McLaughlin’s 2026 “redemption” charge & finding home in IndyCar
- Archie O’Reilly
- 20 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Heading into the 2025 season, Scott McLaughlin was fancied by many as the possible IndyCar champion. Off the back of a strong fourth complete campaign, there was a sense that the New Zealander may have been just about the fastest driver in the field.
At the climax of that 2024 season, McLaughlin had finished third in the standings for a second successive season, marking his standing as the lead Team Penske and Chevrolet driver in consecutive years. With two wins coming on ovals, there was a sense he had risen to a consistent and complete IndyCar driver, whereby he was now title-winning material.
As it was, given the preposterous level of Chip Ganassi Racing’s Álex Palou, it was never to be for anyone other than the Spaniard in 2025. But the way the year transpired for McLaughlin, tipped for such great things last season, was fairly disastrous.
After three campaigns inside the top four in the standings, he regressed to a lowly 10th in the championship, a lofty 335 points off Palou’s victorious tally. He failed to finish five of the 17 races, one of which - the biggest of all - he failed to even start after crashing on the warm-up laps of the Indianapolis 500 in a heartbreaker of an exchange.
So after such a freak year, 2026 is a comeback bid for the captain of Penske’s ‘Thirsty 3s’ as he looks to reestablish the level for which he was touted as an inevitable future champion.
“I guess you could say it’s a bit of redemption,” McLaughlin asserted, speaking on IndyCar’s annual media days. “It was a terrible year on my part last year. I felt like we left a lot on the table. Obviously Indy is the first one that comes to mind but there were a lot of things I did.
“Looking back at Nashville, dropped that race from the lead; Detroit, hit Nolan [Siegel when] we were in a good spot. There’s things I’ve got to tidy up, the team has got to tidy up. But we’ve had a really good off-season and the morale on the team is so high and so excited.
“There’s so much ‘want’ to be back to where we want to be consistently and there’s a refreshed focus, which has been really cool to be a part of and see. I’m really, really excited and just ready to go.”
It was a bizarre year for Penske as a whole - their worst this century - in 2025. Their best-placed driver, the now-departed Will Power, was only ninth in the standings, one point ahead of McLaughlin, and Josef Newgarden was 40 points further back in 12th.
The Month of May was particularly unsettling and had wider ramifications amid a bout of leadership changes after a rules violation in Indy 500 qualifying. For McLaughlin, this included the loss of his strategist Kyle Moyer, the organisation’s general manager, alongside the firings of team president Tim Cindric and managing director Ron Ruzewski.
Things increasingly restabilised as the campaign progressed towards its conclusion, but it amounted to a year of somewhat self-induced uncertainty for Penske.
The end of the season saw improvement for McLaughlin, finishing inside the top 10 in the final four rounds, including third-place results in the last two races. The start had been strong too, with top-six finishes in four of the first five races, including a third place and two fourths.
It was the mid-portion where things derailed. An eight-race stretch from the Indy 500 onwards boasted only a solitary top-10 result, culminating in an average race finish of almost 14th across the season.
“All the pieces were put in place last year and we found our mojo towards the end of the year,” McLaughlin assessed. “Personally, I need to be better, for sure. I thought we had genuine pace but it just wasn’t enough.
“I thought my start to the year last year was strong but there’s one guy that won five races in [six] and we somehow needed to combat against that. And that’s ultimately up to us to execute.”
There have been further alterations to McLaughlin’s team ahead of the 2026 season. Chiefly, Raul Prados will be his new race engineer as long-time engineer Ben Bretzman is elevated to the organisation’s engineering manager. There is also a shock return to Penske for Cindric, who will serve as McLaughlin’s strategist - a role he previously held for Newgarden.
There will also be a new spotter in the No.3 camp, as Colton Herta’s veteran spotter David Hunt joins forces with McLaughlin - in place of Adam Fournier - amid the young American’s switch away from IndyCar to the Formula One ladder.
“That’s a nice thing, to have David come into my team,” McLaughlin admitted of the spotter switch. “It was a pretty crazy few days trying to work all that out, including ringing Colton to make sure I could actually take him because I didn’t want to take him off a buddy.
“We sat down for half an hour, an hour [in Daytona], running through what I like, what I don’t like. But I’m also very open to the idea of him bringing his expertise of 20-something years in the sport and trying to learn off someone that’s been in the game for a long time, worked with some amazing drivers and, ultimately, hopefully make my oval programme even stronger.”
