Bruce Martin
Special to FOXSports.com

INDIANAPOLIS — At the beginning of Josef Newgarden’s athletic career as a young boy, his father often motivated him by offering him a reward at the end of one of his baseball games.

A hot dog and a Pokémon toy.

“A good hot dog was always a special treat for me,” Newgarden told FOX Sports on Thursday. “My dad knew that I would put forth a special effort for a hot dog.”

It was Joey Newgarden’s gift to his son for putting in the time for preparation and the importance of discipline.

“Starting out from when he was 4 or 5 years old, he started with the discipline that it took to show up for every practice, every practice and every game, and you’re tired or you don’t want to do it,” Newgarden’s father, Joey, told FOX Sports.

“I would tell him, ‘We’re going to go and do this, and you give me a bunch of effort. We’re going to go get that Pokémon toy. We’re going to get you a hot dog afterwards.’

“That’s what the motivation was for him to get through and really make a big effort because little 4 and 5-year-old kids don’t have a high level of concentration at that point.”

From hot dogs and Pokémon as a child to checkered flags and two-faces on the Borg-Warner Trophy as the winner of the Indianapolis 500 in 2023 and 2024, Newgarden is one of the most motivated, determined and driven drivers in INDYCAR.

He endures endless workouts at home and has built a physique similar to the Rocky IV boxer Ivan Drago. 

Newgarden is an imposing figure out of the race car in his Team Penske driver’s suit, but even more intimidating behind the wheel of the No. 2 Shell Chevrolet.

He is one of just six drivers who have won the Indianapolis 500 in back-to-back years. The others are Wilbur Shaw (1939, 1940), Mauri Rose (1947, 1948), Bill Vukovich (1953, 1954), Al Unser (1970, 1971) and Helio Castroneves (2001, 2002).

Newgarden is going to be even more fierce and intimidating in Sunday’s 109th Indianapolis 500 because INDYCAR sent him to the back of the field for a rules violation involving modifications to the rear attenuator.

Newgarden will start 32nd in the 33-car field, while boasting one of the fastest cars on the track. That should make his charge a thrilling spectacle for the sold-out crowd of 350,000 fans in attendance and the millions watching the race on FOX.

Newgarden’s 64-year-old father, Joey, is confident his son can win on Sunday.

“You’re going to see a very cool, cold, calculating driver come out there,” Joey Newgarden told FOX Sports. “You can win this race from any seat in the house. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

The Newgardens might be from Hendersonville, Tennessee, but Josef’s racing roots are in the state of Indiana at New Castle Motorsports Park, 51 miles east of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

That’s what makes Newgarden’s tale so interesting, because a driver deep in the heart of NASCAR country has become an Indy 500 legend.

First, some backstory.

Joey Newgarden was born in New York and grew up in Miami. His father ran a successful children’s photography business.

Joey was actually a walk-on with the Miami Dolphins and Houston Oilers in the NFL. He made the practice squads for both teams, but learned quickly that he didn’t have what it took to play at that level.

“I didn’t last one week, 10 days, in either of those ventures,” Joey recalled.

Joey’s family moved to Nashville 40 years ago.

In 1983, he discovered NASCAR racing on The Nashville Network and loved what he saw. He attended the Buck Baker Racing School and the Richard Petty Racing Experience, bought a late model stock car with two motors and an open trailer.

“It cost me $25,000 that I didn’t have,” Joey said. “I went racing at Nashville Speedway, and you never saw a worse race driver than me.

“I think I probably go down in history as the very worst performing race driver. I must have put in 13 races in my whole career there, and that’s because I would always wreck the car and didn’t have the money to put it back together but somehow found a way to do it.”

He had drivers such as Jeremy Mayfield and ARCA legend Frank Kimmel in his car and discovered those were big-time racers.

The Newgarden family was growing up and Josef was proving to be an athletic talent. He played baseball, basketball and football, and took it seriously.

Josef was pulled out of private school and began to be homeschooled by his mother. Teachers found him to be rather animated, and the Newgardens believed he was creative, so they decided homeschooling was the best opportunity for him to grow.

He returned to public school in the seventh and eighth grades and displayed athletic prowess.

By the time he finished eighth grade, however, Josef wanted to race go-karts.

Joey made a deal with his son.

He would let him race go-karts if he put a better effort on the basketball court and baseball diamond.

By the time he got to ninth and 10th grades, Newgarden was still just 5-foot-5 and 115 pounds competing against kids that were 175 pounds and 6-feet tall.

He told his dad that he had given it a lot of thought and wanted to choose just one sport to concentrate on.

“’Well, which one are you going to do?’ Which one do you want to do?’” Joey asked him. “He said, ‘I want to go racing.’

“I told him, ‘If that’s what you want to do, then we’ll do it.’”

