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A Texas Re-do Needs A Newgarden Presence

Verizon IndyCar Series Iowa Corn Indy 300 winner Josef Newgarden. [Pete Klinger Photo]

Verizon IndyCar Series Iowa Corn Indy 300 winner Josef Newgarden. [Pete Klinger Photo]

by Allan Brewer

The momentum has been building for nearly two years now.

It has repelled catastrophe in the face of a frightening accident on the banked oval at Texas International Speedway a month ago. It’s persisted in spite of a turnover in team ownership for three years running. It has step by step marshaled its might across now five and a half years of gathering, understanding and realizing potential as a first-rate contender.

Ed Carpenter Racing’s Josef Newgarden is at the vanguard of a fresh upsurge of American IndyCar drivers who are introducing a new era and handing out increasingly potent punishment to the reputable players of Roger Penske, Chip Ganassi and the Andretti family.

Great American heroes in the greatest American open-wheel series have been hard to come by since the careers of legends like AJ Foyt, Mario Andretti, Johnny Rutherford and Rick Mears came to an end. Most of the talented men who could drive successfully at the level worthy of triumph in the Indianapolis 500 have opted for NASCAR, while the majority of the seats at top-rank Indy-Car teams have gone to non-native drivers brought to these shores as hired guns.

Consider that Team Penske, with fifteen Indy 500 wins, achieved two-thirds of those victories with an American driver behind the wheel in the persons of Al and Little Al Unser, Mears, Danny Sullivan and Sam Hornish Jr. Over the last ten years only two Americans (AJ Almendinger and Hornish) have held a seat at the premier open-wheel racing team in North America on Memorial Day when the world’s grandest car race takes the green flag at Indianapolis.

Helio Castroneves and Juan Pablo Montoya own two of Penske’s Indy 500 wins in the post-modern era since 2006, but one is entering the twilight of his career and is mired in a two-year win drought dating back to mid-summer 2014, and the other is approaching dwindling tide as the 2016 season grinds on.

The scene at Chip Ganassi Racing is only slightly different, mainly because of Charlie Kimball and Graham Rahal—a pair of homegrown racers who are still consolidating their driving strength in so-far sound racing careers; but for the most part the stardom has traveled to a foreign legion led by Dario Franchitti and Scott Dixon, with a brief stint by Dan Wheldon and now Tony Kanaan at the wheel of one of the cherry-red cars.

The decade-long career of Marco, the emergence of Danica Patrick as a star, and the perennial presence of Townsend Bell at Indianapolis, along with Alexander Rossi’s breakthrough win at Indianapolis this year, and the IndyCar Championship of 2012 and Indy 500 victory that Ryan Hunter-Reay brought to Andretti Autosports in 2014, provide ample evidence that Michael Andretti has done the most to endorse the cause of domestic American talent in the top tier of North American open-wheel competition.

To this date, the postponed IndyCar event at Texas doesn’t include ECR’s Newgarden, which could be understandably seen as an atrocious ignorance of one of the series’ sparkling new stars—a talent that has emerged and is persuasively taking center-stage. In the minds of many fans and even some of his racing rivals, a Lone-Star restoration resumed over two months after Newgarden and Conor Daly’s collision on Lap 42 is a race flawed from the start—a distortion and weakly wavering of the battle —and a contemptible blunder by a racing series still trying to recover from a disastrous generation of blunders.

Newgarden was linked as one of the potential race-car drivers to battle for a place with the new American Haas Formula 1 Team that debuted this year, and offers of comparable worldly opportunity will be in the offing into the future. He’s already demonstrated himself to be a talented road-course competitor, taking his first IndyCar career success with a victory at Barber Motorsports Park in 2015 with a margin of victory two seconds faster than the rest of the field. There’s not much uncertainty that NASCAR team owners are assessing his talents as well, and especially so with Josef’s stand-out oval-track performance at Iowa Speedway last weekend.

The ultimate aspiration of IndyCar is to build passion in the stands, and to assure hallmark rivalries on the racetrack. Without the Nashville, Tennessee resident aboard for a re-start of Texas it’s hard to make a persuasive case that this mission is being met. It’s even more distressing that a set of circumstances and personalities are commandeering IndyCar and its most competitive teams in the direction of pushing a talented, likable and native talent into the arms of the competition.

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