Josef Newgarden swept both NTT INDYCAR SERIES races at the Iowa Speedway this weekend. Team Penske swept both front rows too. While the starting lineup differed each day behind Will Power and Scott McLaughlin, the finishing order chasing Newgarden was pretty similar on each day.

Penske finished 1-2-5 in each. They led 248 of 250 laps in Race 1 and 244 of 250 in Race 2. Chip Ganassi Racing led the two laps that Penske didn’t in Saturday’s race while they led the only other four laps in the second 250 lapper on Sunday.

3 drivers finished in the same spots on both days. Newgarden (1st, 1st), Scott Dixon (6th, 6th) and Benjamin Pedersen (27th, 27th).

That’s 4 of the top 6 finishers all being the same on both days too.

7 more drivers were within a spot of their finishing position on each day.

ECR had Rinus VeeKay finishing 17th and 18th, Ryan Hunter-Reay being 23rd and 24th and Ed Carpenter 24th then 23rd.

Callum Ilott was 15th on Saturday and 14th on Sunday.

Romain Grosjean was 11th and 12th. Devlin DeFrancesco was 22nd then 21st. Jack Harvey was 18th then 19th.

Helio Castroneves was even within two spots of being 14th on Saturday and 16th on Sunday.

Still, while the races looked similar to us outside of the cockpits, they varied inside of them.

“I think today was different,” said Newgarden. “As we spoke about yesterday, I felt like today was going to have a different twist, and it did.

“I think that’s why you saw the order slightly jumbled in the top ten. Just balance-wise with a hotter track you were getting different reactions from the car, and we needed to keep up with it.”

A hotter track led to a 4-stop strategy instead of a 3.

The first round of stops occurred for the leaders on Lap 62-63 on Saturday but they only got to Laps 51-55 on Sunday. That meant they were committed at that point to an extra pit stop.

“Yeah, the balance was different today,” Newgarden continued. “The tires were wearing out I think more aggressively, or let’s just say they were wearing quicker with the track temp elevated slightly more.

“Balance was different. It was more difficult today to manage the front rear axle of the car relative to yesterday. Yesterday if you had one axle going off during the race, it stayed consistently sort of there. You can manipulate it on both ends of the car, but today it was both ends, and you could get yourself in a bad spot on either end of the race car today really quickly. It could flip stint to stint.

“I think that’s what made it trickier, and that’s probably why you saw some people moving more today because it was easier to get it wrong, and you just had to be really on top of your tools to make sure that you didn’t let it get away from you.”

Plus, with 250 laps of racing one day prior, teams are going to learn and adjust overnight. Newgarden did.

“I’m just focused. I’m focused on what’s going to be different. I watched probably four hours of video last night just figuring out what can be a little bit better, including the whole broadcast,” he said.

“I just felt kind of on the chip just ready to go, like it’s just not done. It’s half of what the available points are, and so I felt really charged and ready to rock again.

“But I wouldn’t say that’s different to a normal weekend. That’s how you feel leading up to a Sunday. So you get through Saturday, and you think, oh, what a great achievement, and it was, but it’s just not done yet. You can reverse everything the next day.

“Now I feel good about it. We’re not reversing anything. We did the job, and now we can leave.”

With Penske being so good, it forced others to try something different. Pato O’Ward was 3rd to them on Saturday and knew some changes that they could make overnight to help him close the gap. They had to. Unfortunately, it went the wrong way.

McLaughlin and four others went off strategy to pit under caution on Lap 163. He was 2nd and O’Ward third at the time. Would having 17 lap fresher tires help?

It didn’t. McLaughlin restarted 10th and only got back up to 5th in the end. O’Ward only came home 10th.

Still, last year the two races varied in distances. Saturday was 250 laps, Sunday’s was 300. That 44 mile difference didn’t make all that much of a differential between both days either.

Which is why you have to look a bit deeper to see that while the results were similar, the strategies and the pace were not.