Josef Newgarden does not lose at World Wide Technology Raceway. Late on Sunday night, with the clock pushing toward midnight after two weather stoppages, the Team Penske driver pulled away from Marcus Ericsson on the final run to win the Bommarito Automotive Group 500 by 0.673 seconds. It was Newgarden’s sixth victory in just 11 starts at the 1.25-mile Gateway oval, a strike rate no active driver can match at any single track on the IndyCar calendar.
The win was Newgarden’s second oval triumph of 2026 and it arrived on a night that unraveled spectacularly for the championship leader. Alex Palou started on pole, led most of the first 50 laps, and looked set to convert another front-running afternoon into points. Instead the No. 10 Chip Ganassi Racing entry ran out of fuel on pit lane under caution with 56 laps to go, dropping Palou to a 17th-place finish and handing the night to the Penske camp.
Newgarden and Penske Master a Chaotic Night
The 260-lap race never settled into a rhythm. On-track action was halted twice as rain swept across the St. Louis-area circuit, the second stoppage breaking up what had been building into a three-way fight for the lead. When the track finally dried and the laps wound down, Newgarden held the inside line on a restart with 22 to go and refused to surrender it, fending off Ericsson and Christian Rasmussen on the way to the checkered flag.
Newgarden had to earn it. Between a restart with 48 laps remaining and a caution with 36 to go for rookie Caio Collet’s expired engine, he and Rasmussen swapped the lead more than once, the two cars running different lines as Rasmussen committed to the high groove. “We had everything we needed with Team Penske, so a great job to the group,” Newgarden said. “We had a good car to start, and it just came to us when we needed it. This team did the job tonight, and I think that’s why we’re here.”
For Penske, the result reads as a statement after a difficult stretch of the season. Newgarden has now stood in Gateway victory lane in six of the last seven runnings he has contested, a record of oval mastery that has quietly become one of the most reliable trends in the series. His average finish at the track now sits among the strongest any driver has posted at a single venue in the current era of IndyCar.
Ericsson Leads the Most Laps but Comes Up Short
Marcus Ericsson was the aggressor for much of the night. Starting 12th, the Swede carved through the field and took the race lead by lap 47, eventually pacing a race-high 114 of the 260 laps. He had the car to win for long stretches, but he could not hold off Newgarden once the final sequence of green-flag running began.
“I felt we had it at some point, but he is the best in the business on these ovals,” Ericsson said of Newgarden. “I thought I had something for him, but he was just too strong. I wanted that win.” Second place was still Ericsson’s best oval result of the campaign and a reminder that Andretti Global has speed on the superspeedway-style tracks even when the win slips away.
The drive of the night belonged to Christian Rasmussen, who gained 16 positions, more than any other driver, to finish third and claim his first podium of 2026. “I was ripping the top the whole race, my car did not work super well at the bottom, so I was like, well, you have got to rip the top,” Rasmussen said. “We had a third-place car and got third place. We have had a horrible year so far, so getting a podium is a good way to turn that around.” Rinus VeeKay and Scott McLaughlin completed the top five. Kyle Kirkwood, David Malukas, Will Power, Marcus Armstrong, and Christian Lundgaard rounded out the top 10.
How Palou’s Night Fell Apart
Palou arrived at Gateway having carried a 62-point championship lead into the weekend, and for the opening third of the race he looked every bit the runaway favorite. The turning point came on lap 56, when contact with Nolan Siegel forced Palou into damage-limitation mode. The real blow followed under a later caution, when the No. 10 ran dry on pit lane and lost a clutch of positions it could never recover.
A 17th-place finish is, by the standards of Palou’s 2026, a genuine outlier. He had finished on the podium in nearly every race to that point, and a fuel miscalculation is the rarest kind of error for a Ganassi operation that has built its title campaign on flawless execution. The result does not change who leads the championship, but it trims the cushion and gives the chasing pack a reason to believe the next six rounds are live.
Championship Standings
Palou retains the championship lead on 342 points, but his margin over second-placed Kyle Kirkwood has shrunk from 62 points to 49 after the Gateway result. That is still a commanding advantage with six rounds to run, and Palou can absorb the occasional bad night precisely because he banked so many podiums earlier in the year. The math remains in his favor: even a run of second places from here would likely be enough.
The bigger story lower down is Newgarden, who climbed to sixth in the standings on 238 points. Two oval wins in a single season have rescued what had been a frustrating campaign for the two-time series champion, and they keep him in the conversation as a spoiler over the closing stretch. For Kirkwood, the runner-up in the points, the night was a missed opportunity to take a larger bite out of Palou’s lead, with a sixth-place finish that gained only modest ground.
What’s Next
IndyCar swaps ovals for road racing next, heading to Road America for the Xpel Grand Prix on June 21. The four-mile Wisconsin road course is one of the longest and fastest on the schedule, and it should suit Palou, who has historically been near-untouchable there. For Newgarden, the challenge will be carrying his oval momentum onto a circuit where Penske’s road-course form has been more mixed in 2026. The title picture says Palou is still firmly in control, but Gateway was a reminder that nothing on this calendar is guaranteed.
