How is the team which should have won IndyCar’s season opener still win-less?

Pato O’Ward ended up on the losing end of the biggest victory margin at an IndyCar oval race in nearly 13 years last weekend. McLaren’s charismatic racer was left in awe of victor Scott Dixon after Sunday’s Gateway 500.

He summed it up perfectly: “Scott Dixon decided to do a Dixon today.”

Dixon won yet another race through the clever conservation of his fuel and tyres, a hallmark trait for the six-times IndyCar champion. In a race that was expected to require at least four pit stops for fuel and tyres, Dixon needed only three stops and won by over 22 seconds.

“Whenever they told me, ‘he’s going to try to make it without stopping again’, the guy’s going to do it for sure,” O’Ward contemplated after finishing second. “He just does it! He’s just Scott Dixon, you know? I feel like that’s what he’s best known for.

“He’s a six-times champion for a reason. You just don’t run out of talent. You don’t forget it either. The guy is going to be good until he decides to retire.

“He knows how to do it better than anybody, with the great combination that he has – with his team, and car, and everything.”

But while Dixon picked up his second win in a row and finally brought life back to the title battle led by his Chip Ganassi Racing team mate Alex Palou, O’Ward must be wondering how he’s failed to take a victory of his own so far this year. Indeed his McLaren team, which expanded to three full-time cars for 2023, has not claimed a single victory this season.

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O’Ward has come closest, finishing second four times. He’s also had a trio of third places, while his full-time team mates Alexander Rossi and Felix Rosenqvist have claimed one third place each. This could become O’Ward’s highest-scoring season of his IndyCar career, but could also be his first without a win since 2020. In each of the last two seasons he has taken two wins.

It could easily have been different this year. Not least because O’Ward was leading the season-opening race at St Petersburg with four laps to go until a brief plenum fire in his engine caused a loss of power which allowed Marcus Ericsson to slip by. At the time it must have seemed like a temporary setback, but that hasn’t been the case.

Ahead of the 2020 season, McLaren announced a joint entry with Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, which had built itself into an upper-midfield team capable of competing for victories every season by the end of the decade. From that joint entry, McLaren later bought a 75% controlling stake in the team from its founder, Sam Schmidt, and his business partner Ric Peterson.

The same year the team tapped 2018 Indy Lights champion Patricio “Pato” O’Ward, a driver who’d always shown talent yet often had to fight just to keep his fledgling racing career alive, to be its star driver of the future.

The McLaren IndyCar team, in its current guise with O’Ward as the tip of its spear, represents the greatest potential disruption to IndyCar’s established “big three” in the last 20 years. Penske, Ganassi, and Andretti Autosport drivers have won the last 21 IndyCar titles since they defected from CART in the early 2000s. Of the last two dozen runnings of the series’ blue riband Indianapolis 500, 19 have been won by drivers of these three teams.

It would be unfair to expect O’Ward and McLaren to accomplish in four years what Dixon and Ganassi have done in 22 years, of course. But at this stage in the McLaren IndyCar timeline, and with the sheer depth of resources at its disposal as part of the McLaren Group, simply avoiding a win-less season from its three-car operation shouldn’t be a heroic achievement.

O’Ward has held up his end of the bargain at McLaren since 2020: multiple wins, poles and podiums, a runner-up finish at the Indy 500, and a third-place championship finish in 2021 in a year where he was leading the points table with three races to go. The Mexican has a style of driving which oozes raw speed and flair, and a genuine connection with the people of his homeland that make him one of the most popular drivers in the series.

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This year has contained multitudes for O’Ward. He began it unlucky not to have won back-to-back races in St. Petersburg and then at the Texas oval. He’s finished in the top ten in the last eight races, he’s been the series’ joint-best qualifier and has more podiums than anyone besides runaway points leader Palou. He sits fourth in the standings but with a chance to be championship runner-up.

But that run of top tens came after a mid-spring swoon punctuated by unnecessary crashes in Long Beach (where he incurred Dixon’s wrath), Detroit and in the Indy 500, all of which were tinged by desperation on O’Ward’s behalf. It’s the reason why he dropped out of title contention as spring turned to summer and Palou kicked on the afterburners.

O’Ward has been very good in 2023 but has still left fans wanting a bit more. Which is still better than what has been achieved by Rosenqvist and newcomer Rossi. Rosenqvist has already staved off the threat of losing his job once already, and he’s been quick at times this year – but he’s been very unlucky, less consistent – and let a golden Indy 500 opportunity of his own slip away. He may still be on borrowed time at McLaren.

Rossi has come in and regularly run inside the top five and top ten this year, but the expectations will be higher in the near future for a past Indy 500 winner and multi-time title contender – he wouldn’t have left Andretti Autosport for McLaren just to be the ‘floor guy’.

McLaren have bolstered their IndyCar team with a slew of top hires, and when they lost team president Taylor Kiel this off-season, they snagged former Penske engineer Gavin Ward as his replacement. McLaren were ready to build a new, dedicated IndyCar shop of their own – before deciding on moving into the old Andretti Autosport headquarters in 2025, which will still give them a new space that can accommodate all of the team’s lofty ambitions for the long-term future.

That future won’t include Palou, who spurned McLaren recently in favour of either staying with a more proven powerhouse in Ganassi or potentially chasing the F1 dream with someone else.

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To steer clear of hyperbole: A win-less 2023 season wouldn’t come close to the humiliation of McLaren missing the Indy 500 in 2019 as a one-off entrant. But the talent, resources, and ambition this team has brings with it raised standards.

While McLaren had at least three, if not four drivers capable of winning the 500 this year (including the retiring Tony Kanaan), Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing had three of their cars fighting just to qualify for the race. By Toronto, RLLR had a first win in three years while McLaren still haven’t won a race since July 2022. They’ve arguably leapt over Andretti Autosport in the IndyCar hierarchy already, but that appears to be more the result of Andretti slumping than McLaren taking a great leap forward, with Ganassi and Penske pulling further ahead.

Two chances remain for McLaren to win an IndyCar race this year, with the final two rounds taking place in the next two weeks. And just like the past three seasons, O’Ward will be McLaren’s leading man in the championship yet again when all is said and done – with many, many years ahead of him to succeed in the sport.

But the modest progress McLaren has made this year surely falls short of what this bold, ambitious team and its beloved superstar driver envisaged in 2023.

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