month of May. There's more pressure to win the Indianapolis 500 than anything else, so that's the key difference there," Josef Newgarden said, as quoted by ASAP Sports.

"Then for the championship, you have to be good for so long across so many different types of courses. They're both gratifying. I think they both deserve extreme recognition. They're just different. You can't put them in the same category," he concluded.

Newgarden's lap times during IndyCar's two-day preseason test at Sebring last week were promising. He emerged as the second-fastest driver out of 27, only six-hundredths slower than teammate Will Power.