“Never stopped believing” - How McLaughlin ended his two-year IndyCar win drought
- Archie O’Reilly
- 1 hour ago
- 10 min read
With every question on the matter, the next became that little more irksome. He may not have outwardly admitted as such, but having to constantly dwell on failing to do what he has built a career doing was always going to be irritating.
“I don’t care,” he rebutted, speaking within half-an-hour of finishing runner-up at the Milwaukee Mile. “Like, I don’t. I just want to win. Don’t care. Just want to drive hard.”
With a shake of his head, not necessarily in a tense manner but certainly forthrightly, Scott McLaughlin dismissed the latest invitation to reflect on a winless run in IndyCar that would tick over to two years in two days’ time. In a similarly stern vein, later that same day, he confronted Scott Dixon on pit lane after, as a backmarker, his idolised compatriot had inadvertently denied him a second podium finish of a bizarre two-race day in Milwaukee.
McLaughlin had not endured a drought greater than this 35-race barren spell - dating back to Milwaukee Race 2 on 1st September 2024 - since a run from late 2014 to early 2016 while racing in V8 Supercars, before he became a champion for the first of three times in 2018.
After moving to IndyCar full-time in 2021, McLaughlin found his feet quickly, entering the winners’ circle by the opening round of his sophomore season. That was the first of seven victories in the next three years for an open-wheel novice who finished fourth in points in only his second season in 2022 and a team-leading third place the following two seasons.
Up against championship-winning veterans Josef Newgarden and Will Power at Team Penske, McLaughlin was holding his own and beating two of the series’ modern greats. But somehow, after a three-win, five-pole campaign in 2024, which left him in the argument of being the fastest driver in IndyCar at that point, he lost his way a little.
The 2025 season was Penske’s collective worst this century, with McLaughlin languishing 10th in the standings at season’s end, with only three podiums - two of which came in the final two rounds - compared to his eight rostrums the year prior. He had also suffered the crushing low of crashing out on the pre-race pace laps at the Indianapolis 500.
“It’s a bit of redemption, in some ways,” he outlined ahead of the 2026 season. But even that charge spluttered a little in its formative stages - at least after a strong initial burst with pole and second place in the season-opening race on the streets of St. Petersburg.
Penske had been rocked in 2025 by a bout of changes to their leadership team during the Indy 500 campaign, which were somewhat addressed in the ensuing months but left the team in need of restabilising during the off-season. A reshuffling most significantly left McLaughlin with a new engineer, as Raul Prados took over from the promoted Ben Bretzman, who had been on McLaughlin’s stand for four years.
Beyond that, fired team president Tim Cindric returned to Penske as McLaughlin’s strategist, with previous strategist Kyle Moyer having been axed alongside Cindric. The team’s new technical director, David Faustino, also shifted to McLaughlin’s No.3 stand from the No.12 car, having worked with Power for 16 seasons before the Australian’s own exit pre-2026.
“It was a lot of changes,” admitted current team president Jonathan Diuguid. “It’s kind of an all-star team. The people moving in those positions were very experienced, with Tim on the radio, Raul, Dave Faustino, Malcolm [Finch] running the engineering of the car. They’re all extremely experienced guys who know how to win.
“Raul, I can tell you, he lives it. He never sleeps. I’m sure Scott has had to mute his phone at 3:00 in the morning sometimes. He’s relentless.”
But regardless of individuals’ pedigree or drive, the number of changes were bound to take some time to gel and a synergy was never going to be built immediately. In the seven rounds after the strong start to 2026 in St. Pete, McLaughlin only finished in the top 10 three more times, albeit headlined by a personal-best third in the Indy 500.
Prados had not worked full-time in IndyCar since his stint with AJ Foyt Racing between 2012 and 2015, having quickly transitioned to a role on Penske’s sportscar programme after joining the team in 2016. Getting readjusted to IndyCar “terminology” was not an instant process, nor was McLaughlin and Prados learning one another’s preferences.
“You always question yourself: are you making the right decisions when the results aren’t coming?” reflected Diuguid of Penske’s raft of alterations. But late in this season for McLaughlin, form has picked up markedly.
