Newgarden wins at Phoenix IndyCar 2026 and leads the championship

Newgarden won the Good Ranchers 250 at Phoenix Raceway with a comeback from tenth to first place in the final 32 laps, decided by a gamble on fresh tires under the last yellow flag that gave him the grip that Kirkwood and the other leaders no longer had. It is the second round of the 2026 IndyCar Series and with it Newgarden moved to the top of the championship for the first time since June 2024.

The Power-Rasmussen contact split the race in two

Will Power and Christian Rasmussen had been battling for the lead lap after lap when they made contact exiting turn two on lap 206. The left-front tire of Rasmussen's Chevrolet No. 21 hit the right-rear of Power's Honda No. 26, causing a puncture that ended his race, and Rasmussen's car also suffered damage that would weigh heavily in the closing stages. The yellow flag forced every team to decide in seconds what to do with the 44 laps remaining.

Newgarden pitted along with O'Ward and a handful of drivers near the front to put on new tires. Kirkwood, Rasmussen, Malukas, and Armstrong, on the other hand, stayed out on track, trusting that track position would be enough to hold on at the end. Both gambles made sense, but only one could work on an oval where tire degradation punished drivers more and more as the race progressed.

When the race restarted on lap 218, Rasmussen was running first, Kirkwood second, and Newgarden tenth. The advantage of new tires was evident from the first green lap, as Newgarden gained positions where he previously couldn't find grip, passing cars one by one on a one-mile oval where every overtake requires centimeter-perfect precision. By lap 22 he was already third and had the lead in sight.

Photo By Penske Entertainment

The fastest car of the race finished 14th

Christian Rasmussen drove the fastest car to hit Phoenix on Saturday. His Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet No. 21 led five different stints, accumulated 69 laps at the front, and executed the most spectacular move of the race with an outside pass on O'Ward in the circuit's high-speed section during lap 109, an action that drew a reaction from the stands.

But all that performance was nullified when the contact with Power robbed him of the car's responsiveness just when he needed it most. Rasmussen ran out of weapons as his tires wore out in the final laps, and when Kirkwood passed him on lap 242, he could only watch as positions slipped away until he fell to 14th.

"We had the best car of anyone today. We should have won this race," Rasmussen said, and the numbers back up that assessment, as his fastest lap of 22.382 seconds was bettered only by Power and Malukas throughout the entire race.

Two laps were enough to decide the race

Kirkwood inherited the lead on lap 242 with a six-tenths advantage over Newgarden, but that gap didn't survive a single full lap as Newgarden ate into his lead corner by corner until passing him on the inside of turn four on lap 244. Kirkwood, who had made his final stop on lap 192 and carried 26 more laps of tire degradation, had no way to respond and watched Newgarden pull away without issue to the checkered flag.

"We thought about it, but the pits opened and we had to decide. Staying out was the right thing at that moment," Kirkwood explained about the call not to pit under yellow, and it's hard to blame him because at that instant he was running second and any pit stop would have sent him to the back of the pack.

"I'm very surprised," admitted Newgarden. "Mid-race I wasn't sure we could win, but we kept working and I told myself that if we got another opportunity we were going to be aggressive. We came in for tires and the car was a rocket when I needed it."

With this victory, the 33rd of his career, Newgarden moved to the top of the championship with 78 points against Kirkwood's 73 and broke a streak that seemed endless, because no one other than Palou had led the overall IndyCar Series standings since June 2024.

Photo By Penske Entertainment

Palou's 100th race ended in 21 laps

Álex Palou arrived at Phoenix with a record that only nine drivers in the category's history can boast before their 100th race, including names like Rick Mears, A.J. Foyt, and Mario Andretti, which includes twenty wins, four championships, and a top-10 percentage with Chip Ganassi Racing exceeding 83 percent in 85 starts. That history suggested the milestone race would at least be an opportunity to score points, but contact with Rinus VeeKay of Juncos Hollinger Racing in the high-speed section between turns sent the Honda No. 10 into the SAFER barriers just 21 laps in and left Palou out of contention without having been able to fight for anything.

