What clicked for IndyCar runner-up O’Ward in 2025?
- Archie O’Reilly
- Aug 30, 2025
- 7 min read
While the season has been dominated by Álex Palou, the driver-team combination behind the Spaniard in the championship have quietly forged a career year in IndyCar.
Pato O’Ward has locked up a runner-up finish in the 2025 standings with one race to spare, with his Arrow McLaren team guaranteed a double-top-five finish in points for the first time. Should O’Ward finish first or second in Sunday’s finale at the Nashville Superspeedway, he will usurp the points tally with which Palou won the championship last season.
While he has not got an Astor Cup to show for his progress, O’Ward has knitted together a season that could easily have been championship-worthy in another year. His high peaks have remained and many of the previously troublesome troughs have been eliminated.
“It’s been a growing year,” said O’Ward, who is now on a run of three successive top-five championship results. “It’s been a successful year. I know in racing it’s either you win or bust but there’s a lot of value in seeing the growth that I have had this year, that the team has had this year.
“Ultimately, it seemed like there were two championships going on; it was Álex Palou with himself and the rest of the field. There are many ways to see how it went but, all in all, it’s been successful. We’re proud of our efforts and how we keep on getting stronger and stronger.”
O’Ward’s previous-best championship result was third place in 2021, when he was in the fight until being taken out in the finale. But in 2025, a new, more reliable and consistent version of O’Ward has already logged his best-ever points tally in his six-year full-time IndyCar career.
Last season saw him finish fifth in points but with seven race results of 13th or worse. He was credited with three wins and a further three runner-up results as part of his 10 top-10 finishes but was cost by too many individual lapses and team shortcomings.
This year though, with one round remaining, O’Ward has 12 top-seven finishes and only four results outside the top 10. Outside of a mechanical DNF in Portland, his worst finish and only result outside of the top 15 being 17th is a marked improvement.
“I would like to say it’s just a bit of the experience,” he assessed of where the improvement has come from. “Just year after year, trying to learn and really digest the seasons and really seeing: where did we need to get better? Were we making impulsive decisions? Where we should have had a bit more of a cool head.
“You obviously will never have a perfect, perfect season. But you try and get there as much as you can.”
O’Ward currently stands on two wins and a total of six podiums in 2025, with 10 top-five results marking a more consistent achievement of the peaks he has shown ever since his first complete year in the series in 2020.
But coming into the 2025 season, he did not actually have a set results target in mind. His ambitions were more so centred around keeping things clean.
“My goal going into this year was actually completing every single lap,” O’Ward admitted. “I didn’t really have a win objective. I didn’t have really anything. I just wanted to finish every single lap. Sadly, that dream was crushed in Portland.
“But apart from that, at least from my side, I’ve been on that objective and I’m proud I’ve been able to accomplish it, at least up until this point in the season.”
O’Ward is keen to offer credit to his team, for whom he has been the bedrock and leader throughout years of some instability in the outfit’s infancy. This year has been a breakthrough in terms of consistently fighting at the front with multiple cars for the first time.
There remains a chance that new-for-2025 addition Christian Lundgaard can finish third in points to achieve a double championship podium for Arrow McLaren. Outlining the collective step forward, no previous teammate of O’Ward’s had finished better than eighth in points.
There have been many examples of Arrow McLaren making huge strides at tracks they have previously struggled. Equally, their problem-solving during weekends has improved in order to always find performance and maximise the majority of events.
“There’s been a lot of work being done in the off-season and during the season to bring better tools to us drivers to extract more from the race cars or at least open the window a little bit more,” O’Ward explained, “making it a bit more friendly to carry in 250 laps or 110 laps in a street course or something.
“On the technical side, [the team is] having upgrades and new things to try week in, week out and seeing things actually work rather than just having options and not really having any growth in that part.”
The joy of having multiple cars in the game at the head of the field on a regular basis is that if woes strike one driver then another can pick up the pieces for the team. But a lot of the time, O’Ward and Lundgaard - with 11 top-10 finishes of his own this year - have both delivered on the same weekends.
A shared tally of 12 podiums is the team’s most in a single season and, by firing on multiple cylinders, does provide evidence that Arrow McLaren have stepped up in a department where the likes of Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske have excelled in years gone by.
