Perfect? Nearly. That doesn't mean Josef Newgarden's afternoon in Elkhart Lake was easy.

ELKHART LAKE - Boy, that looked simple, didn’t it?

Josef Newgarden started on the pole Sunday for the Kohler Grand Prix at Road America, made a great start and led 53 of 55 laps – yielding only to pit – in a race that ran under the green flag from start to finish.

Just a Sunday cruise, right?

“I had one (major scare) in Turn 1,” Newgarden said. “I was, like, full opposite lock (of the steering wheel), way out past the rumble strips. It could have been bad.”

Oh, yeah, there was that.

And there was Ryan Hunter-Reay, who dogged Newgarden all day, plus Scott Dixon, the wise and sneaky-fast 2017 winner.

“We were pushing each other 110%,” Hunter-Reay said. He spent much of the day within a fraction of a second of Newgarden’s tail.

There also were tough decisions to be made by the Team Penske brain trust regarding when to pit, when to use the primary tires and when to use the alternates that are softer but more delicate, and there were the stops themselves.

“We had no mistakes in the pits. Guys were perfect. Strategy was perfect,” said Newgarden, the runner-up last year. “Fuel mileage was just perfect. Chevy engine was just perfect.

“I think if we had one bobble, we lose that race. Ryan was there to pounce when he needed to. We needed to be perfect to stay out front.”

Newgarden pulled away over the final 10 laps to finish 3.3759 seconds ahead of Hunter-Reay's Honda. He earned his first victory at the 4.014-mile track, his third of the season and 10th of his career. Team Penske collected its fifth victory in the 28 Indy-car races at Road America dating to 1982.

Dixon finished third, another two seconds back, in what gradually became a three-man race. Takuma Sato was another nine seconds behind in fourth and rookie Robert Wickens finished fifth.

Dixon, who started ninth, picked up spots each time he came to the pits and had his best chance to steal a victory coming out of the final round of stops.

Dixon went an extra lap on his first stint, pounded out his quickest laps in the middle of the race and then came in a lap earlier than the other leaders for the final stint. He needed to either be ahead of Newgarden and Hunter-Reay after their stops or be close enough to pass before their tires reached peak temperature and performance.

“I think speed-wise we were right there,” Dixon said. “Had a bit of a crack at Hunter-Reay on his out lap on the last stint there, but cooked it too much going into (Turn) 14, got a bit loose, lost momentum.

“That would have been really the only chance of passing him.”

Other than a serious mistake by Newgarden, the best chance Hunter-Reay had would have been a yellow flag and a restart.

“I was hoping to make it more interesting not for TV, but for fans here,” Hunter-Reay said. “I felt like I could give him a run for his money early in the race. Just never came to fruition.

“Had a yellow come out, he would have been the car ... punching the air like you see on an oval, (and the) car behind is going to have to pop out and pass somewhere.”

But for the ninth time in Indy-car history (IndyCar, Champ Car and CART) and the first since 2000, the race ran caution-free.

Newgarden was relieved. 

A year after being beaten and frustrated by Dixon, he managed to put together a great three days on a track he considers perfect for Indy cars and where he has always felt welcome. So beloved is the 27-year-old Tennessean, a group of fans in Turn 1 built the “Josef New Garden” complete with planted flowers and little Newgarden heads-on-sticks.

Although not easy, the race went about as close to perfectly as he could have imagined.

“It's been an amazing weekend, great fan turnout, incredible atmosphere,” Newgarden said. “I took my time on the cool-down lap because of how packed the place was. I wanted to kind of enjoy it because it was just an amazing atmosphere.”