Scott McLaughlin can name the exact race. September 2024. Milwaukee Mile. A win that felt, at the time, like just another entry in a career full of them. He had no way of knowing it would be his last trip to victory lane for nearly two full seasons.
“I really do hate it, and I’m chomping at the bit for a win,” McLaughlin said of the drought that has now stretched to 33 races, the longest of his professional racing career, across open-wheel and stock cars alike. He returns this weekend to the same track where the wait began, hunting for the one result that has eluded him for two straight seasons.
A Streak That Keeps Growing
McLaughlin came to IndyCar in 2021 as a three-time Supercars champion from New Zealand, a driver whose reputation for winning followed him across an ocean and a completely different discipline of motorsport. The transition looked easy from the outside. He won races in his first full season with Team Penske and kept winning through 2023 and into 2024, building a résumé that put him firmly in the conversation with the series’ best.
Then the wins stopped. Not all at once, and not through any sudden drop in McLaughlin’s own driving. Team Penske as a whole hit a rough patch, compounded by a cheating scandal that cost the organization key personnel and credibility heading into the 2025 season. McLaughlin kept qualifying well, kept running near the front, and kept finishing just short of the one result he actually wanted.
“You always have to have confidence, no matter what,” he said. “It’s a bit of a drought right now, but I feel like we have all the ingredients to win a race. It’s just so hard to win in the INDYCAR SERIES right now.” He has said before that he has weathered stretches like this, recalling an 18-month, nearly two-year gap between wins earlier in his career. This one has already run longer, and it lands at a different stage of his life, with a family watching every week and a driver who insists his own performance has not slipped even as the results have not followed.
The Search for Special Sauce
McLaughlin and race engineer Raul Prados have spent the summer chasing what the driver calls the “special sauce,” the small combination of setup tweaks and strategy calls that separates a car capable of winning from one capable only of finishing well. A test at Mid-Ohio earlier in the year gave the pair a dedicated day to chase exactly that, away from the pressure of a race weekend.
“I feel like I’m driving as good as I ever have,” McLaughlin said, a claim backed up by how consistently he has run near the front of practice and qualifying sessions in the middle of the drought. Speed has rarely been the problem. Converting that speed into a checkered flag, in a series as tightly bunched as IndyCar has become, is a different challenge entirely.
Team Penske’s broader struggles have not helped. The organization that once dominated IndyCar with Josef Newgarden and Will Power at the front has spent much of the past two seasons fighting to keep pace with Ganassi, Andretti and a resurgent field of smaller teams that have closed the technical gap. McLaughlin has been candid that the No. 3 car’s issues have not been isolated to him, that the entire Penske stable has needed to find performance rather than simply wait for a return to old form.
The 2024 push-to-pass scandal still shadows the organization in ways that go beyond one race suspension. Newgarden and Power were stripped of results, the team’s president left the organization, and the fallout forced Penske to rebuild trust with rivals who had long accused the flagship team of bending rules in its favor. McLaughlin was not implicated personally, but he inherited an organization playing defense at exactly the moment he needed it pushing forward on car development. Rebuilding a reputation and rebuilding a winning package turned out to require many of the same people, stretched across two urgent problems at once.
Milwaukee and a New Life
The Milwaukee Mile carries extra significance for McLaughlin beyond being the site of his last win. Ahead of last year’s Indianapolis 500, he became a United States citizen in a naturalization ceremony at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a step he has described as one of the proudest moments of his life outside of racing itself.
“I’m very proud of this race purely because I’m a new American citizen, and I don’t take that lightly,” McLaughlin said. “I’m very proud to be here with my family, give my family an opportunity to be here.” That milestone has not translated into results at ovals this season the way he would like, but it frames the Milwaukee weekend as more than just another data point on a championship table. It is a track tied to his identity as a driver who left one country’s motorsport establishment behind to build a new career, and a new life, in another.
McLaughlin has also spoken about reaching his 100th career IndyCar start earlier this month in Washington, D.C., a milestone that put his current stretch in a longer perspective. A driver with 100 starts and a résumé full of poles, wins and championships in two different countries does not need to prove he belongs. What he needs, by his own admission, is one race to go his way.
What Ending It Would Mean
“It’d be unreal,” McLaughlin said, describing what breaking the drought at Milwaukee in front of the home crowd that watched him win there two years ago would feel like. The Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250 doubleheader gives him two chances across the same weekend, on an oval where his recent history is mixed but where his ceiling, based on 2024, is clearly high enough to win.
Christian Rasmussen, the reigning race winner at the Mile, arrives as a threat, and Alex Palou’s championship pursuit will dominate headlines regardless of who wins. But for McLaughlin, the storyline is simpler and more personal than a title fight. It is about proving to himself, and to a Penske organization trying to rebuild its reputation, that the speed he insists has been there all along can finally translate into the result that has avoided him for 33 races and counting.
McLaughlin’s teammates have not made the drought easier to sit with. Will Power remains a threat on ovals whenever the car cooperates, and Josef Newgarden carries two Indianapolis 500 wins on his own resume, a reminder inside the same shop of what the No. 3 crew is chasing. Team owners rarely say it out loud in the middle of a drought, but every week that passes without a win from any of the three Penske cars adds pressure that flows downhill from Roger Penske himself, a man with a low tolerance for prolonged silence in victory lane.
Scott McLaughlin does not need reminders of how long it has been. He counts the number himself, out loud, to reporters who ask. What he wants now is a smaller number: one more race, one checkered flag, one end to a stretch that has tested a driver who spent most of his career treating losing as a rare inconvenience rather than a pattern.
There is a version of this weekend where none of the history counts for anything, where McLaughlin simply drives the car he insists is capable of winning and the result takes care of itself. There is another version where the drought stretches a 34th race, and a 35th, and the questions from reporters keep circling the same number that has followed him from the last time he stood in Milwaukee’s victory lane. McLaughlin has lived with both outcomes before. What has changed, two years and 33 races later, is how much he has left to prove, not just to a championship table, but to himself, about whether the driver who once won with startling regularity is still in there waiting for one race to go his way again.
