Pato O’Ward took his first victory of 2025 in the first race at Iowa, but 24 hours later it felt like the enormity of the task had already been forgotten.
That might just be the nature of a double-header weekend where you win the first race, and then another happens to wipe people’s memories. But there also might have been a few elements of this that were underappreciated in the moment.
First off, the win was pulled off against Josef Newgarden, and there are two parts to this that are extremely interesting. One is that no driver is better on a track than Newgarden at Iowa, he’s relatively unstoppable - heading into 2024 he’d won five of the last seven races there.
His 2024 event ended up being ruined by the fact he qualified poorly in the year that they repaved the track, and made it really difficult to overtake. And yet he still came from 22nd to third in one of the races.
Long story short, when there are two lanes and you can overtake, he is absolutely unbelievable. Some drivers are still trying to study and replicate how he scythes through traffic with ease, including his Penske team-mates.
O’Ward knows all this, and he identified one area, the in-lap before his final pit stop, as the place to make the time on Newgarden. He gained a second and it gave him the track position needed.
“As soon as I got to Josef, he's one of the guys that when you're behind him, he tries to outsmart you, definitely,” said O’Ward after the race.
“He's been running ovals for more than I've been in the series. That experience only comes with laps, and he's also very strong here, so I knew that we had to be perfect.
“We capitalised on that in lap.
“I think I went a little bit over the limit and risked a bit more than I was planning to, but all in all, it actually worked out because he was right on our gearbox in [Turn] 3 and 4 when we came out.
“Great pitstop, and did my job to secure us that overcut, and that's pretty much what gave us the win today.”
On road courses, it’s the out lap which makes the big difference because you’re on cold tyres and a full tank of fuel.
That’s still true on an oval, but you are able to get up to speed quickly. It’s the in-lap, where you have to navigate traffic, get to the inside and be the latest of the late brakers into the pits even when the whole car brakes terribly in oval-spec, which is why lock-ups are relatively common on oval events.
The second element to all this is the seemingly intertwined nature of Newgarden and O’Ward. They always seem to find each other in the big moments on ovals. Of course, the 2024 Indy 500 is the well-remembered one as Newgarden passed O’Ward on the last lap.
That moment would break a lesser driver but - after showing emotion of course - O’Ward knuckles down and gets back to work.
“He’s the guy that I've been most around, especially to win races,” says O’Ward of Newgarden.
“If it wasn't for him, I would have a lot more wins. But he's a tough competitor.”
O’Ward makes a nod to this year being difficult for Newgarden - he’s yet to win and sits 14th in the points - saying: “I think this year for him has been quite different to what it's been in the past. I see him very differently, to be honest, like his attitude and everything is definitely not the Josef that I've always praised, I would say.
But here’s the real juicy part: “But I've studied him. I know how to race him. He gets what he gives. If he was flirting with fire there, then that's what he got, and that's what I was going to give him because you get to these points in your career, and for me especially today when I was behind him, I said, ‘today is the day that's going to change’.
“Because obviously he's got a lot more experience than I do, but I think over the years, I've grown to realise that I'm pretty handy, at least in certain ovals, and I believe our package is very strong, and it's important to capitalize when we can get those wins.
“We were super close in Gateway and we've been so close there, and now here, we've won here before, but it was kind of given to us when Josef had a failure there that 50th race [of his IndyCar career] for me that I won here [in 2022].
“I knew I had all the pieces in place to outright beat him at his own game. That's what we did today.”
In terms of ‘flirting with fire’, that feels much more like the old Pato O’Ward that has really been phased out this year.
In recent seasons he’s gone for big moves and risks that have landed him in trouble and often not been worth the end result it produced. This was especially true last year.
All drivers racing at the front have to fight with an increased level of risk but sometimes O’Ward didn’t quite get the gamble right.
This year he’s been like a different driver, and it’s the consistency he has produced that has landed him second in the championship second only to Alex Palou, who “the guy just doesn't have any bad races, and a bad race for him is like fifth. Otherwise he's on the podium”.
The big struggle for O’Ward this year has been a previous strength; qualifying. It hasn’t been awful but hasn’t been to his same high standard either.
“This year for me, qualifying specifically, it's been horrible,” he says.
“I find my ways in recovery drives like almost every weekend, which it's fun to try and do it when you know you've got a car that can go it, AKA Mid-Ohio, but there's other scenarios where we've really got nothing to fight with, and that's where you're just hoping that you stay out of trouble and you try and capitalise on people's mistakes when people are making mistakes.”
He’s certainly done that better than before.
Maybe we’re joining things together unfairly, but his cold-blooded calculation in outsmarting Newgarden and a more measured approach in the races feels symbiotic.
This is certainly the most consistent Pato O’Ward we’ve seen and he’s reaping the benefits from this approach, even if people don’t always notice.
