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O’Ward and McLaren can finally stop chasing the impossible

Posted on by angelo
O’Ward and McLaren can finally stop chasing the impossible

714 days! Pato O’Ward clenches his fists on his desk rhythmically to acknowledge both the length of his winless streak in IndyCar road racing and his excitement at ending the streak at Mid-Ohio last weekend.

The year started well for O’Ward. With Alex Palou at Ganassi, O’Ward became the undisputed leader and number one driver for McLaren’s IndyCar team, as well as being the beneficiary of the Formula One reserve role that Palou had overtaken to overtake him.

However, despite a third place in St. Petersburg in the first race of the season – which turned into a victory after Penske’s push-to-pass scandal, but only more than a month after the race – a truly delicate period followed, until Mid-Ohio last weekend brought that period to an end.

That ended that 714-day streak we mentioned, which stretched to Iowa in July 2022, O’Ward’s last win. The period since then has given rise to questions at almost every race about when that streak might end, what it’s like to finish second so often – five times since that Iowa win – and where McLaren has failed to place.

“We definitely feel like a weight has been lifted off our shoulders,” O’Ward says in an exclusive interview on this week’s episode of The Race IndyCar podcast.

“You have invested so much energy into this project, and to get close to it, I would say 10 times in the last 714 days…

“OK, we won St. Pete, we got points, but we didn’t get to celebrate, we didn’t get to feel what that victory meant.”

It feels like the last two years have been very difficult for O’Ward and the team. O’Ward is very in tune with his fans, often paying out of pocket for fan experiences or putting on races to get people into the stands, and not winning for them has been a burden on him.

When you consider the expectations O’Ward places on himself, the pressure he carries beneath his weight, it’s easy to explain some of the roller coaster moments of the year so far.

After St. Pete, the entire team headed to the Thermal Club, the non-points event, before Long Beach where he qualified 14th and hit the back of teammate Alexander Rossi, finishing 16th.

At Barber he started fourth but spun while avoiding Christian Lundgaard on the brakes, then hit Pietro Fittipaldi and later had a collision with his own team-mate Theo Pourchaire, dropping him to 23rd.

An alternative strategy did not pay off on the Indianapolis road course, where he finished 13th.

Some of the mistakes from that period were his own – I’m not trying to make excuses – but when you contextualize the high level that O’Ward has played at over the years on this team and the pressure he puts on himself, it goes a long way to explaining why he made some of those mistakes or risky decisions.

He knows that there is a limit beyond which too much effort can also produce this kind of negative result.

“Long Beach and Barber were really underutilized, and they were very tough weekends to swallow,” O’Ward says.

“The problem is, it’s always a constant battle. You want something so badly, and then you have to force yourself to back out, because it’s so easy to overstep the mark.

“Since the beginning of May, I would say I have no regrets.”

After finishing a close second at the Indianapolis 500 in May, O’Ward added a seventh-place finish at Detroit, an eighth at Road America and an eighth at Laguna Seca. But even though it was part of a more consistent run, it wasn’t easy for him. At Detroit and Road America, he was forced to drop to the back to avoid incidents at the start.

“You drive like a maniac and you end up ninth. Yuck!” he adds.

“These are very demanding races, where you give absolutely everything and you ask yourself: ‘Am I doing something wrong? What do we need?'”

It is clear from the results and performances that McLaren is not yet in the same league as Ganassi and Penske.

Yes, some exuberance from O’Ward may have cost him points earlier in the year, but you can believe he extracted the most from the car and salvaged many other results in which his teammates or many other drivers in the field would not have been able to deliver such is his innate speed and talent.

On the team side, they’ve fundamentally struggled to understand the tyres this year, and a lighter car mix at the start of the year – because IndyCar introduced weight-saving parts before the (delayed) arrival of the hybrid – generally harder tyres again to cope with the extra weight of the hybrid, and now with the weight of the hybrid installed, it’s been a difficult year to adapt to and overcome.

The team continues to invest in equipment to make up for the years of investment made by Penske and Ganassi. Remember, McLaren is in a shop that can accommodate two cars, let alone three, while waiting to move to the old Andretti factory next year to have more space and be able to use the resources it has more efficiently.

All of this contributes to performance on track, especially when the car and rules change often.

“I would say last weekend was the first weekend where I didn’t feel like I had to rely on something to help me or do the impossible,” said O’Ward, adding, “I was really able to make the most of it without feeling like there was a knife to my throat.”

That’s what people have come to know and love about O’Ward: he pushes the car beyond the limits of what’s possible and delivers the most spectacular driving we see in IndyCar.

Sure, he makes some mistakes, but shouldn’t he be allowed to make them when he’s performing the kind of heroism that no one else can do anywhere else?

He trails Palou by 70 points, but with six of the remaining eight races on ovals, O’Ward must feel good about closing that gap as ovals haven’t always been Palou’s forte.

Palou’s specialty has always been road courses like Mid-Ohio, where he won last year, but IndyCar’s most in-form driver couldn’t coerce O’Ward into making a mistake, even after 25 laps of practice.

It was a brilliant performance from IndyCar’s enigma, O’Ward. But there’s a reason why you can hear audible cheers when he does something right on track, and especially when he wins. He’s the spectacular performer without whom IndyCar would be a much worse place.

What was lost in the end of that win drought was the fact that – despite struggling to adapt this year – McLaren came out on top. First of all victory of the hybrid era and best suited to its use.

One wonders how much help the team has received from F1 and what knowledge it has about adapting the simulation to account for a hybrid unit, which its IndyCar hybrid support engineer Kenny Krajnik spoke to The Race last week and said was extremely helpful.

“It will be fascinating if this makes a crucial difference and gives McLaren a big advantage,” reads the conclusion of our Mid-Ohio preview.

McLaren eventually had an advantage, yes, but as has often been the case in recent years, it was O’Ward who made the difference.