Josef Newgarden rolls off 14th for Sunday's Indianapolis 500 carrying a chip on his shoulder, a freshly rebuilt Team Penske pit-stand around him and a sound-bite that has bounced through the IndyCar paddock for three months. The two-time and back-to-back Indianapolis 500 winner has spent the off-season recasting himself as the villain Penske needs to rebuild around after a 2025 campaign defined by qualifying scandal, a Roger Penske management reset and a season in which the Captain's flagship driver finished out of the championship top ten for the first time in nearly a decade.
"There's a Lex Luthor. We are the Evil Empire about to strike. Just wait. We're coming full attack," Newgarden told FOX Sports' camera in a winter promotional shoot that has since become a kind of mission statement for the team's reworked 2026 effort. Stripped of the cartoon framing, the idea is straightforward: Penske is tired of being characterised as a fallen giant, and Newgarden has elected himself as the driver who carries that fight back to Chip Ganassi Racing and Andretti Global on the biggest stage in the sport.
The work behind the talking points has been quiet but extensive. After last year's Indianapolis 500 push-to-pass infraction triggered the dismissal of senior Penske management and a months-long review of how the team operates, Cindric's successors have rebuilt the driver-engineer feedback loop almost from scratch. Newgarden describes a different rhythm to his race weekends, even if much of the surface looks the same.
"It feels like business as usual in a lot of respects. I'm excited," Newgarden said of his return to the cockpit for 2026. "It's that time of year where the cadence is starting to pick up."
What has changed, he explained, is the mechanical scaffolding that surrounds the cockpit. "I think the way we debrief, probably communication flow. A lot of mundane things, a lot of process-driven things, will be different. Almost refreshed, if you will. It'll be a new workflow. That's probably the best way to put it: a slightly different cadence on race weekend. Hopefully, it will be a good, positive change."
The other reset, he conceded, is generational. With Will Power having moved on, Scott McLaughlin still rebuilding from his Fast Six crash and a rookie in the Penske stable, Newgarden has become the senior voice in the building.
"I am the old guy. I can't believe I've been doing this for 15 years," he said. "I've always had a strong sense of what I've wanted, and that part isn't going to change. When I was young and now that I'm older, I'll still have the same projection in my voice about what I think we need to be doing. That part will be similar."
The numbers say the rebuild is at least partially working. Newgarden ran inside the top six in three of the four practice sessions on the Speedway's run-up week, lined up 14th after a measured rather than maximum Fast 12 attempt and has reportedly had the best fuel mileage in the Penske stable across long runs all month. Whether that translates into a third Borg-Warner Trophy on Sunday will depend on yellow flag rhythm, the field's increasingly aggressive pit strategy and whether Alex Palou's CGR can shake the maiden-win monkey off its back.
But for a driver who arrived at the Speedway last May with a cloud over his head and his name attached to one of the worst weeks in modern Penske history, the path back through public anger to grid 14 has been more substantial than the qualifying sheet suggests. He has not pretended otherwise. The Evil Empire act is a wink, but the work behind it, he insists, is not.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/newgarden-evil-empire-penske-indy-500-2026-full-attack-rebound). Visit for full coverage.*
