David Malukas has a joke he keeps returning to this season, and it is starting to sound less like a joke. “P2 champions,” he said after climbing out of his Team Penske Chevrolet at Road America. “That’s been the story of this season.” He smiled when he said it. He also could not entirely hide that the smile is getting harder to hold.
For the third time in 2026, Malukas crossed an IndyCar finish line in second place. For the third time, he watched someone else take the trophy and the headlines while he gathered another armful of points. The result at the XPEL Grand Prix moved him back to second in the championship standings, comfortably the best run of his career and exactly the kind of season most drivers spend years chasing. And yet the man living it admits the wait for a first win is beginning to weigh on him.
A chaotic race that ended the same familiar way
Road America was bedlam. A string of cautions scrambled strategy and threw the running order into a blender, and at one point Malukas found himself near the front without quite knowing how he had got there. A well-timed stop before a caution for Christian Rasmussen vaulted both him and Marcus Armstrong up the order. From there it became a question of who could survive the chaos.
“It was a crazy race. No, it feels good,” Malukas said. “Honestly, big, big kudos to this team because that race, I mean, obviously everybody saw that, was insane. I didn’t even know what was going on. Next thing you know, we’re P2.” He was quick to share the credit and just as quick to point at his own performance. “Our race pace was missing a little bit there from my side. I have to study and figure out why I’m losing some time in these races. This team carried me here.”
The win went to Christian Lundgaard, who recovered from first-lap contact with Scott Dixon to claim the lead when Armstrong’s engine failed with four laps remaining. That left a one-lap dash to the flag, and it was decided by rubber rather than nerve. Lundgaard had the faster alternate tires. Malukas was stuck on the harder primary compound, and he knew immediately there was nothing to be done.
“The very end one, that was the one where there wasn’t really any chance there,” he said. “You’re going against alternates versus primary tires. It’s not really going to be a competition. You come out of Turn 14, he’s going forwards, I’m going sideways. That’s kind of the result of that.” On equal rubber, he suggested, he might have set Lundgaard up a lap later. He never got the option.
The pressure he is trying to keep contained
Malukas is honest about the tension building inside a season that looks, from the outside, like an unbroken run of success. Asked whether the hunger for a maiden win was growing, he did not pretend otherwise.
“Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely slowly starting to build there. It’s always just a battle of trying to keep that kind of contained,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re still in a championship fight. There’s still a good amount of races to go. You’re still on that edge of, I want to take some risks to go for the win, but at the same time, I need to keep it contained because I don’t want to do something stupid and lose out on some good points.”
That balancing act, between the driver who wants to win today and the driver who wants to be standing at the end of the year, has become the defining theme of his campaign. He is 24 years old, and he knows which instinct comes more naturally. “That younger side of me wants to come out and do some stupid stuff,” he said. “I’m trying to keep it calm.”
If anyone were going to tell him to cool down, it would be his team. They are telling him the opposite. “During the race, they’re saying, full push. Do whatever you need to get around him,” Malukas said. “They’re going full from their side.” The restraint, in other words, is self-imposed. Penske is not asking him to protect points. He is managing that pull himself, which is its own kind of maturity for a driver still early in his career.
How far he has come to get here
To understand why a string of second places feels like a triumph rather than a frustration, you have to remember where Malukas was two years ago. In the spring of 2024 he arrived at the Month of May at Indianapolis without a ride at all. A mountain bike accident had wrecked his left hand and wrist, requiring surgery on February 13 of that year and costing him the start of the season and, ultimately, a coveted seat. His career had stalled at exactly the moment it was supposed to take off.
What followed was a slow rebuild. A full 2025 campaign with AJ Foyt Racing produced a career-best 11th in the standings and, remarkably, a runner-up finish in the Indianapolis 500. That run earned him the call he had been waiting for: a move to Team Penske and the No. 12 Chevrolet for 2026. He wasted no time justifying it, taking his first career pole and first podium at Phoenix early in the year.
Then came the result that still stings. At the 110th Running of the Indianapolis 500, Malukas led entering the final straightaway, the biggest prize in American open-wheel racing within his grasp. Felix Rosenqvist drafted past him before the Yard of Bricks to win by 0.0233 of a second, the closest finish in the history of the race. It was the cruelest possible near-miss, and it captured his season in miniature: fast enough to win, close enough to taste it, denied at the very last moment.
The path to that moment was a long one. Malukas is the son of Henry Malukas, a Chicago businessman and amateur racer whose love of the sport pulled his son into karting young. David climbed the American open-wheel ladder the hard way, through USF2000 and Indy Pro 2000 before a standout Indy NXT campaign that ended as championship runner-up in 2021. He reached IndyCar in 2022 with the modest Dale Coyne Racing team, spent time at Meyer Shank Racing and AJ Foyt Racing, and was passed over more than once before Penske finally handed him the No. 12 seat vacated by Will Power. For a driver who has so often been the underdog, sitting second in the standings for one of the sport’s benchmark organizations is not a position he takes lightly.
A championship fight he cannot afford to throw away
The consolation, if it is one, is that all those runner-up finishes have kept him squarely in a title fight against the most dominant driver of his generation. Alex Palou leads the standings, and Malukas is under no illusions about the level he is chasing. “Palou has obviously been on his A-game,” he said. He name-checked Kyle Kirkwood too, noting that a rare off day for Kirkwood at Road America would almost certainly be followed by a return to the front.
Malukas trimmed his deficit to Palou from 63 points to 37 over a strong Month of May built on consecutive runner-up results at the Sonsio Grand Prix and the Indianapolis 500. With the new habit of late-race cautions reshuffling the field, he sees a path to keep chipping away. “You’ve got to be at the forefront of strategy,” he said. “If we can keep getting some good strategy calls, we can slowly pick away at it. Who knows what will happen in the end?”
That is the quiet ambition underneath the jokes about being a P2 champion. The points position is real, the comeback from 2024 is real, and the pressure he describes is real too. At some point the second places need to become a first, both for his own peace of mind and for a title bid that grows more serious with every race. Malukas left Road America without the win he wanted. He also left it second in the championship, still standing, still in the fight, and still waiting for the afternoon when the chaos finally breaks his way.
Sources:
- https://www.pitdebrief.com/post/malukas-says-pressure-for-first-2026-indycar-win-is-slowly-starting-to-build-after-road-america/
- https://www.indycar.com/Drivers/David-Malukas
- https://www.foxsports.com/stories/motor/indy-500-finish-david-malukas-scott-mclaughlin-felix-rosenqvist
