Scott Dixon was in a class all by himself on Saturday night. The Chip Ganassi Racing driver led 157 of 200 laps in the Genesys 300 at the Texas Motor Speedway en route to his 47th career Indy Car victory.
Defending series champion as well as the defending race winner on the 1.5-mile track in Josef Newgarden says that while he had the speed in his car to earn the pole for the 2020 NTT IndyCar Series season opener, he had nothing for Dixon in the race itself.
“I mean, honestly tonight feels like a victory to me,” Newgarden said after leading 41 laps in total from the pole en route to a third place effort. “We were not very good. Congrats to Scott. They were amazing tonight. I mean, they were just a cut above. They are very deserving winners.
“Scott, look, he was way better than me tonight. It’s as simple as that. He had a good run, was able to stay pretty tight fresh on tires. Honestly tonight for me was a night of hanging on. I was doing everything I could just to try to stay up front.
“It was a tough night. I think we had good speed in the car. Team Chevy did a great job for us. We just did not have a perfect handle on what we needed over a full stint.
“It’s one of those nights you just got to kind of swallow your pride. We knew we just weren’t good enough tonight. Look, I just tried to finish as high as possible. That was what we did. The team really put me in a position to do that. We had amazing stops. We kept fighting and trying to create a strategy to keep me up front even though I wasn’t very good throughout a tire stint.
“Honestly we did everything we could to fight to stay up front. Early on I was doing everything I could to keep Scott behind. He was way quicker. Once I got a little deeper into the pack, it was even harder to hang onto that front area.
“We’ll be working hard to come back and make sure we understand why that was. We’ll be hunting for a win soon. It was a good night to finish third.”
Newgarden, noted that if they had more practice, they likely could have found the right direction with his car, but also said that it was wildly entertaining on Saturday too.
“The hardest part for me was thinking that we — basically thinking we made the right decisions going into the race, about 15 laps in realizing that we were horribly off the mark,” Newgarden continued. “So you don’t have a lot of time to rectify an issue.
“I think if there was more practice, more of a lead-up to this event, maybe we would have had some clues to point out maybe we weren’t as strong as we thought we were going into the race.
“When you have that jam-packed schedule, it’s kind of on the team and the driver to execute quickly and to make the right decisions, to show up with good stuff, kind of stick to your guns.
“I like that. I really like that style. It didn’t work out for us tonight. I think in the future we can hopefully thrive in that situation.”
Newgarden, had no top five finishes in his first seven Texas starts. Now, he has two straight.
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