Winners and Losers: Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio
- Morgan Holiday
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
Arrow McLaren took their first 1-2 finish in an IndyCar race in the Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio this past weekend.
It was a weekend filled with more off-track rumours than on-track action, though the lack of cautions in the race meant there was an awful lot of racing. DIVEBOMB takes a look at the winners and losers coming out of IndyCar’s busy weekend in Ohio.
Winner - Arrow McLaren
Arrow McLaren was the talk of the town coming into this weekend for more than one reason. They dominated silly season news as Scott Dixon announced he was leaving Chip Ganassi Racing for a rumoured spot at McLaren, and the team was rumoured to be looking at bringing back the most recent Indy 500 champion Felix Rosenqvist as well.
This speculated (but now official) lineup left McLaren’s best performing driver, Christian Lundgaard, out of a seat for 2027. Talk throughout the Mid-Ohio weekend also centered around Lundgaard’s performance as the top McLaren driver and O’Ward’s lack of podiums to date.
Less shockingly but still relevant news, Nolan Siegel was also looking to be out of a seat for next year. Coming into Mid-Ohio, Siegel only had one top 10 finish to his name in the 2026 season, a 10th place finish at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course.
With all the rumours and discussion swirling around the team as the weekend approached, McLaren needed a good result now more than ever, especially for the one driver they planned on retaining for 2027, O’Ward. And fortunately, they pulled off their best team result of the season as Lundgaard secured pole ahead of O’Ward in qualifying and O’Ward took his first win of the season on Saturday.
Lundgaard settled for second place after a mistake on Lap 42 allowed O’Ward the gap he needed to make the move for the lead. Siegel had a quietly solid drive to move up from 15th to 10th, his second top 10 of the year, marking the first race this year where all three drivers finished in the top 10.
McLaren may be under fire in the public eye for choosing to drop Lundgaard for next year, but Mid-Ohio provided them a moment to silence critics and make a statement that they’re here to succeed in IndyCar.
Winner - Josef Newgarden
Consistency hasn’t exactly been the name of Newgarden’s game this season, as the Team Penske driver has mostly had very good results or very bad results. And even relatively good results have been harder for Newgarden to pull off as he nurses a foot injury from the Indy 500 back in May (though that didn’t stop him from taking his second race win of the season at Gateway a month ago).
What Newgarden needs more than another win or a podium is to get some consistently solid results in over the next few races, something he managed to pull off at Mid-Ohio. It wasn’t a stunning weekend for Newgarden by any means, he both qualified and finished ninth in a grueling 90 lap race in the heat with no cautions. But for the driver sitting sixth in the championship currently, stunning isn’t necessarily what he should have been going for.
It’s been a rough year or so for Newgarden, who finished 12th in last year’s championship after his worst season in over 10 years. He’s been working his way back to the front despite his injury and other issues, and he came into the weekend off the back of a 22nd place finish at Road America where he finished last of the running drivers, so it’s fair to say that a solid ninth place finish is exactly what Newgarden needed at Mid-Ohio.
Winner - Kyle Kirkwood
Yep, believe it or not, this season’s edition of the Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio was the first time that Kirkwood finished on the podium at a road course in his IndyCar career.
Kirkwood came into IndyCar with a 62% win rate in his entire Road to Indy career (31 wins in 50 races throughout three categories) and only finished off the podium 12 times. Since joining IndyCar in 2022, he’s won six races (five street tracks and one oval) and has 10 total podiums to date. But up until this weekend, he shockingly hadn’t finished in the top three on a road course.
Kirkwood is no stranger to the podium at Mid-Ohio, he’s won there more times than not throughout his junior career. But his best finish at the track in IndyCar was eighth before this weekend, and it wasn’t looking like that was going to change after Saturday when he qualified 10th.
According to Kirkwood after the race, it was pit strategy and a few well-timed overtakes that allowed him to move forward seven places to third by the end of the race. Certainly he had no cautions to assist him in an all-green race, and it was a hard-fought race to the front for Kirkwood to secure his first road course podium in IndyCar.
