- Pato O’Ward described his own 2026 championship campaign as confusing, saying he felt like he was “on his own island” even as he finished fourth in points.
- Arrow McLaren has surrounded him with three Indy 500 winning teammates for 2027, including six-time champion Scott Dixon and his close friend Felix Rosenqvist.
- O’Ward still has zero series championships and two runner-up finishes at the Indianapolis 500, and 2027 could be his best remaining chance to close both gaps.
A driver who says he has always been alone
Pato O’Ward has twelve career IndyCar wins, six top-five championship finishes in seven full-time seasons, and a reputation as one of the most popular drivers the series has produced in a decade. He also says that none of it has stopped him from feeling like he is figuring the sport out on his own, season after season, with nobody standing next to him who has already solved the puzzle he is chasing.
“It was a bit of an odd one,” O’Ward said of his 2026 campaign, a year in which he finished fourth in the standings with three victories, ten top-five finishes and eleven top-ten results. “I felt very confused. I’m always kind of on my own island, always have been, and this year I just couldn’t seem to get a direction. More times than not, I’m more kind of like, ‘Where do we go?’ It was one of those seasons.”
That is a striking admission from a driver who closed the season better than almost anyone in the field, sweeping both races at Milwaukee Mile and putting together three top-five finishes across the final five events. Only Alex Palou and Kyle Kirkwood finished ahead of him and teammate Christian Lundgaard, who was third in the standings after winning twice. The results say O’Ward had one of the stronger years of his career. The way he talks about it suggests something else was missing, and Arrow McLaren has now built an entire offseason plan around filling that gap.
The roster that just arrived to help him
Arrow McLaren chose not to retain Lundgaard or Nolan Siegel, O’Ward’s teammates over the past two seasons, and replaced them with a pairing that has no modern precedent in the sport. Six-time NTT IndyCar Series champion Scott Dixon, the winner of the 2008 Indianapolis 500 and owner of 59 career victories, is moving to Arrow McLaren for 2027. Felix Rosenqvist, who drove for the team from 2021 to 2023 and went on to win the 110th Indianapolis 500 with Meyer Shank Racing, is returning as well. Ryan Hunter-Reay, the 2012 series champion and 2014 Indy 500 winner, comes back for a second straight year as an Indy 500 specialist entry.
Team principal Tony Kanaan called the move a response to what he considered the best season in the organization’s history, one built around the opening of the team’s new McLaren Racing Center in Indianapolis. “The experience Pato, Scott and Felix bring is nearly unmatched, and we’re working hard this offseason to hit the ground running in St. Pete next March,” Kanaan said. On the team’s two remaining targets, he did not hedge. “We’re locked in on the Indy 500. We’re hyper-focused on making a statement at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, one that ends with milk.”
For O’Ward, the timing counts as much as the names on the entry list. Rosenqvist is not just a decorated teammate; the two became close friends in their years together at Arrow McLaren and have stayed close in the years that followed. Dixon, meanwhile, represents something closer to a finishing school. Few drivers in the history of the sport have combined O’Ward’s kind of natural speed with the patience and race instincts Dixon has built across six championships. Putting them under the same roof is less a roster upgrade than an attempt to hand O’Ward a blueprint he has spent seven years trying to write by himself.
Two trophies still missing from the shelf
O’Ward has been close enough to both of IndyCar’s biggest prizes that the misses have become part of his public identity. He has finished runner-up at the Indianapolis 500 twice, denied by inches rather than laps both times, and he posted a career-best second place in the overall championship standings in 2025 before this year’s fourth-place finish. A driver with his résumé in almost any other racing series would already have a title. In IndyCar’s deepest era in years, he has instead built a highlight reel of near-misses against Palou, who has turned into the benchmark every other driver in the paddock is measured against.
What makes O’Ward compelling to IndyCar’s growing audience is not just the speed. It is the way he talks about the sport in public, with a bluntness most drivers reserve for their own garages. He does not dress up a confusing season as a learning experience or a secret success. He calls it odd. He says he felt lost. For a fan base that has watched plenty of athletes recite talking points about trusting the process, O’Ward’s willingness to admit he did not always know where to turn has become part of why people root for him as hard as they do.
“It’s all about building on what you learned the previous year,” O’Ward said of his approach heading into 2027. “Doesn’t always work out perfect, but I’ve got some very experienced teammates coming into the picture, and I’m so excited to learn from them.” The team’s own internal numbers back up how close O’Ward and Lundgaard already were to a bigger 2026. One team figure, discussing the gap between the pairing’s top-five finishes and actual podiums, put it plainly: “They’re close. It’s just how many of those top-five finishes could have landed on the podium.”
What a loaded lineup actually solves
There is a version of this offseason where surrounding O’Ward with three Indy 500 winners and seven combined championships between them backfires, turning a team built around one star into a crowded garage of big personalities chasing the same handful of trophies. Kanaan does not appear worried about it, and neither does O’Ward, who has spent his career being the fastest driver in almost every room he has shared. What changes in 2027 is that, for the first time in years, he will share a shop with people who have already finished the job he is still chasing.
Dixon won his first championship the year O’Ward turned nine years old. Rosenqvist has already climbed into the winner’s circle at the one race that has eluded O’Ward twice. Hunter-Reay has a title and a Borg-Warner Trophy of his own. None of that history will turn a single lap for O’Ward next season, but it gives him something a loaded field of rivals never could: teammates who can tell him, from experience, what the last step actually feels like.
O’Ward is 27 years old, squarely in the middle of a career that has already produced enough wins and heartbreak to fill a highlight reel twice over. He has said for years that he wants a championship and an Indy 500 win badly enough to measure every season against those two targets and nothing else. For the first time, he will be chasing them from inside a team that has stacked the garage with people who know exactly what crossing that line feels like. Whether that finally ends the feeling of being on his own island is the story Arrow McLaren is betting its whole offseason on.
The Mexican driver’s rise has also made him one of the sport’s most visible ambassadors outside the United States, drawing crowds at Mexico City and helping IndyCar build an audience in a country that has not had a homegrown open-wheel star of his profile in years. That platform raises the stakes on everything happening inside Arrow McLaren this winter. A breakthrough season would not just settle a personal account for O’Ward. It would hand IndyCar one of its most marketable storylines at exactly the moment the series is trying to grow beyond its traditional base.
None of that changes what happens on track, and O’Ward knows it better than anyone covering the sport. Trophies are not awarded for popularity, and his own words about feeling lost in a season where he finished fourth are a reminder that even a driver with his talent cannot simply will a championship into existence. What he can do, for the first time in his career, is lean on teammates who have already finished the exact race he is still trying to win.
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