“It’s great,” O’Ward acknowledged. “The more cars you have up there, the better result for everybody, the more motivation there’s naturally going to be.
“There’s obviously different strategies that you can be playing around with. If one car gets hosed by a certain yellow, maybe the other one doesn’t. You always pick and choose. You can always save a weekend at least on one side - or at least that’s what you hope to do.
“The objective is always to have the best weekend with every single car. But in IndyCar racing, sometimes it is a gamble and you never know what’s coming at you.”
Both O’Ward and Lundgaard have admitted to have thrived under one another’s competition, driving themselves and the team on to this new level.
The upturn has all added up to O’Ward and the team breaking plenty of new ground, of course headlined by the championship picture. But O’Ward also had certain ‘curses’ in mind that he was very keen to break heading into the season.
With the big boss, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown, in town, July’s victory in Toronto was a particularly special landmark.
“There’s been a lot of curses, I believe, that have been broken this year,” O’Ward suggested. “One of those being Zak was finally at a race win, which was nice to have, because it just seemed like every time he was there, we just never won. So that sucked but it was nice to get that done and over with this year and having that experience with him.”
In this year of breaking curses, another has been quashed in Nashville with, quite astonishingly, O’Ward’s first oval pole. He dominated Saturday’s session to oust fellow front-row-starter David Malukas by 0.699 mph.
Can he end his best year to date by breaking a final curse of the season by winning from pole for the first time? O’Ward is acutely aware of the fact he is chasing such a feat.
“Checking off boxes, that’s what we like to do,” he said. “I’ve got a big one on the list this weekend… I’ve never won from pole ever, ever, ever. I’m determined to make it happen this weekend. Step one done and super happy with my car.”
There are 225 laps ahead on the 1.33-mile intermediate oval on Sunday to decide whether O’Ward can convert from the best position on the grid for the first time. But whatever happens, his runner-up finish in the championship makes the year a resounding triumph.
“The year has already been a success,” he insisted. “So whether it’s good or bad tomorrow, I don’t think it’s really going to play so much with how I feel about the year because I’m proud of the work that everybody has done.
“It really is all about tomorrow just trying to end on a high. But if something goes wrong, it doesn’t mean that it’s been a bad year. It doesn’t mean that your whole off-season has to be a bad time or something.”
If he can cap the season with his third win of the campaign, he has vowed to take his team to Las Vegas in celebration. A deserved reward for a tireless six-month season.
Then it is back to work and gearing up for 2026, where O’Ward is targeting a continuation of his and the team’s upwards trajectory. Momentum is a real thing, in his eyes, so he desperately wants to be able to shake off any rust and fly out of the blocks at pace next year.
As with every top driver, he is not settling with where he stands. He has two poles, four front-row results and 13 top-10 starts in 17 races but continues to grapple with views that his qualifying form has not been as strong this year. More measured race days have made up for any aggression on that front but, much like Palou, O’Ward wants to merge the two
“I usually pick it up and get into the flow of things during the summer [so] one of my objectives next year is to try and start the season as strong as possible,” O’Ward disclosed. “It also starts in qualifying, just because this year has been the worst year I’ve ever qualified in IndyCar.
“But it’s been the best championship year. The points are awarded on Sunday so who cares where you qualify? But I would love to make my life easier on Sunday and bump those numbers up.”
O’Ward still sees elements of his year as being imperfect and is striving for even more. But the imperfections for himself and the team have been drastically fewer and further between.
Cutting out the glaring inconsistencies and occasional erroneous weekends of years gone by, O’Ward has proven he is absolutely a championship calibre driver. There are extremely strong foundations to build from.
“We want to be in this position next year but even closer to fighting for that championship,” O’Ward vowed. “There’s been many races as well where we were just not where we were supposed to be. We were just back there and really struggling.
“Our bad days are still too bad, I would say, but I think that goes to almost everybody in the grid, apart from the No.10 car. Everybody’s got bad days and bad weekends but it seems like they just seem to have one of those years.
“It made it so much more difficult to keep up and give him a challenge. But it’s been a year of growth in many ways. So I’m proud of that.”
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