It began with karting at New Castle Motorsports Park, one of the best karting facilities in the United States owned by former IndyCar driver Mark Dismore. 

Joey Newgarden had a Navigator and later a Chevy Suburban that hauled a karting rig, a small trailer, down the highway from Hendersonville, Tennessee to New Castle, Indiana.

He turned a 5-hour drive into a 3-hour, 50-minute drive with young Josef laying in the back watching Jim Carrey movies on a small DVD player.

“I have no idea how we got there that fast, but four hours was always the window,” Joey recalled. “But if you got there in 3:50 or 3:45, you were setting a new record.”

Joey and Josef always had a close relationship as father and son, and the long trips to New Castle were a time to bond even further.

“He didn’t know any other way,” Joey said of his son. “He had a mom and two sisters and then he had his dad, right? 

“No brothers, no real male role models. So, I was it.

“There was no Ward and Beaver Cleaver dad thing going on, once we started racing go-karts seriously, it was a whole shifting of the gears, and it became a business.”

New Castle Motorsports Park opened in 2004 and the Newgarden’s raced there in June of that year. They started in rental carts before they bought a kart that Dismore had off the floor. It was an American-made kart, and they paid $7,000. They didn’t have to haul it up and down the highway, because it was left with Dismore.

“We did one race weekend and got our butts handed to us his first time,” Joey recalled. “There were 13 kids in the group, and he finished 10th or 11th.

“I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I got it in me to race one more week,’ but we came back in August. After that weekend, we came back home and put his kart and trailer away.”

That wasn’t the end of this journey, however.

They tinkered on the kart over the winter, but it wasn’t until the following March when the Newgarden’s resumed their racing dream.

In 2005 and 2006, father and son made 23 trips from Nashville to New Castle each of those years. Those included local regional races, plus five national events.

“That was the best education in racing ever,” Joey said. “I told him it didn’t matter if he had a fancy kart because he was learning a lot here. He must have run 150 go-kart races between those two years.

“And we showed up out there.”

Newgarden competed against the 12-year-old son of former Formula One and Indy 500 driver Derek Daly — a kid named Conor Daly, who is competing in his 12th Indy 500 on Sunday. INDYCAR team owner Eric Bachelart’s son also competed in karting and so did 1998 Indianapolis 500 winner Eddie Cheever’s.

The Newgardens weren’t intimidated. Josef put his head down, learned what he could, and made it happen.

He won two junior championships in 2005 and finished second and third against Daly and Bachelart.

At the end of the year, a big world championship race came to New Castle in October.

“Josef wound up winning that one and whipping those guy’s asses that weekend,” Joey said proudly. “That was big motivation to come back the second year.

“And when he came back in 2006, he’s 15 and he smoked everybody. In the third year, instead of 23 trips up there, we made 10 and Josef won the senior championship.”

Young Newgarden had outgrown karting and competed in 24 races in Skip Barber.

“He was a rookie and went back to getting his butt kicked,” dad said. “The second year in Skip Barber, Josef smoked everybody and wound up getting the opportunity to race in Europe.”

He moved to Europe at 17 and lived on his own, competing in Formula Ford and the British Formula Ford Series. He attempted to compete in GP3, before he came back to the United States to compete in what is now the INDY NXT SERIES.

Then, the lucky break into INDYCAR with Sarah Fisher Racing in 2012, finishing 23rd in the championship. By 2015, he won two races for CFH Racing and finished seventh in the INDYCAR Championship.

One more win with Ed Carpenter Racing in 2016, and Newgarden was ready for the big time — Team Penske.

He won four races and the 2017 INDYCAR Championship in his first season at Team Penske. He won another INDYCAR title in 2019 with Team Penske. He won four races each season in 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2023 and a career-high five races in 2022.

In 2023, he won the Indianapolis 500 for the first time in his career. He won it again last year.

Newgarden enters Sunday’s Indy 500 with 31 victories and has become the current face of the Indianapolis 500.

It all started on those long trips from Nashville to New Castle, Indiana with his father speeding down the highway to turn a five-hour drive into 3-hours, 50-minutes.

“It’s a lot of old memories, that’s for sure,” Joey Newgarden said.

For Joey and Josef Newgarden, they were memories that lasted a lifetime.

“It was very important,” Josef told FOX Sports. “I’ve had the great fortune of being supported by my parents. My Dad was very supportive and so was my mom.

“I treasure the times getting to ride up here with my dad and drive go-karts. It’s all I wanted to do as a kid.

“I got to bond with my Dad going to the track. I bonded with my Mom; she came a lot of times. I’m a lucky guy. I had really, really, really good parents.”

“To me, it was a dream. To be here at the Indianapolis 500 is very surreal, still.”

Bruce Martin is a veteran motorsports writer and contributor to FOXSports.com. Follow him on X at @BruceMartin_500.

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