A new race engineer can give a feeling of unease for a driver, especially after having success with an old engineer for several years, racking up several wins and a couple of championships.
However, winning three of your first eight IndyCar races with a new engineer puts any doubts or uneasiness away, and such has been the case for Josef Newgarden.
This NTT IndyCar Series season is the first time Newgarden has claimed three wins this soon in a season. Race engineer Eric Leichtle feels validated that his driver is third in points, especially since this is Leichtle’s first time race engineering an IndyCar driver.
While that may be a concern for some, it hasn’t been for Team Penske, as Leichtle’s previous two jobs were directly involved in the IndyCar program for Pratt & Miller, the organization who services many GM racing programs including Corvette Racing.
Starting in 2018, Leichtle was working as a Chevrolet-supplied performance engineer to Team Penske, standing on Simon Pagenaud‘s timing stand during on-track sessions for that and the following two seasons.
In 2021, Leichtle became the IndyCar program manager for Pratt & Miller and became Newgarden’s race engineer for 2022 after Gavin Ward left the team.
The pair won their second race together at Texas Motor Speedway and their third on the streets of Long Beach, and from then on it’s been feast or famine. Newgarden has three wins and a fourth place finish, but also four finishes of 13th or worse this season. As the IndyCar season heads to The Buckeye State, Leichtle knows that his first visit to the track as an IndyCar race engineer will be supported by a lot of data that he has studied.
Leichtle has access to all of the notes from previous IndyCar races to help him formulate a good setup for Mid-Ohio. Newgarden’s past experience at the Lexington, Ohio track helps and through the first eight races of this season, Leichtle knows how good Newgarden is compared to other drivers he has engineered, such as Michael Cooper or Andy Pilgrim as part of the Cadillac program in what was then known as Pirelli World Challenge. When the car isn’t perfect, the Hendersonville, Tennessee native still figures out how to get the maximum amount of performance out of the car.
“I think that’s a pretty important task,” Leichtle Because my job is to make it as perfect as I can, but it’s never quite there. So the ability to adapt and still find performance with something that’s not exactly how…
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