INDYCAR MEDIA DAY

February 18, 2014

Josef Newgarden

THE MODERATOR:  We are joined by Josef Newgarden. 
First time on the track in the off-season yesterday? 
JOSEF NEWGARDEN:  First time this year.  We tested right before Christmas.  It's good.  I'm glad we got some test days.  Pretty limited now in IndyCar racing.  You have to be pretty on it if you have test days.  If you have two days to run a car, you need to have a pretty good plan. 
We've done a lot of homework this off-season.  We've been getting after it.  Hopefully we're going to be set for the year. 
THE MODERATOR:  Your year last year did well in certain places.  Obviously could have done well in certain places by your own estimation.  Your thoughts about 2014 and where you need to improve? 
JOSEF NEWGARDEN:  Last year we were just too slow.  Honestly, that was our biggest problem.  We were slow.  It's attributed to a lot of things.  We've got to do a better job with our homework.  We have to do a better job with communication.  There's a lot of things I've been learning as a young driver. 
That's the difficulty in open-wheel racing now and racing across the board.  For a young driver that comes in, it's difficult to figure things out quick enough.  That's because there's not a lot of tools nowadays.  You don't have as many test days.  You don't understand everything before you're racing an event.
Nowadays it's just really hard to figure things out with a limited budget, limited resources.  We have some of those issues we deal with on our team, but we try to make the most out of what we have, we try to make a little go further. 
Two years into it, I think we made a good progression from 2012 to '13.  2012 we had flashes of brilliance.  We were actually faster in 2012 than 2013.  Couldn't finish races.  I struggled to finish races. 
Moving into 2013, we were able to finish races but weren't as quick as we were in 2012.  That ended up biting us. 
I was happy with our progress from year one to year two.  Moving into year three, we have to have a fast car and be able to finish races well, call good races, have good pit stops.  I've got to keep it out of the fence, keep it from getting tangled up.  Everything has to kind of come together for year three. 
If we do that, I think it's realistic that we could be a top 10 championship car.  I think that's a realistic goal for us to set.  There's always possibilities we could do better than that.  I think being inside the top 10 for a championship is a great aspiration for all of us.  I believe we can do that. 
We've done a lot of homework.  A lot of hard work has been put in, as everybody does in the series.  We've particularly put in a lot of work on our car.  Each specific department has been looked at.  Dampers, aerodynamics, all the relationships between the geometry, how they relate to the chassis stiffness.  We've gone over everything and tried to do our homework as best as possible.  Now we're trying to do testing to confirm anything. 
With a little bit of luck, we can have better speed this year and put ourselves in good positions to finish well. 
THE MODERATOR:  When you mention looking at every aspect of the car, promoted an engineer to be your race engineer.  Can you talk a little bit about that. 
JOSEF NEWGARDEN:  My engineer went away after last year.  He went to go to James Hinchcliffe's car, which is pretty awesome.  I love Hinchcliffe and my engineer I had, Nathan.  They're going to be a formidable team this year.  We promoted our assistant engineer to assist me.  His name is Jeremy Milless.  If there's anything that Jeremy has been doing this year is putting everything he has as an engineer into the program.  He's done everything in the book to do a great job and find every little thing and detail in this car. 
It's cool.  Jeremy has never actually been a primary engineer of a racecar.  I feel like he's had a lot of opinions and views to do a racecar.  It's his opportunity to put that into full effect. 
It's been fun because he's had a ton of energy over the last three, four months.  It energizes everybody when you have an engineer that's fresh and wanting to improve.  He's like leading a charge almost. 
I'm really excited about it.  He's done a great job.  We have a couple other great people in.  He has a new assistant engineer underneath him who came from Panther Racing.  We have some backup there also.  There's a lot of good people in the mix.  We've hired in some new mechanics, other key essential people.  I'm excited.  I think we've got great things ahead for 2014. 
THE MODERATOR:  Thank you.