In the wider team, there has been a first alteration to the driver lineup since the conclusion of McLaughlin’s first season in 2021, when Simon Pagenaud departed amid a reduction to a three-car operation. And with David Malukas replacing 17-year Penske servant Power, there is a first new driver joining the team since McLaughlin’s own addition five years ago.
“I find it’s going to be pretty seamless,” McLaughlin said of working with Malukas. “The way we’ve had some debriefs post-year - that included David as well - has been pretty seamless. Will obviously brought a lot of experience but, at the same time, we’ve got a guy coming in that’s been in a lot of teams in the recent past, which is I think really important.
“He’s brought a lot to the table already. The camaraderie and stuff, that’s just going to happen naturally. I feel like myself and Josef, we work really well together. Same, I imagine David is going to be pretty easy to work with.”
The addition of 24-year-old Malukas means, at 32 years old, McLaughlin is no longer the youngest driver in the Penske camp. Beyond that, the three-time V8 Supercars champion is certainly no longer a single-seater novice heading into his sixth season in IndyCar.
But despite his experience and standing ever-growing, it does not feel to him as though this off-season signifies a hierarchical change within the Penske driver ranks.
“I feel this is the first time in my career I haven’t been the youngest teammate,” McLaughlin acknowledged. “Look, I’m so focused on what I’m doing right now and improving my craft. I feel like I say this every year but I come into this now where I feel so at home.
“I walk around this place, I know everyone. This is my sixth IndyCar season; I did main-series Supercars in Australia for seven seasons. So I am nearly the same amount of seasons at the top in motorsport in open-wheel [as] in Australia. I feel comfortable where we’re at. I feel like I’ve got experience and I’m using some of that to my best ability.”
McLaughlin sits at 85 starts in IndyCar heading into the campaign, meaning he is on track to reach 100 starts in Washington D.C. in August. Thus far, he has seven victories - though he is without one for the best part of 18 months - and 22 podiums, with 11 poles, a healthy 31 finishes inside the top five and 52 top 10s marking a highly respectable return.
A recent outing in a Chevrolet Corvette GT3 car with DXDT Racing in the Daytona 24 Hours reignited some of the old sensations from his Supercars days. But he is now almost as much an IndyCar driver as anything else from within his illustrious career.
“Jumping in the Corvette at Daytona, a lot of those memories of driving a touring car and traits that you need to be fast in those cars, that came back pretty easily,” explained McLaughlin, who also raced a Corvette in the Suzuka 1000Km last September.
“But now when I get into an Indy car, I just feel very comfortable. I know what my seat feels like; I know what I want out of the car; I know how much front wing to ask for. Just little things that, [85] starts ago, I had absolutely no idea what it was. It’s crazy that it’s come up so fast.
“But at this point, I’m still having just as much fun as I had when I first joined the category in 2021. And that’s a testament to the sport. I have a blast. The people in it are great people. It’s just an awesome environment. I’m excited to keep building.”
Ever since he moved stateside, there has always been talk about how his closed-cockpit background - and his success in that world - would lend itself to a career in NASCAR. When the prospect of a switch to North America was first touted, there was maybe even an expectation that NASCAR would be where McLaughlin would logically land.
But from an impressive first test outing in 2020 onwards, he has embraced and enjoyed the livelihood of IndyCar. And he is now in a position where he would almost certainly not entertain a permanent career in NASCAR, as much as it may suit him.
“I don’t really have much of an interest of going full-time in NASCAR,” he insisted. “I love IndyCar racing and I love being a part of this sport. You never say never, for sure. But at the end of the day, I’m so focused on what I’m doing here in IndyCar that until success happens and until things happen or I’m satisfied, then I don’t really see much on the outside.
“But from a full-time perspective, no. I think if I was Connor Zilisch’s age and something came, maybe would I think about it? Yeah. But now I’m 32 years old and got a kid at home and I don’t know if I’m interested in being away 38 weekends a year.
“That’s just a personal choice. Not that I disagree with any of those guys; it’s just they’ve grown up doing that all the time. But I came over here to IndyCar because I wanted to be a part of the 500 and the lifestyle of racing 18, 20 weekends and I’m excited about that.”
Of course, McLaughlin would not decline the opportunity to try out the series in a one-off type of capacity. But he has found a home in IndyCar and is unflappably driven to rebound and return to his path to becoming a champion in the sport.
“I’m very happy doing what I’m doing right now,” he implored. “Honestly, if [Roger Penske] came to me tomorrow and said: ‘Do you want to do a NASCAR race?’ I would do it because I just love racing. I would race a f**king wheelbarrow if I could. So I don’t care.
“But I love the sport [of IndyCar]. I love being a part of it.”
