Wrong time, wrong tire for late restart - Newgarden

Josef Newgarden had a discomforting thought as his comfortable 10-second lead was erased by a caution with 23 laps to go Sunday at Mid-Ohio: "[I] felt like we were on the wrong tire again, kind of like Road America."

A month ago, Newgarden was leading at Elkhart Lake when Takuma Sato's crash brought out the yellow on lap 28. On the lap 30 restart, Scott Dixon pulled off the pass for the lead around the outside of Turn 1 and controlled the rest of the race, shocking the Team Penske quartet that had dominated each session that weekend.

Fast forward to Sunday, two laps after Newgarden had pitted for black tires during the final pit stop cycle on lap 65. Ed Jones brought out the caution with a spin just two laps later. Restarting behind him, Penske teammate Will Power, Graham Rahal and Simon Pagenaud had opted for reds – creating more drama than Newgarden wanted.

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"Just the wrong time," Newgarden said. "It was kind of like Road America – there wasn't much time to build temperature on the blacks. We had a discussion what tires we wanted to use. We had like a 10-second gap. I said, 'If we maintain this gap to the pit stop, let's go to black tires again.' I think that was the right call. Then the caution just falls at the wrong point.

"If it falls halfway through a stint, it's a little bit easier because the reds don't come on as strong as the beginning, but when reds are brand-new and we're brand-new blacks, it's really difficult on the restarts."

"The problem I had was I had so much pickup on that caution period, I was just trying to clear the tires off coming to the restart zone, and I've never seen chunks of rubber just fly off the tires like they did. It was like my tires were raining in reverse style.

"Then we got going, and I couldn't turn. Turn 5, the car would not turn. It was just flat sliding. There was no grip. It was really difficult to get going those first three laps. As soon as that cleaned up and the tire came in, the car was very fast again.

Power, on the other hand, wasn't as comfortable on the softer compound.

"I think, on the alternate tires, we just had a lot of push, couldn't really do much about it," he said of chasing his teammate. "Felt our pace was pretty good on blacks, but we just weren't good enough on reds today to have a shot."

Newgarden was also helped by the lapped car of Esteban Gutierrez, who restarted between Newgarden and Power. Asked if he thought he would still have the edge without the Dale Coyne Racing car, Newgarden said it was "impossible to say."

"As the stint went on, when we have the 10-second gap, I'd have picked the blacks all day because we have a gap, and I know I'm going to be better over the stint," he explained. "But when you're just talking about the pure start, you don't want to be on those tires. It's the wrong thing to be on. So I was really concerned about where we were at.

"I think we would have held Will off, but it's impossible to say. Maybe he would have gotten me. I have no idea. I was happy I had a buffer. Probably happy to have a buffer even with the concern that Esteban was new and might do something like that, but still happy to have that. I think it helped more than it hurt."

Power also weighed in: "It's actually not Gutierrez's fault. The rules for IndyCar are kind of ridiculous, that the team would tell him to stay and push and he's not even in the lead. I understand if he was ahead of Newgarden because then, if it goes yellow, he gets his lap back.

"Yeah, I mean, IndyCar on one hand wants really good racing, but then you put a bunch of backmarkers, people a lap down in the mix. It ruined probably a very good battle at the end because Josef was on black tires and we were on reds."