This is an opinion column.

Josef Newgarden loves this stuff, man.

The guy lives motorsports. He loves Barber Motorsports Park and thinks you should, too. Excuse the fact he’s a Tennessee guy because Newgarden didn’t come to the eastern fringe of Birmingham on Tuesday playing “Rocky Top” and didn’t wear any shade of orange.

Newgarden just happens to be one of the fastest race car drivers in the world, and his enthusiasm is frankly intoxicating.

As the two-time defending Indianapolis 500 winner, he’s arguably among the biggest stars in the sport.

Yet for 10 minutes he talked shop with a relatively recent racing convert who spent his career writing about college football. This hack of a columnist was among the Americans caught in the wave of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” docuseries that chronicled IndyCar’s open-wheel cousin, Formula One.

The traditionally European-centric “pinnacle of motorsport” is in the midst of an American invasion with three races washing up on our shores. Now, Cadillac is set to become the 11th team with the backing of General Motors beginning in 2026.

Newgarden gets it. He likes Formula One too.

NASCAR, check. If it has wheels and a howling engine, count Newgarden in.

But he’s an IndyCar guy above all and he’s ready to make the case for this racing series climbing back to the top of the pecking order.

While taking a break from Tuesday’s testing ahead of the May 4 Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix at Barber, the Nashville native had this writer convinced IndyCar’s time as the hidden gem should be ending.

Catching an F1 slipstream with NASCAR not quite the goliath of 20 years ago, Newgarden and a few of his fellow IndyCar drivers made a convincing pitch as it claws for a share of the viewership market.

It’s about accessibility and quality of competition.

Where garage passes for NASCAR’s April 27 race at Talladega start at $89, the IndyCar equivalent a week later is $45. It’s more intimate than what can be an overwhelming environment at the superspeedway. Similar experiences at the three F1 races in the United States would cost you into the thousands compared to the $59 general admission passes for race day at Barber.

“You know, any fan can basically come in here and get a paddock pass,” Newgarden said, “get a general admission and walk pretty much anywhere that they want, meet any team, meet any driver, you know, and see any part of this track that is unique to top level motorsport.”

That’s cool but what about the excitement of action?

In the 2024 season, 10 different IndyCar drivers won at least one of the 17 races. NASCAR wasn’t too far behind, percentagewise, with 18 winners in 36 races.

“You’re not going to find a series that has better parity at this high of a level,” Newgarden said, “being the lowest budget team and still fight for the win at the Indianapolis 500 or the win at Barber here. That is not the case in Formula One. It’s more of a manufacturer’s championship. And certainly in NASCAR, I think you’re a little more top heavy from a parity standpoint across the field.”

It’s more about skill of driving in IndyCar as opposed to Formula One because they’re all essentially driving the same car. F1 cars are constructed by each individual team so the gap between the haves and have-nots is wider than the Atlantic Ocean.

Pato O’Ward is another of IndyCar’s young stars. A product of Mexico, O’Ward drives for McLaren and is a reserve driver for team’s F1 operation. He got to drive a practice session last fall in Mexico City and has the potential to get the call up to the big leagues at some point.

But for now, he’s all in for IndyCar. He explained why, if a race fan had to pick between Barber and Talladega, why they should opt for the open-wheel race.

“We’re faster,” Pato O’Ward said. “We sound better and, you know, it’s just a different way of racing. I would say, I would say it’s probably more raw. Less games are played and it’s just raw racing.”

And Barber is one of the more interesting stops of the series. Drivers like Newgarden and O’Ward love talking about the challenge of the scenic 2.38-mile winding ribbon that sees more elevation change than any stop in the season. That’s slightly shorter than the 2.66 mile tri-oval in Talladega that’s left-turn only.

Barber’s also earned the nickname “The Alabama Roller Coaster” for the wild ride it takes drivers and, by extension, fans. With cars that don’t include power steering, you can spend the afternoon watching these athletes wrestle million-dollar machinery around one of the most physically demanding tracks.

“Yeah, it definitely rewards people that are fit,” O’Ward said. “And it’s very rewarding to like a good qualifying lap when you get it right. And you have to be very precise because everything is just quite sensitive to where the car placement is. So when you get it right, you definitely feel like you’ve had a good lap going.”

Newgarden said it was “very much like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway” in terms of facility quality and amenities offered. Now, this is still a sport with a firm epicenter in the heartland. Everything still revolves around the Indy500 on Memorial Day Weekend — a time once considered among the top two or three sporting events in the nation.

Fractures in the sport, the rise and dominance of football (pro and college) and a number of other factors knocked open-wheel racing down the pecking order in the US.

Momentum, however, is back.

The 2025 season-opening race in St. Petersburg drew 1.417 million viewers as IndyCar made its debut on Fox. That’s a considerable bump from the 974,000 who watched the same race last year in the final year on NBC, but still behind the 4.132 million who watched the NASCAR race in Austin later in the day on FOX.

There’s a degree of rebirth with the IndyCar series and Barber offers a unique setting to experience a little bit of it all. It’s a road course like what you’d see in F1 but with a more competitive field.

The beauty of Barber also sets it apart from Talladega. It truly feels like a racetrack nestled into a golf course opposed to something akin to an airport.

Perhaps not Augusta National, but not a hayfield either.

As someone who’s experienced both races, there’s only one I’m eager to attend again.

Josef Newgarden sold me.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.