“We’re Just Cursed”
David Malukas had the win. He led 93 laps at the Milwaukee Mile, took the point on an off-strategy pit stop, and looked set to close out the first victory of his IndyCar career with 19 laps left. Then the green flag waved on a restart, his No. 12 Chevrolet stumbled off the line, and Pato O’Ward’s Arrow McLaren swept past into a lead it never gave back. Malukas finished second, his sixth career runner-up, and the words came out raw in the moment.
“The team did such a good job. I mean, that car was unreal. It was already so good in race one, and then they worked on it and got it to where it needed to be for this race. I mean, we were so fast, faster than the rest, and yeah, just got let down on that restart,” Malukas said. He called it a curse on the No. 12 team.
What killed the restart was a plenum issue, a Chevrolet-specific problem where fuel and air ignite too early in the engine’s intake system. The fix requires the driver to lift off the throttle and let the misfire clear, costing precious speed at the exact moment Malukas needed all of it. He is not the first to lose a race to it. Six different Chevrolet cars suffered the same failure in 2024 Indy 500 qualifying, a list that included O’Ward himself and two-time Cup champion Kyle Larson, forcing GM vice president Jim Campbell to publicly promise an overnight fix. That the same manufacturer issue resurfaced two years later, in the exact moment Malukas needed a clean restart to close out his first win, is what made the frustration land so hard.
A Season Defined by Everything but the Win
The Milwaukee restart was not an isolated bad break. Earlier this year, at the same track, Malukas took a nine-place grid penalty for changing his engine without approval, forcing him to start 12th. A win from that position would have been a signature result. Instead it became one more entry in a season that has given him nearly everything except a checkered flag: four runner-up finishes, a podium at the Indianapolis 500, and an Oval Championship he clinched at the very race where the plenum issue cost him again.
Twelve months ago, Malukas closed out his championship campaigns in 16th, 17th, 24th and 11th. This year he sits fourth in points heading into the season finale at Laguna Seca, by any measure his best year in the series. The gap between where he started and where he stands now is the story Milwaukee briefly threatened to overshadow.
The Fallout of Blaming Chevrolet
Malukas drives for Roger Penske, and Penske’s relationship with Chevrolet runs deeper than a sponsorship line. The partnership has produced seven drivers’ championships and nine manufacturers’ titles together. Penske’s own path into motorsport ownership started with a Chevrolet dealership in Philadelphia after he retired from driving in 1965. Publicly blaming the engine supplier for a race-losing failure was never going to sit well inside that organization, whatever the mechanical facts.
By the next morning, Malukas had reversed course. “Chevy has done great things for me this year, and I wouldn’t be getting the results I have been without them. I apologize for what was said, immature of me,” he wrote on social media, addressing the racing community directly rather than issuing a statement through the team.
Growing Up in Public at 24
The apology mattered for who said it and when. Malukas is 24, in his fourth full IndyCar season, and living through the highest-pressure ride of his career at a team that expects its drivers to represent the organization as carefully as they drive for it. A frustrated comment after a heartbreaking loss is an old story in racing. Walking it back within a day, by name, without hiding behind a publicist, is less common, and it says something about how seriously Malukas takes his standing with the people who built the car under him.
Team Penske has not publicly commented on the exchange, and the silence itself reads as the organization giving its driver room to own the moment rather than escalating it. Malukas has given them plenty of reasons to be patient. His speed at Milwaukee was not manufactured or lucky. Whatever the internal conversations were, the results argue for keeping him exactly where he is.
The heartbreak also arrived on a weekend that had already been claimed by two bigger storylines. O’Ward swept both Milwaukee races within hours of each other, and Alex Palou clinched his fifth IndyCar championship in six years at the very same event, a run of history that pushed Malukas’s near-miss to the margins of the coverage. For a driver chasing his first win, losing the moment twice, once on the racetrack and again in the news cycle, added its own quiet frustration to a night that already stung.
The reaction to the apology itself broke in Malukas’s favor. Public accountability from a 24-year-old driver, delivered without a team statement or a publicist’s fingerprints on it, is rare enough in racing that it drew as much attention as the original comment. Penske has built its reputation over decades on drivers who race hard and speak carefully. Malukas broke that pattern for one night and then corrected course before it could define him.
An Oval Championship Won in the Same Breath as Heartbreak
The strangest part of the Milwaukee weekend is that Malukas walked away from it as IndyCar’s Oval Champion, a title awarded across the season’s full-course races and one that requires exactly the kind of speed and consistency he showed on the Mile. He clinched it in the same session that cost him the outright win, a split result that captured his whole year in a single afternoon: real, measurable proof of how far he has come, delivered in the same breath as a reminder of what still separates him from the top step.
The win handed O’Ward a Milwaukee sweep, taking both races in the doubleheader within hours of each other, a result that will sit in the record book with no asterisk attached even though the manner of it left Malukas convinced the faster car finished second. Racing rarely grades on mechanical sympathy, and Milwaukee was another reminder of that for a driver who has now lost the tiebreaker on speed alone more than once this year.
One Race Left to Turn Heartbreak Into a Headline
Malukas carries his Oval Championship and his fourth-place points standing into the Laguna Seca finale on September 6, the last chance of 2026 to convert a season of near-misses into the win that has eluded him all year. He has led laps at the Indy 500. He has led laps at Milwaukee, twice. What he has not done yet is take the checkered flag first, and the mechanical letdown that cost him at the Mile will not be forgotten by a team that has built its identity on fighting back from setbacks.
If Malukas breaks through at Monterey, the Milwaukee restart becomes a footnote in a breakout season. If he does not, the wait continues into 2027, and so does the question of whether a driver this fast can finally get the timing to match the speed.
Either way, the version of Malukas who leaves 2026 behind looks nothing like the one who finished 16th, 17th, 24th and 11th in the championships that came before it. He has raced at the front of the field all year, at a team that does not hand out seats to drivers it does not believe can win, and the Milwaukee heartbreak, however it stung in the moment, sits inside a season that has already answered the question of whether he belongs there. The only thing left to settle is when the checkered flag finally falls his way.
Sources:
- https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/were-just-cursed-roger-penske-154237470.html
- https://www.motorsportweek.com/2026/08/31/pato-oward-sweeps-milwaukee-alex-palous-title-clinch/