As a cherry on top of a great weekend for the Andretti driver, he moved back into second place in the title fight over David Malukas. 56 points now sit between him and Álex Palou in the championship.
Loser - Chip Ganassi Racing
Speaking of Palou, Mid-Ohio was a relatively anonymous weekend for the driver looking to run away with his fourth consecutive championship. Last year at Mid-Ohio, Palou was 93 points ahead of the rest of the field. Coming into Mid-Ohio in 2026, he was only 60 points ahead. Leaving the track after this past weekend, he’s now “just” 56 points ahead of Kirkwood in the standings.
Now, 56 points is still a solid margin, it’s over a race win’s worth of points and it’s not likely that Palou will have many more weekends like this over the rest of the season. But Palou missed out on the Fast 6 and only qualified eighth, and in the race was only able to improve to fifth. It’s not time to doom and gloom for Palou fans, he could probably finish fifth in most of the races for the rest of the year and still take the title, but it was an odd off-weekend for the reigning champ, and he’s not the only Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR) driver that struggled this weekend.
Dixon shocked the racing world earlier in the week by announcing that he would be moving on from his 25 year relationship with CGR after 2026. It might’ve been nice for the 46 year-old driver to make a strong statement on the track after the news, but he qualified 23rd and finished 17th, marking his fifth consecutive race finishing outside the top 10. That’s not to say that Dixon doesn’t still have it or anything, but a good result might’ve been nice.
The final driver in the CGR roster, Kyffin Simpson, qualified 20th and finished 15th, officially making Mid-Ohio a weekend to forget for the whole team.
Loser - Marcus Armstrong
It’s a second consecutive weekend in the loser column for Armstrong, who has had his worst back-to-back results of the season in Road America and Mid-Ohio. But the feeling of these two weekends is vastly different, and he’s on this list for a different reason this time around.
In Road America, Armstrong was leading the race with four laps to go and was on track to take his maiden IndyCar victory when an engine issue forced him to retire from the race, granting the win to Lundgaard. It was a devastating end to what would have been a deserving win for the Meyer Shank Racing (MSR) driver.
Ahead of the weekend at Mid-Ohio, MSR announced that they’d extended Armstrong’s contract for another two years, locking him in at a team where he’s done well for himself the past few one and a half seasons. Plus, with Rosenqvist leaving the team in 2027, he’ll slot nicely into the number one position at the team. It was good news for Armstrong and the team heading into Mid-Ohio, but the race weekend wasn’t the comeback they would have wanted from his Road America heartbreak.
He qualified 24th, second to last overall, which was the big disappointment of the weekend. In the race he picked up the award that drivers in the loser column often receive, the biggest mover award. Armstrong moved up 10 places in the race for a 14th place finish, which makes you wonder what he could have done if he had started higher up the grid.
14th doesn’t sound too bad for a midfield driver, but it’s Armstrong’s third worst result of the season. On a weekend where he would have been hoping for a strong redemption, it wasn’t an ideal result for Armstrong or MSR.
Loser - Scott McLaughlin
McLaughlin is going in the loser column for this weekend, not necessarily because he had a bad result (though it wasn’t great), but because he had a pretty miserable race physically.
The Team Penske driver qualified 17th, but started down in 23rd after a grid penalty for an un-approved engine change. He then came through in the race to finish 16th, up seven places from where he started. Not great, but could be worse, right?
For McLaughlin, it was worse. According to the New Zealander, his cool suit failed on Lap 3, meaning he spent the majority of the race without its assistance to beat the heat. Sunday was the warmest of the three days drivers were on track for, but with track temperatures still in the 90s for a race where drivers didn’t get the benefit of a caution to take a break and slow down a bit, it was a pretty miserable experience for McLaughlin.
Honestly, the fact that he came through to 16th in those conditions is pretty impressive, but the fact that he had to go through it means he’ll be walking away from Mid-Ohio relieved that the whole ordeal is over.
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