- Christian Lundgaard will drive the No. 9 PNC Bank Honda for Chip Ganassi Racing in 2027, the number Scott Dixon carried to six championships and 58 of his 59 career wins.
- The 25-year-old Dane learned Arrow McLaren would not renew his contract just hours before the news became public, then turned his final season there into a career-best third-place points finish.
- Lundgaard will line up alongside five-time champion Alex Palou at Ganassi, saying his goal is simple: get a CGR car back to Victory Lane.
Christian Lundgaard found out his own racing future had ended with one phone call, hours before anyone else knew. “I found out a couple of hours before the media found out,” he said of the morning in early July when Arrow McLaren told him the team would not bring him back for 2027. He had just finished the best IndyCar season of his career.
Three months later, Lundgaard has a new home, and it comes with a number that means more than almost any other in American open-wheel racing. Chip Ganassi Racing confirmed in late September that the 25-year-old Dane will drive the No. 9 PNC Bank Honda in 2027, the car Scott Dixon piloted to six IndyCar championships, 58 of his 59 career victories, and a win at the 2008 Indianapolis 500 across 24 full seasons with the team.
A Car Nobody Could Simply Inherit
Dixon’s exit left a hole that Chip Ganassi says he did not plan to fill in a hurry. “Rushing was never the plan,” the team said, after it spent weeks working through its options following Dixon’s own move across the paddock to Arrow McLaren, where he will partner Pato O’Ward. When Ganassi settled on Lundgaard, he explained the decision in terms of opportunity more than a resume alone. “When’s the last time the guy that’s finished third in the points was available?” Ganassi said.
That third-place finish came with Arrow McLaren, where Lundgaard spent two full seasons and turned 2026 into his team’s highest point-scoring season, ahead of teammates with longer American open-wheel careers. He won two races, stood on the podium 13 times, and finished in the top five on 14 occasions. Oval racing, long seen as his weak point after he arrived from Formula 2, kept improving every year: his average oval finish dropped from 18.4 as a rookie to 17.6, then 15.3, then 13.2, then 10.8 in his fifth season. At the Milwaukee doubleheader in 2026, he finished third in one race, his first oval top five, and sixth in the other. When reporters raised concerns about his oval pace once the Ganassi move became public, Ganassi brushed past it. “I didn’t see any oval questions at Milwaukee,” he said.
None of that kept Arrow McLaren from moving on. The team’s decision, which Lundgaard learned of in early July, pointed to oval performance as one factor even as his results on ovals had been climbing year over year. He has said the news left him disappointed and confused, and he kept a low profile in the weeks that followed rather than address it in public.
From Rahal’s Rookie to Ganassi’s Newest Driver
Lundgaard’s road to this seat has not run in a straight line. He joined Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing for his first IndyCar race just weeks after turning 20, arriving from a junior career built on strong Formula 2 results in Europe. Arrow McLaren signed him away from RLL, and his two seasons there included public friction with the team that he says shaped him. “I need to learn as much as possible and do the simple things right,” he said of his approach heading into the Ganassi move, a line that doubles as a description of how he talks about his own growth as a driver.
He describes himself in plain terms: a simple guy, the kind of driver who would take spaghetti Bolognese over a formal dinner. Ganassi says that description shaped his thinking in the signing process. He focused on Lundgaard’s character more than technical setup notes, and introduced him early to PNC Bank, the team’s primary sponsor, as part of bringing him into the organization. It is a deliberately unglamorous way to welcome a driver who will race in the sport’s most storied seat, and Lundgaard appears to prefer it that way. He has said more than once that he does not want to be treated as a replacement act, only as the next driver assigned a number with a long memory attached to it.
Learning From, and Trying to Beat, a Five-Time Champion
Lundgaard’s new teammate is Alex Palou, who has won five championships, the last four in a row. Lundgaard says he wants to learn from Palou, then beat him. It sounds like a tall order. Palou has finished no worse than third in the championship in every season from 2022 onward, and Ganassi’s cars under his direction have been the class of the field. But Lundgaard has pushed a seasoned teammate before: his time at Arrow McLaren included stretches when he outscored drivers who had been racing IndyCar far longer than he had, and his third-place points finish in 2026 beat every Arrow McLaren teammate he shared a garage with.
He is realistic about what replacing Dixon means and does not claim he can copy it. Nobody can. Dixon’s 58 wins in the No. 9 make up close to a third of every win Chip Ganassi Racing has recorded in IndyCar’s modern era, and his six championships make him the winningest active driver in the series by a wide margin. Lundgaard’s answer is not to chase Dixon’s shadow but to set a narrower target of his own. “The main objective is to get a CGR car to Victory Lane,” he said, a goal stated without the number nine attached, without a championship count attached, just the simplest version of what a Ganassi car is built to do.
Betting on a Team’s Culture Over Its Spec Sheet
Lundgaard has said he chose Ganassi in part for what the team stands for rather than for lap-time promises, pointing to its reputation for keeping things uncomplicated inside the garage. He says he believes Chip Ganassi Racing will solve IndyCar’s new car first when the 2028 formula arrives, a confidence that reflects the team’s recent run as much as anything Lundgaard himself has done so far.
The timing lines up in an odd way with Dixon’s own path. The 45-year-old New Zealander is not retiring. He is crossing the paddock to join forces with O’Ward at Arrow McLaren, the very team that decided weeks earlier it no longer needed Lundgaard. The two moves, Dixon out of Ganassi and into Arrow McLaren, Lundgaard out of Arrow McLaren and into Ganassi, happened inside the same silly season and swapped the two drivers’ positions on the IndyCar grid.
What Comes Next
Lundgaard will spend the rest of 2026 finishing his final year with Arrow McLaren before the full-time move for 2027. He will not inherit Dixon’s engineers automatically, and he will go through the same integration process any new driver faces at a team built on institutional memory, repeatable processes, and, in Palou’s case, four straight titles. Ganassi’s approach, by his own description, will not rush that process either.
For a driver who learned his own team no longer wanted him only hours before it became public knowledge, the past three months have moved fast. Lundgaard goes from a locker room that cut him loose partly over oval concerns to a seat in the most decorated car in IndyCar history, working for an owner who picked him for one plain reason: as Ganassi put it, nobody finishes third in the championship and stays on the open market for long.
That reasoning says as much about Ganassi’s team as it does about Lundgaard. A roster builder who could afford to wait weeks after losing a six-time champion chose speed of decision over comfort of familiarity, then handed the keys to a driver still smarting from a rejection he never saw coming. Palou, for his part, has welcomed the signing publicly and says he expects Lundgaard to push him from the moment testing begins. For a driver who spent the summer wondering where his career was headed, arriving at a team that expects to be challenged by him, rather than merely accommodating him, could turn out to be the best outcome of a silly season that briefly left him without a seat at all.
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