Two-times IndyCar champion Josef Newgarden says Formula 1 doesn’t appeal as strongly to him as it did earlier in his career.
Newgarden briefly raced in Europe before returning to the USA in 2011. He won the Indy Lights championship that year and graduated to IndyCar immediately afterwards.
Since then he has won 20 races and two championships in the series. Last year he finished runner-up for the second season in a row. The 31-year-old retains a respect for Formula 1 but says he is more excited by the standard of competition in IndyCar racing.
“For me the allure of F1 is the gravity of the cars,” said Newgarden. “When I think of F1, I think about a manufacturer’s championship and trying to build the quickest cars that you can within a reasonable – or I should say an unreasonable – budget. That’s what was exciting about it.
“But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve been in racing and watched Formula 1, I don’t know that it’s somewhere I really want to race. It…