Josef Newgarden celebrates in victory lane at World Wide Technology Raceway. (Joe Skibinski/Penske Entertainment photo)

By Thomas Hughes, SWN Staff Writer

MADISON, Ill. (June 7, 2026) – Sunday night’s Bommarito Automotive Group 500 was not merely another Gateway oval race won by Josef Newgarden.

It was a race of contrasts: late-night exhaustion, rain and breakthrough joy; familiar dominance and unexpected opportunity; and a 17-lead-change event that ended with Team Penske back in victory lane but left more than one driver feeling the impact of the night.

For one, compare the emotions of Newgarden and A.J. Foyt Racing’s Caio Collet.

Newgarden exited with a measured sense of satisfaction, shaped in part by a lingering ankle injury from the Indianapolis 500, after a race stretching past midnight on the East Coast and the fact that he has now won 11 of the last 24 oval races.

“I'm just glad we went the distance honestly,” Newgarden said of the 34th victory of his NTT IndyCar Series career and second this season. “That was the big thing. With the rain, it almost turns it into a casino in some regards. … I love short oval racing. I don’t think that’s a secret. But I don’t look forward to this place more than others.

“… IndyCar is a game that you have to be super versatile in. You [have] to be very well-rounded as a team, nimble. You got to be good everywhere. It exposes the weakness if you're not good everywhere.”

Back to the juxtaposition: Collet went through his FOX Sports post-race interview with tears pooling in his eyes. The rookie led seven laps in the race for A.J. Foyt Racing, but he came away with little to show for it.

A 22nd-place finish was all that resulted, the byproduct of a blown engine sustained on lap 226 of the event. The failure dashed any hopes of his first top 10, his first top five and perhaps – had things broken his way – a first podium.

At lap 144, that possibility looked real. After a half-hour rain stoppage, Collet sat second behind Andretti Global’s Marcus Ericsson, having risen 18 spots from the start. By lap 20, Ericsson had climbed into the top five while Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou led the way early.

Palou held command until lap 47, when Ericsson finally completed his climb. Ericsson started 12th, reached sixth inside the first 10 laps, broke into the top five by lap 20, passed Newgarden on lap 45 and took the lead from Palou soon after.

It did not last long. The rhythm broke on lap 55 after the first pit cycle, when Arrow McLaren’s Nolan Siegel made contact with Palou and slammed into the outside SAFER Barrier, bringing out the caution.

Ericsson and Newgarden battled back and forth on lap 64, but from there, the race went dormant for a time. The Swede extended his lead out to nearly a second, but on lap 114, the race was put under yellow when Rahal Letterman Lannigan Racing’s Graham Rahal crashed.

With rain looming as a potential factor, Collet snagged the lead before conceding it to Dixon and then to Ericsson. The race was red-flagged on lap 137 with Ericsson, Collet and Dixon as the top three.

Roughly 38 minutes later, the event got back underway. Collet pushed his way back into the lead, but after another round of pit stops, Dixon, Palou and Team Penske’s David Malukas pulled into the lead on the primary strategy.

Rain persisted as a looming figure, eventually forcing another stoppage just before the race crossed the 200-lap mark. Shortly after the restart sequence, the event turned on its head.

With Dixon and Palou leading as the top two, Dixon pitted, and Palou followed suit with the majority of cars behind him. However, when rolling to his pit box, Palou ran out of fuel, losing critical time and falling two laps down. Palou ultimately finished 17th.

Newgarden then held off a fast-charging Christian Rasmussen at a track he had won at five times before.

Rasmussen threatened for the position multiple times — he took the lead heading into turn one on lap 215, and he seized it again on lap 220 — but Newgarden seized the lead for good on lap 221 and never looked back.

With 35 laps left to go, the race witnessed its fourth and final caution when Collet pulled into the pits with a crushing engine failure. Newgarden, however, was undeterred and charged to a 0.6613 second victory over Ericsson and Rasmussen.

The victory served as Newgarden’s sixth at the track in addition to his eighth St. Louis top 10 — both event records.

“If you’re being truthful about it, I think me and Marcus were pretty close on performance,” Newgarden said. “It was just going to come down to execution. The team executed when we needed to. That’s what ultimately pulled off the victory.”

Ericsson’s second-place effort was his second top five of the season, joining a fourth-place finish at the Arlington Grand Prix in Texas. The podium was the 12th of Ericsson’s career, though he left a race in which he led 114 of 260 laps empty-handed.

“It’s definitely bittersweet after leading that many laps, having a great car underneath me,” Ericsson said. “We drove all the way to the front; [I] was feeling really good up front. Josef is good around these tracks. He got track position on us at one of the stops. It’s just hard to get around him.”

Rasmussen, meanwhile, picked up his third-ever podium finish and his second-straight third-place finish at Gateway with a race-high 38 on-track passes.

All three of his podiums have come at short ovals: two third-places at Gateway in 2025 and 2026, plus a win at Milwaukee in the penultimate race of the 2025 campaign. Rasmussen’s 36-point day vaulted him into 22nd in the championship, putting his ECR team back into Leader’s Circle contention.

“This has been a terrible year so far,” he joked in his FOX Sports post-race interview before speaking highly of the effort showcased Sunday.

“We had a third-place car today,” Rasmussen added in the post-race press conference. “I couldn’t hang with those guys there at the end… We didn’t really have a lot of [degradation], but I just didn’t have that ultimate pace.”

Palou still sits with a comfortable lead in the championship, though his advantage has been thinned to 49 points by Kirkwood. Palou’s 342 points has him ahead of Kirkwood (293), Malukas (274), Arrow McLaren’s Christian Lundgaard (246) and Pato O’Ward (239) after the season’s first half.

The Spaniard has claimed a daunting 285 points on road/street courses, 75 ahead of Kirkwood and 127 more than Lundgaard.

IndyCar is off a week before heading to Road America for the Xpel Grand Prix on Sunday, June 21, at 2 p.m. ET on FOX, the IndyCar Radio Network and SiriusXM IndyCar Nation, channel 218.

The finish:

Race (260 laps): 1. 2-Josef Newgarden. 2. 28-Marcus Ericsson, 3. 21-Christian Rasmussen, 4. 76-Rinus Veekay, 5. 3-Scott McLaughlin, 6. 27-Kyle Kirkwood, 7. 12-David Malukas, 8. 26-Will Power, 9. 66-Marcus Armstrong, 10. 7-Christian Lundgaard, 11. 5-Pato O’Ward, 12. 9-Scott Dixon, 13. 14-Santino Ferrucci, 14. 60-Felix Rosenqvist, 15. 18-Romain Grosjean, 16. 47-Mick Schumacher, 17. 10-Alex Palou, 18. 20-Alexander Rossi, 19. 77-Sting Ray Robb, 20. 45-Louis Foster, 21. 8-Kyffin Simpson, 22. 4-Caio Collet, 23. 15-Graham Rahal, 24. 6-Nolan Siegel, 25. 19-Dennis Hauger.