IndyCar champion thinks F1 has lost its charm – “Doesn’t look much of a driver’s championship”

Two-time IndyCar champion Josef Newgarden revealed that he thinks F1 is not exciting anymore, saying that its allure is dying out.

F1 is a team sport, with both team and driver having to be one in order to achieve success. In recent times, however, the gap between the top teams and their low-tier counterparts seem to be increasing.

As a result, the old ‘oh it’s not the driver, it’s the car’ argument is used a lot while discussing F1 champions. If a driver absolutely crushes his opposition, some fans attribute it to the dominant car.

In that regard the IndyCar champion revealed that F1 was not exciting anymore, and that it was slowly becoming less about the driver.

Speaking ahead of the 2022 IndyCar season, the 31-year-old told Autoweek, “For me the allure of F1 I think is the gravity of the cars.

“When I think about F1, I think about a manufacturers’ championship, trying to build the quickest cars that you can within—I should say within an unreasonable budget. That’s what was exciting about it.”

josef-newgarden-team-penske-indycar no to F1
Newgarden (pictured) doesn’t think F1 is super fun. Source: IndyCar

Specifics of it

“The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve been in racing and watched Formula 1, I don’t know it’s somewhere I really want to race. It doesn’t look much of a driver’s championship to me,” Newgarden explained.

“It’s a very impressive championship, it always has been. It’s something I would certainly like to do. I’d like to drive everything that I could to have the experience. Then I’d have more first-hand knowledge to really speak on it.

“I think IndyCar is really where you’re going to get the most competitive product as a racing driver. When you’re a driver at the top level, you want to have an opportunity to compete, to win the championship, to win big races regardless of your situation.”

Read more: F1 signs new TV deal which will present never-seen-before footage from the past

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