O’Ward admits Arrow McLaren may “go backwards to go forwards” in IndyCar
- Archie O’Reilly
- 2m
- 4 min read
Pato O’Ward has conceded his Arrow McLaren team may take a step back before they are able to regularly threaten IndyCar’s benchmark teams in a championship fight amid what he has described as a transformation period for the outfit.
The Mexican driver sits fifth in the standings - six points behind teammate Christian Lundgaard in fourth - after eight races in 2026, having recorded six top-five results without achieving a podium finish. Lundgaard, meanwhile, has three podiums to his name this campaign, including victory on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course last month.
While impressively consistent, O’Ward has not stood on the rostrum since his win on the streets of Toronto in Round 13 of 2025 last July, with 12 races having passed since.
“The consistency pays off very strongly whenever you start racking up some podiums and wins,” he said in a media call this week. “I’d say we’ve done a good amount of what is expected. The standard that you expect from Arrow McLaren and myself is to at least be in the fight in many of these weekends and we have been. We’re just missing that little bit.
“Sometimes when you’re leading a championship, you can take fourth and fifth and keep up the consistency because that’s what’s going to let you breathe. But when you haven’t quite had those bigger hit points days in a positive way, that’s what you need to be searching for.”
After finishing second in the standings last year, albeit with Chip Ganassi Racing’s Álex Palou having secured his fourth career and third successive championship with two races remaining, O’Ward already trails the standings-topping Spaniard by 107 points this season.
There had been an expectation pre-season that, following the team’s best championship result to date - which also included Lundgaard finishing fifth - the gap to the series’ pace-setters would be more significantly closed again this campaign.
“I don’t know, man. I don’t know what it is,” O’Ward conceded of the missing edge. “We’re obviously still searching for that next step that I believe is going to put us right where we want to be in fighting the big dogs like Penske and Ganassi.
“It’s not easy to fight against these guys because they’ve been at the lead ship the last decades and, honestly, forever. We’re fighting up against the best and that’s where we want to put ourselves in. We’re just actively searching for different opportunities.”
Adjustments to the driver lineup and volatility among the team’s leadership have sometimes been familiar at points within the team’s infancy. While there was the continuity of the same three-driver lineup from 2025 to 2026 amid some growing stability, there have still been alterations behind the scenes that may be yet to entirely take force.
“There’s been a lot of changes,” O’Ward explained. “And even if there’s not many changes in your main stand, there are in mechanics and stuff like that. Just having a lot of rotation of people can bring in some random nuances.
“A team is a collaboration effort of a lot of people. It’s not just one person; it’s a collaboration between a lot of different hands, a lot of different eyes. Sometimes it takes some time to gel together and keep gelling together better.”
Another element of transition for the team has been moving from their existing workshop to the newly-renovated, state-of-the-art ‘McLaren Racing Centre’, which while still in the Indianapolis area is almost triple the square footage of their previous base.
The facility, which was occupied by Andretti Global before its renovation, was officially opened in early February - less than a month before the IndyCar season commenced.
“With transformation, you can expect some other areas to be maybe a little bit more trouble for a short term of time,” O’Ward said. “Right now, we are in that transformation, which is why maybe sometimes it can feel a little bit like: ‘Hey, I feel like we’ve gone backwards.’
“Sometimes you’ve got to go backwards in order to go forwards, take a bigger step forward.
“It’s not a lack of effort. I know everyone here is working so hard. I know TK [Tony Kanaan, team principal] is pushing so hard along with Zak [Brown, CEO]. Everybody that’s leading this team is working extremely, extremely hard to give ourselves those opportunities. But we’re also realists and we understand that some things do take time.”
By the eighth-round stage of 2025, O’Ward had scored podium results in half of the races. The final event within that stretch saw him finish runner-up to Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood at World Wide Technology Raceway (WWTR), which IndyCar visits this weekend.
In the nine rounds that followed WWTR last year, O’Ward’s only further podiums were victories at Iowa Speedway and Toronto - neither of which are on this year’s schedule. He did also lead at Portland Raceway, before a mechanical failure ended his race, and Nashville Superspeedway, when he crashed from the head of the field due to a tyre failure.
With 10 races remaining this year, he still holds belief that the gap to the top of the championship can close. But there is an awareness that there is more performance to find.
“We still have plenty of championship to go,” O’Ward said. “This time last year, I was at a bigger deficit to Palou, so this is a move in the right direction. Obviously not giving up on the championship hopes but also being a realist that we need to up our game.
“We’ve just got to maximise every weekend, man. [Palou and CGR] have obviously done a way better job than we have pretty much everywhere. That obviously isn’t going to cut it if we want to have a shot at the championship.
“We need to make sure that we not only are maximising weekends, but when those are maximised weekends, they’ve got to be wins and podiums. Because otherwise, I really do think we have no shot.”
