- Scott McLaughlin snapped a 36-race winless streak with a dominant victory at the IndyCar season finale at Laguna Seca, his first win after Milwaukee in September 2024.
- He dedicated the win to his daughter Lucy, born in October 2024, telling Victory Lane that she had never seen him win a race until Saturday.
- The win capped a three-time Supercars champion’s rockiest IndyCar stretch and gave Team Penske a statement finish heading into 2027.
A Trophy His Daughter Had Never Seen
Scott McLaughlin climbed out of his No. 3 Chevrolet at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca and did the thing he does after every win, the backflip off the car that has become his signature. Then he grabbed a microphone and said the part that mattered more than the flip.
“My little girl, Lucy, hasn’t seen me win yet, and now she has,” McLaughlin said. “So, Dad’s coming home with a trophy, baby. Let’s go!”
Lucy was born in October 2024, one month after McLaughlin’s most recent IndyCar win at Milwaukee. Every race in between, every podium and every near-miss, happened without her seeing her father cross a finish line first. That drought ran 36 races and stretched across two full seasons before it ended at IndyCar’s 2026 finale, where McLaughlin led 87 of 95 laps and beat Kyle Kirkwood to the line by 1.3739 seconds.
Six Years He Called Terrible
McLaughlin did not dress up how the wait felt. “It’s been terrible, right? I’ve been waiting six years to do that,” he said afterward, referring to the burnout celebration he performs after wins, a ritual he had not performed in two years.
The six-year marker reaches back past his IndyCar career into the identity he built before Team Penske ever put him in an open-wheel car. McLaughlin won three Supercars championships in Australia, in 2018, 2019 and 2020, and left that series as one of its most decorated drivers of the modern era. He made the jump to IndyCar in 2021 already carrying heavy expectation as a champion changing continents and categories, and while he won IndyCar’s Rookie of the Year award and became the first Team Penske driver to claim it, race wins came in bursts rather than a steady climb. Seven of his career IndyCar victories arrived across his first three seasons. Then the well ran dry.
A Season That Tested Him
The numbers behind the drought are specific enough to sting on their own. Thirty-six races is more than two full IndyCar seasons’ worth of races without a checkered flag for a driver who won seven times in his first three years in the series. A driver who arrives with three Supercars titles and 45 combined wins across categories does not expect to go two full years between visits to victory lane, and the longer it stretched, the more it became a storyline unto itself, a subplot at nearly every race weekend regardless of how McLaughlin actually finished that Sunday.
2026 had already been a difficult year before Laguna Seca. McLaughlin finished 10th in the previous year’s standings, a result that fell short of the benchmark Team Penske sets for its lineup, and the questions that follow any driver in a slump, fair or not, had started to build. He kept saying in interviews that the speed was there even when the results were not, a claim that is easy to make and hard to prove until a car finally validates it.
At Laguna Seca, the car validated it in the most emphatic way available: a lights-to-flag domination of the last race on the calendar. “A culmination of some hard work,” McLaughlin said, tracing the turnaround to a test session weeks earlier. “I think the whole team, all three cars, just been working on basically I think from the Mid-Ohio test for us, at least on my car, we found a bit of a direction.”
Congratulating the Champion He Is Chasing
McLaughlin’s win came in a season that ended with Alex Palou claiming a fifth IndyCar title in six years, a run of dominance that has reshaped the championship conversation in the series. McLaughlin, who finished the year well outside title contention, used his own Victory Lane moment to acknowledge it directly rather than ignore it.
“Congrats to Alex on his fifth, but we’re working hard to beat them, and today was a big step in the right direction,” McLaughlin said. He also turned the credit toward the people who stuck with him through the drought. “These guys and girls at Team Penske have stood behind me the whole time,” he said, a line that reads differently coming from a driver who spent two years hearing whispers about his seat.
A Team That Needed the Result Too
McLaughlin’s drought had unfolded inside a broader slide at Team Penske. The organization managed only two wins across its full lineup in 2025, its fewest in nearly two decades, and absorbed 15 mechanical or crash-related retirements among its three cars, a number the team had not approached in nearly three decades. Josef Newgarden finished 12th in the championship that year, his worst result in his years with the team, and Will Power left Team Penske entirely before the 2026 season after 17 years, replaced in the No. 12 car by David Malukas. Against that backdrop, McLaughlin’s own results looked less like an isolated slump and more like a symptom of a program working through a difficult stretch together.
Newgarden had promised a turnaround in blunt terms before the year began, telling reporters the team was “about to strike” and coming “full attack” in 2026. McLaughlin’s Laguna Seca win gives that promise its first hard evidence heading into the offseason, a result the whole team can point to rather than one driver alone.
It also arrives at an interesting moment for the No. 3 car’s lineup around him. Power’s exit and Malukas’s arrival changed the complexion of the Team Penske garage for the first time in years, and a new-look roster benefits from having at least one driver who can point to a dominant, wire-to-wire result as proof the underlying car is not the problem. McLaughlin delivered that proof in the last race anyone will remember from the 2026 IndyCar calendar, and there is no better timing available to a driver climbing out of a two-year slump than a dominant win in the final race fans and rivals alike will carry into the winter.
What Laguna Seca Actually Changes
One win does not erase a 36-race gap or answer every question about where McLaughlin stands inside a Team Penske lineup that also includes Josef Newgarden and Will Power. But it changes the shape of the offseason conversation. Instead of walking into 2027 defending a slump, McLaughlin walks in on the back of a dominant, wire-to-wire win against a field that included his closest championship rivals.
For a driver who ranks third all-time in wins across Team Penske’s racing programs, with 52 combined victories including seven in IndyCar, the Laguna Seca result is also a reminder of the resume that got him hired in the first place. It also puts a number on what the drought actually cost him in career terms: two full years in which a driver who wins as regularly as McLaughlin has across two continents produced zero, a gap large enough that some corners of the paddock had started to wonder aloud whether his open-wheel career had plateaued for good.
The backflip was for the cameras. The line about Lucy was for himself, and for a daughter who is about to start watching her father race for real, one win at a time, starting with the one she was finally there to see.
Sources:
- https://www.indycar.com/news/2026/09/09-06-nics-laguna-race
- https://speedcafe.com/indycar-news-2026-laguna-seca-results-scott-mclaughlin-win-reaction-comments-video-highlights/
- https://www.dive-bomb.com/article/never-stopped-believing-how-mclaughlin-ended-his-two-year-indycar-win-drought
- https://speedwaymedia.com/2026/09/06/scott-mclaughlin-erases-win-drought-with-dominant-drive-at-laguna-seca/
