- Six-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon is leaving Chip Ganassi Racing after 25 years, ending the most decorated driver-team partnership in the series’ modern history.
- Dixon will join Arrow McLaren for the 2027 season alongside 2026 Indianapolis 500 winner Felix Rosenqvist, who called leaving Meyer Shank Racing the hardest decision of his career.
- Both drivers turned down comfortable, competitive situations for uncertainty, with Dixon admitting the decision kept him awake at night before he told Chip Ganassi himself.
Twenty-Five Years, Fifty-Eight Wins, and One Restless Question
Scott Dixon has spent almost his entire adult life at Chip Ganassi Racing. He arrived in 2002 as a 21-year-old New Zealander with promise but no guarantees, and over the next 25 years he turned that promise into six IndyCar Series championships, a 2008 Indianapolis 500 win, and 58 of his 59 career victories, a number so lopsided toward one team that it borders on statistically absurd. Only once in his entire career has Dixon won a race in another car. Everything else came in Ganassi colors.
That run ends after this season. Dixon, 45, is set to join Arrow McLaren for 2027, according to reporting from ESPN’s Marshall Pruett, a move that closes the most productive driver and team partnership in modern IndyCar history. He will be joined at McLaren by Felix Rosenqvist, the 2026 Indianapolis 500 winner, who is leaving Meyer Shank Racing after three seasons. Christian Lundgaard and Nolan Siegel, the two drivers Dixon and Rosenqvist are replacing, will lose their Arrow McLaren seats.
“It Kept Me Up at Night”
Dixon did not describe the decision as one driven by dissatisfaction. He described it as something closer to an itch he could no longer ignore. Speaking on “SPEED with Harvick and Buxton,” he described the internal debate that preceded his choice to leave the only professional home he has known in America.
“I thought a lot about the situation that I was in, what the future really holds, there were a lot of things that kind of kept me up at night, and a lot of it was actually, ‘Do I finish my career without trying anything else?'” Dixon said. “The one thing that kept kind of nagging at me was, ‘Should I try a different team, be with a different environment?’ Don’t get me wrong. I love Chip. He’s one of my best friends. Trust me, it was an extremely tough conversation that we had a couple of times, just about the possibility and what it would look like and where and when it would kind of happen. Ultimately, it came down to I need to try something different for right now.”
According to reporting on the move, Dixon told Chip Ganassi directly in a meeting that he planned to leave, and Ganassi Racing confirmed Dixon would depart after 2026 following his decision to turn down a multiyear offer to stay. For a driver whose entire American racing identity was built inside that shop, walking into that conversation could not have been simple, no matter how warmly the two men have described their friendship afterward.
A New Zealander’s Pull Toward the McLaren Name
Part of what makes the move so much bigger than a simple driver swap is the symbolism attached to the McLaren name itself. Bruce McLaren, the team’s founder, was also a New Zealander, and Dixon has spoken openly about what racing for that organization means to him on a level that goes beyond contracts and car performance.
“I’ve always been a Bruce McLaren fan, a fellow Kiwi, that whole situation, especially coming from New Zealand, even talking to my dad about Bruce and when he watched him, and for me straight up I’ve just been a big fan of Bruce McLaren and obviously his family,” Dixon said. “When you look at it just from the New Zealand historic value and what it means for people back home, that is an easy sell right there.”
Dixon was careful to note he is not chasing greener grass out of frustration with Ganassi. “There’s the excitement of just really not knowing what the approach is, how they do it, what’s different,” he said. “I’m definitely not going into a situation of thinking that the grass is always greener on the other side. That’s probably not the case. I’m with one of the best teams in the history of INDYCAR racing.” It is a rare thing for a driver to leave an organization while praising it that directly on the way out the door.
Rosenqvist Returns to the Team That Once Let Him Go
Rosenqvist’s move carries its own layer of history. He originally drove for Arrow McLaren from 2021 to 2023, before the team released him when it believed it had a chance to sign Alex Palou, who in the end stayed at Chip Ganassi Racing instead. Rosenqvist landed at Meyer Shank Racing, where this year he delivered the biggest win of his career, edging David Malukas at the finish line to win the 2026 Indianapolis 500 by the closest margin in race history.
He described returning to a team that once moved on from him without bitterness, describing it instead as the nature of the sport. “It wasn’t like we were terrible. We actually had a pretty good second and third year together,” Rosenqvist said of his first stint. “What I said when they made the decision was, ‘OK, it’s business. I wish you guys the best. I really loved working with you, and maybe we’ll see each other in the future.’ That’s literally what I said. Times change, and here we are. So I don’t have any animosity against the past or anything. It is sport. It’s just business. You can’t force anyone to keep you as a driver. It changes all the time. Everything is fluid, and you’ve got to perform, and that’s all you can do.”
Choosing to leave Meyer Shank Racing, the team he had just delivered an Indy 500 win for, was not easy either. “It was not an easy one. It was probably as close to a 50-50 as you can get,” Rosenqvist said. “The long term was the deciding factor for me. It was basically looking three years in the future, trying to make your best bet where you’re going to be, which in this world, I guess for any athlete, you’re going to have to make tough calls and you’re going to have to make your best bet where you’re going to thrive yourself and in the future. It was probably the hardest decision I made. But I’m super happy to be coming back to a team that I know. I know the engineers, I know the leadership.”
A Win Streak in Jeopardy for the First Time in Two Decades
The timing of Dixon’s departure adds a layer of tension to what remains of his final Ganassi season. He has won at least one race in every IndyCar season starting in 2005, one of the sport’s quietly remarkable streaks, and it is currently in jeopardy. Dixon sits ninth in the 2026 standings, without a win, as he closes out a partnership defined almost entirely by winning. Rosenqvist, seventh in points, will close out his Meyer Shank tenure on slightly steadier footing, carrying the Indianapolis 500 trophy with him into the new chapter regardless of how the rest of the year unfolds.
McLaren’s motivation in pursuing both drivers is not difficult to trace. The team has made no secret of its ambition to win the Indianapolis 500, a race that has eluded it in recent IndyCar history in spite of the outfit’s global racing pedigree. Adding a six-time champion with a 2008 Indy 500 win and the reigning Indy 500 champion in the same offseason is as direct a statement of intent as a team can make, and it costs two younger drivers their seats in the process. Lundgaard, who has two wins this year and is McLaren’s highest-ranked driver in the current standings, now finds himself searching for a new home, even with a season that many would call the strongest of the three departing or arriving drivers.
For Ganassi, losing Dixon is not just a roster change. It is the departure of the driver most responsible for the team’s identity over the past quarter century, a rare case of a superstar leaving with no feud, no budget dispute and no lack of results behind it. After 25 years of near-total success in one place, he simply wanted to find out what he did not yet know about himself as a driver. Whether that curiosity pays off at McLaren will not be answered this season, or perhaps even next. But the conversation that got him there, the one he admits kept him up at night, has already reshaped IndyCar’s silly season heading into 2027.