Above anything, that owes to the chemistry increasingly forged between McLaughlin, Prados and company throughout the season. When McLaughlin won pole position at Laguna Seca on Sunday - his first P1 Award on a road course since Barber in April 2024 - he dedicated the success to Prados, considering Penske’s shortcomings on road courses in recent times.
“Road courses was the biggest deficit we identified,” Diuguid detailed. A test at Mid-Ohio in late June, though, was critical in establishing a direction that had been lacking.
For McLaughlin to have denied Álex Palou, the newly-crowned five-time champion and eight-time polesitter in 2026 who earmarks Laguna Seca as his best track, a third straight Grand Prix of Monterey pole was an achievement in itself. He had shared P1 Award honours with Palou for the Milwaukee doubleheader the week prior but he was decidedly more pumped-up by the latest coup.
Within 24 hours, it would mean little more than having the best track position for the last attempt at preventing two whole seasons winless. But the display that ensued from pole on Sunday was equally rampant - and through its dominance familiar to the form that left McLaughlin in the conversation as a genuine title contender at the end of 2024.
His start to the race was commanding, building a healthy buffer to Palou and fending off any attempted undercut during the first pit cycle. As a rare strategic mishap left Palou confined to an extra pit stop, McLaughlin’s stranglehold only strengthened.
Towards the end of the third stint, though, Kyle Kirkwood emerged as a possible threat to a victory that had seldom looked in doubt, the Andretti Global driver pressing to within two seconds of McLaughlin either side of the final round of pit stops. But Kirkwood was never going to take undue risks with status as vice champion on the line.
Plus, McLaughlin knew if he could survive the out-lap and early stages of the final stint, Kirkwood’s deficit on the faster-wearing alternate tyres would prove telling. On the harder primary compound, McLaughlin himself battled a vibration during the closing portion of the race, but having targeted managing a gap of two seconds to Kirkwood as not to overpush, his lead never dipped below one second.
There was no panic from McLaughlin, even though as the laps ticked down, given the end of his winless run was on the line, one could have forgiven fraughtness inside the cockpit.
“It’s just control what I can control,” he said of his approach. “I can’t control if a yellow comes out. We had a good [pit] exchange; I came out in the lead. That was just a matter of then bringing up the tyre nice, not using it too hard, making sure we had something to play with in case the yellow came out. For me, it was just control the gap and do what I need to do.”
The jeopardy of a caution - or any other possible adversity - never materialised. For the first time in 735 days, McLaughlin was first to the chequered flag, leading 87 of the 95 laps and beating Kirkwood to victory by 1.3739 seconds.
He was not to be drawn on the toll of the drought while he was enduring it, but the eruptive nature of McLaughlin’s celebrations conveyed all that needed to be known. Crossing the finish line was quickly greeted by a sequence of quickfire air-punches, before he ended his in-lap with multiple installments of donuts, alongside champion Palou, on the frontstretch.
It was the first opportunity McLaughlin had been granted to attempt donuts since moving to IndyCar. Was he rusty? He certainly believed so.
“It [was] terrible,” he laughed. “I’ve been waiting six years to do that. My initial one I wanted to park it against the fence and do it. I lost it in the smoke. I was too close to the wall when the smoke cleared. It sucked. Look, I was doing donuts… that’s all I can ask for.”
This was a win befitting of such emphatic celebration. It was the complete weekend from McLaughlin, from pace in practice, to his pole, to a clinically controlled race. A thorough belief and freedom emanated from his driving again, culminating in a brutally authoritative performance entirely reminiscent of his best days, which grew absent in the past two years.
He was greeted with a whirlwind of emotions as he returned to pit lane and climbed atop his car to explode with jubilation once more. Much of that came from his knowledge of the effort that had gone into restoring such winning fortunes, as well as the extra meaning of this being his first victory since the birth of his daughter, Lucy, post-season in 2024.
Whether she was entirely aware of the event remains to be seen - McLaughlin suggests not - but that does not make his first win as a father any less special.
