IndyCar’s Josef Newgarden Had No Idea Who The RHOSLC Cast Was During The Cameo

In spite of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City surprised to see him, an IndyCar driver Joseph Newgarden was left stunned after appearing on the Bravo reality series.

Newgarden, 34, made a cameo in a November 2024 episode of the show, where Bronwyn Newport took the cast on a trip to the IndyCar race in Thermal, California, outside of Palm Springs. When Newgarden met the Housewives on the track, Newport called her “the best cast member ever” Lisa Barlow he shouted, “Take off your shirt!”

The women even tried to set up Newgarden with a single cast member Heather Gaybut he was told that Newgarden was married to his wife, Ashley Welchand that the couple shares a 2-year-old son A quarter.

“I didn’t even know what was going on,” Newgarden admitted in an exclusive interview with him Us Weekly “I’m serious, this is how these things happen. We are on the road, we are in this race. Someone walks into our engineering office and says, ‘Hey, there are people here, there are guests. Can you please come out and say hello?’”

Newgarden continued, “I came out and said hello to everybody. They’re like, ‘They’re going to record you, so don’t worry about it.’ I say, ‘Okay, no problem.’ And then you don’t hear anything about it for a few months, right? Then I get all these documents when the show is on. I don’t know this show. I have never seen you.”

The driver “didn’t know” his collaboration with the Housewives will be featured in the show, but he called them “very fun.”

After the episode aired, Newgarden joked about the surprising response to his Bravo debut.

“You know what was funny? “She gets messages from her husband,” Newgarden said. “It’s all men. Every text message was from a guy and it was like, ‘I was watching with my wife,’ or, ‘My wife had it on TV and I saw you were there. That’s good.’ I found 20 such texts. I thought it was really funny.”

Except for his new item Housewives fame, Newgarden is also the face of the first season of IndyCar on Fox, which will officially begin on March 2. Newgarden is featured in a flashy commercial to promote the partnership, which highlights Newgarden’s gleaming jaw and reveals the emergence Tom Brady.

For Newgarden, being in the IndyCar spotlight is not something he takes lightly.

“I care about the growth of the sport, just being a competitor and the love of IndyCar,” he said. “I want to see it reach the highest level. I remember when I was a kid, IndyCar used to be a household name in North America. It reached beyond America alone. It was a global game. I think it can go back to that time.”

Newgarden added, “I care a lot about its representation and how it’s viewed. I think Fox will really capture the essence of what IndyCar is, the cool thing about it. Because it has been there for a long time. It’s just a matter of exposure.”

Fox’s coverage of the 2025 IndyCar season begins with the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Louis. Petersburg in St. Petersburg, Florida, Sunday, March 2.