The retirement is his worst result since June 2025 in Detroit, and it stands out because between Iowa 2024 and that Detroit race, Palou had finished every event contested. Two retirements due to contact in less than a year break a pattern that had become normal for someone accustomed to always finishing among the frontrunners, and the points loss is considerable considering that just two weeks ago Palou won the season opener at St. Petersburg by a margin of 12.49 seconds, a record for that race, and now all that advantage evaporated in Phoenix.

Photo By Penske Entertainment

Team Penske celebrates 60 years with two cars in the top three

David Malukas started from pole and in the early stages of the race seemed to have the pace to win, but a wheel-to-wheel battle with his teammate Newgarden exiting the pits and the team's pit calls pushed him to third place, which nonetheless gives Team Penske two of the top three positions in their 60th anniversary season.

Pato O'Ward played a leading role for a good part of the race and even led thanks to a pit stop that allowed him to gain positions through strategy, although the final fourth place fell short of what his Arrow McLaren had shown in the first 200 laps, and Marcus Armstrong closed out a solid top five for Meyer Shank Racing in a round where the team also placed Felix Rosenqvist in 12th.

Photo By Penske Entertainment

The race left opposing stories within the same teams, as Scott Dixon finished seventh for Chip Ganassi Racing and somewhat cushioned the disaster of his teammate Palou; Graham Rahal completed a solid comeback to ninth place in a positive weekend for Rahal Letterman Lanigan, but that same team lost Louis Foster mid-race due to damage on his Honda, and Romain Grosjean couldn't even start in his Dale Coyne Racing car.

Record number of passes in IndyCar's return to Phoenix

IndyCar hadn't raced at Phoenix since 2018, when Newgarden and Team Penske also won, and the return to the one-mile oval in the Arizona desert produced 565 on-track passes, a category record for this circuit. The combination of high-degradation tires and 25 cars on a mile of asphalt meant there was practically not a single lap without someone attempting an overtake.

The 2026 season offers no respite, and the third consecutive race in three weekends arrives on Sunday, March 15th in Arlington, Texas, with the debut of the Java House Grand Prix of Arlington, a temporary street circuit that winds around the AT&T Stadium and Globe Life Field and will be IndyCar's first race in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.

Good Ranchers 250

Pos	#	Piloto	Equipo	Tiempo
1	2	Josef Newgarden	Team Penske	111:14.466
2	27	Kyle Kirkwood	Andretti Global w/ Curb-Agajanian	+1.794s
3	12	David Malukas	Team Penske	+2.841s
4	5	Pato O'Ward	Arrow McLaren	+3.932s
5	66	Marcus Armstrong	Meyer Shank w/ Curb-Agajanian	+6.481s
6	20	Alexander Rossi	ECR	+7.291s
7	9	Scott Dixon	Chip Ganassi Racing	+8.165s
8	3	Scott McLaughlin	Team Penske	+9.879s
9	15	Graham Rahal	Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing	+10.469s
10	8	Kyffin Simpson	Chip Ganassi Racing	+12.131s
11	14	Santino Ferrucci	A.J. Foyt Enterprises	+16.836s
12	60	Felix Rosenqvist	Meyer Shank w/ Curb-Agajanian	+17.214s
13	7	Christian Lundgaard	Arrow McLaren	+17.658s
14	21	Christian Rasmussen	ECR	+18.286s
15	19	Dennis Hauger	Dale Coyne Racing	+18.974s
16	26	Will Power	Andretti Global	+18.641s
17	28	Marcus Ericsson	Andretti Global	+19.632s
18	47	Mick Schumacher	Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing	+20.522s
19	4	Caio Collet	A.J. Foyt Enterprises	+21.666s
20	6	Nolan Siegel	Arrow McLaren	+20.865s
21	77	Sting Ray Robb	Juncos Hollinger Racing	+22.420s
22	76	Rinus VeeKay	Juncos Hollinger Racing	+18.191s
23	45	Louis Foster	Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing	-
24	10	Alex Palou	Chip Ganassi Racing	-
25	18	Romain Grosjean	Dale Coyne Racing	-