Josef Newgarden missed out on pole position for the Iowa Corn 300 by the tiniest of margins, but the Ed Carpenter Racing driver feels he is in with a good shot of victory on Sunday.
The young American sat out the test session before the weekend in order to rest his fractured clavicle suffered during his horror crash at Texas in June, but praised stand-in JR Hildebrand for getting the car to a good place set-up wise, although he bemoaned the 0.0404 second gap to pole sitter Simon Pagenaud during qualifying at the Iowa Speedway.
“You always wish you had a little more when you’re sitting second!” said Newgarden. “That’s the beauty of hindsight. We did everything we could with our information.
“It was tough because I didn’t get to test, but J.R.(Hildebrand) did such a great job for us last week at the test. He got the car in an awesome place; we just missed it by a whisker there.
“We have a great race car and we really have an opportunity to make something happen. We’ve had two good races here over the past couple of years, I think we’ve got another shot to get a win this time.”