“I’m very excited,” McLaughlin reacted. “I’ve been wanting to win for Lucy so much. That’s the main thing. [Emotions are] a bit of everything, to be honest. I’d say a little bit of relief because I’ve been promising Lucy a long time a race win. She has no idea. She gave me nothing on FaceTime before. [But] that’s part of it.
“It’s cool to just have a good weekend. We were top five every session. Just from the jump, felt like we had really good speed. [It’s] a culmination of hard work. Always felt Raul was my guy. We’ve been having that good energy, that feeling that we could do this. But it was just about putting the parts together. Today was fantastic.
“We’ve had poles; haven’t quite completed the races. You could see that it was there. Really proud to get our first win together on a road course, where the last couple years we probably struggled at the most. What a great way to end the season.”
McLaughlin and his No.3 team have certainly been building towards this moment. Before Laguna Seca, from Round 9 onwards, his streaky start to the season had given way to seven top-10 finishes in nine races. The latest of the two errant results, in Washington D.C., had come after crashing in a bid to make an overtake for the race lead.
Maybe McLaughlin’s audacious attempt at passing Kirkwood on that occasion hinted at a creeping desperation to return to Victory Lane. But his composure all Sunday at Laguna Seca could not have been more stark in its opposition to that.
“For us to get that success, we never stopped believing,” McLaughlin rallied. “We knew we could do it. It was a matter of putting it together and [getting] the feeling that I needed to go fast and trust the car. Really hit on that this weekend but even the last couple events. We’ve been on a bit of roll. The whole No.3 stand is fantastic.”
With all now said and done, it has been an improved year for Penske. David Malukas often starred in his first season with the team, finishing as the outfit’s best-placed driver in fifth in the standings, 32 points ahead of McLaughlin in an improved sixth place. Newgarden’s eighth place still beats the team’s best finish of ninth with Power last year.
They leave the season with three wins and a feeling they are “definitely heading in the right direction”, as Diuguid assesses. But while Newgarden’s pair of oval wins were satisfying, ending the campaign with a victory to evidence rectification of the team’s biggest weakness for several seasons elicits an extra buoyant feeling heading into the long off-season.
“We’ll definitely celebrate this win,” Diuguid said. “It’s an important one for the team. It goes to show we’re on the right track and have a good foundation to build on. [Now] we’ll start to focus on the details to have all cars in the top five and be able to fight for a championship.”
McLaughlin himself reaffirmed that any celebrations will promptly give way to trying to learn and lay foundations from the win, for he has bigger ambitions than just that sole success.
“I don’t think we were that great across the stints,” he was already analysing in the immediate aftermath of the race. “We need to figure out why we’re using the rear tyres a little bit more than the No.27 there. I’m very happy but there’s work to be done.”
After his pole at Laguna Seca, McLaughlin lamented his inability to knit together a complete campaign. Going into the off-season, that thought is at the forefront of his mind. Because Palou has shown with his four-year grasp on the title that anyone who could provide a challenge can scarcely afford any glaring weaknesses or any number of write-off weekends.
That is the model McLaughlin is striving to emulate, which he had gone some way to nailing in 2024, ahead of his attempt to mount a title challenge next season.
“It’s nice to win a race here or there but I want to be competing week in, week out. That’s the only way to win a championship,” he insisted on Saturday. “I’m too inconsistent. I need to be more consistent throughout the whole season if I’m going to compete with these guys. I have the speed. I don’t doubt that by any means. I know I can win races. I’ve done it before.
“If I want to win a championship, which is the ultimate goal, I need to be better in the mid-season and consistent throughout the whole season.”
In any case, McLaughlin is being sent into another off-season of digging deep on the best note possible. As well as the tangible reward of silverware, he ends the campaign with the sense that everything is really clicking with his revamped No.3 ‘Thirsty 3s’ squad and that he is being given the platform to flourish again on-track. But he will not settle.
“To have success is fantastic. Is it as much success as we want? No. We continue as we always are talking about: effort equals results. We will keep working.”
But should he put his question-quelling and doubt-busting Laguna Seca level together consistently, after two years spent searching, McLaughlin will be an IndyCar force to be reckoned with again in 2027.
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