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The Tennessean had big praise for his West Australian former Supercars engineer, with whom he has already shared his first Indianapolis 500 victory, when he spoke after their first pole position together.
“He’s great,” said Newgarden of Mason.
“I’ve been fortunate in my career. I’ve got to work with just tremendous talent every single year. I’ve really had no weak points.
“Luke just has been an addition to that. He’s another person that to me is an absolute rockstar race engineer. Anybody that knows what a race engineer really is would understand the significance of that.
“You can be a technically savvy individual. You can be a good engineer, but a race engineer requires something just a little different. I think Luke excels at it.
“I just think of world of him. He’s in a great spot. He’s certainly bringing a great dynamic to our team in a lot more ways than just one. Yeah, it’s good.
“I want the best for him. I want to see him win a bunch of races, and I want to do that together with him.”
SUMMER GRILL: The Australian who won the Indy 500 at his first attempt
Importantly for Newgarden, he also starts the season with the same race engineer, having had change in both 2022 and 2023, as well as the same strategist (Team Penske President Tim Cindric) and crew chief (Chad Gordon).
Such a MEGA lap that @josefnewgarden didn’t even know he had it.
Watch as the @Team_Penske driver and race engineer Luke Mason break down the lap that earned the No. 2 team the P1 starting spot in Sunday’s @GPSTPETE. pic.twitter.com/FA3BmTtMgu
— NTT INDYCAR SERIES (@IndyCar) March 10, 2024
“I don’t think it hurts,” said the two-time IndyCar champion.
“I mean, I don’t want to lean too aggressively into the consistency side. I think we’ve had, in general, a lot of consistency in our team.
“So, even when I have new personnel on the 2 car, these are individuals that I know very well. The way we operate at Team Penske is I think a little bit unique. In a lot of ways, you’re working with everybody on all cars.
“Yeah, I don’t think there’s a huge change from that standpoint, but we do have more consistency than last year. It’s Luke’s second year with me. We’re together. We’re not changing that role. We didn’t change much on the car.
“Yeah, there’s some positivity too it. I don’t know that I want to read too much into it.”
What Newgarden is reading into, however, is the work which Chevrolet has accomplished in the off-season.
“I think it was a huge difference-maker today, was just Chevrolet,” he declared.
“I’m not going to put everything on them because it’s always a package. We always have to work together in conjunction.
“I think there was things we fell short on last year from a chassis standpoint. You know where we weren’t strong just as a team and what we needed to do, road and street course-wise.
“I think we’ve elevated our game, and Chevrolet has absolutely elevated their side.
“They took a lot of meetings with us in the off-season. They work hard every off-season, but I think they just went that from an extra mile this go-around.
“It’s still early days, but I’ll really encouraged by what they brought here and what we can see for the rest of the year.”
The Warmup is next on Sunday at 09:10 ET/Monday at 00:10 AEDT, followed by the 100-lap Race at 12:15 ET/03:15 AEDT.
