McLaren should see a painful defeat to Palou as a big victory
IndyCar

McLaren should see a painful defeat to Palou as a big victory

by Jack Benyon
7 min read

Pato O'Ward's Thermal IndyCar weekend went from lamenting his recent qualifying performance to scoring an outrageous pole position, from looking like a dominant winner about to end a 49-year 'drought' to another painful second place.

It’s fair to say O'Ward is box office. He's so important for IndyCar because of the entertainment he brings and the fanbase he's cultivated.

After he lost a race win which seemed buttoned up before a fight with Alex Palou on Sunday, we're now left to piece back together the jigsaw of a crucial weekend which told us so much about O'Ward, his McLaren team, his fight to adapt to a key change this year, his current frame of mind and just how inevitably dominant Palou appears in 2025.

Qualifying 'turnaround'

O'Ward was the fifth-best full-time IndyCar qualifier in 2024 and has rarely been out of that top five in his entire IndyCar career. But that didn't prevent him saying he had been disappointed last year with his performances.

That was compounded in St Petersburg, which teams tackled with the new hybrid unit for the first time this year. The device was introduced at Mid-Ohio last July, which means the first seven races of 2025 are still new territory for it.

Like with the introduction of the aeroscreen in 2020 - albeit to a lesser extent for most teams - the hybrid has altered the weight distribution of the car and therefore the set-up philosophy. At the very least, it's forced major tweaks that have impacted how the car is set up.

Any driver who likes a bit more play in the rear end has found the added weight has made the rear more secure and introduced an undercurrent of understeer. Or, in O'Ward speak, the cars "just plough like pigs".

See, I told you: box office.

O'Ward is one of those drivers who enjoys an amount of oversteer as part of his set-up and it's clear the hybrid has hit him harder than many other drivers in the field.

"Maybe I figured out how to drive quickly again, I don't know," he smiled after qualifying on pole and being asked about a turnaround.

"It's been a struggle because Mid-Ohio was the first race that we did with the hybrid, and it was great for me [he won the race]. But all the ones after that, you can't take the car, or at least I can't, where I used to have it.

"You guys can probably see it in the onboards. It was a car that was very on the edge. It was just right there where it was almost too much, but I could make it work without a doubt in qualifying.

"Even if it was just one lap, even if we didn't quite have the pace, I knew I could take it there and extract the laptime that truly wasn't available for it.

"The problem now is with this hybrid is we've got so much more weight and the car is a lot lazier and it just can't do that anymore.

"It's been a bit of an adjustment. I’ve had to change my driving style, or the approach to how you extract laptime from the car is very different now because you can't have it strong at the front. It's a snowball effect.

"I just really focused this weekend - like, why was I fast in Mid-Ohio and why was I slow in the majority of the other road courses?

"I didn't feel like I was qualifying the car for some reason, just I didn't feel at one with it.

"We figured it out obviously this weekend, which has been great. I think this is a great base moving forward to kind of know what I need from the car. So I'm definitely very happy."

O'Ward has often been lazily accused of being a driver who needs the car a certain way, who can be hard on his tyres or is too flamboyant in his style. 

In actual fact, even if the characteristics he likes in the car have remained relatively baked-in since his arrival in 2020, he has long shown he is able to adapt - and this leap in Thermal qualifying is the biggest evidence yet.

What happened in the race

O'Ward was supreme in the first three quarters of the race, perhaps better than many expected, extending a gap of over seven seconds before the first stops and 11 seconds after the final stop.

This is all from a team that really struggled at this track last year and has clearly made a massive leap given O'Ward's team-mate Christian Lundgaard was third, too.

So what went wrong? What allowed Palou to erase that 11-second gap in just a few laps late on?

"Sticker set of red tyres, that was the answer for losing the lead," bemoaned O’Ward.

He said the team would investigate, but its choice to take fresh soft tyres for the start of the race, while Palou saved his for the last stint, proved to be decisive.

Despite having a hybrid that only worked for 50% of the race amid multiple issues for the series' spec units in the heat and over the bumps/kerbs of Thermal, O'Ward was still in the top three with Lundgaard for in-lap speed and while their out-laps suffered more, there was little else the pair could have done to stop the inevitable once the tyres were chosen and the race strategy set in motion.

O'Ward said the hybrid issue wasn't decisive nor was the traffic he got caught in - though that did bring about an unusual absence of bipartisan PR when O'Ward criticised other Chevrolet teams, having been briefly caught behind Sting Ray Robb of Juncos.

O'Ward said: "I hate to whine about it, but it sucks to be the leader.

"All of our Chevy affiliate teams are worthless with helping when a Chevy leader is coming up on them.

"Honda seem to work as a team very, very well because [Louis] Foster was doing everything in his power to keep me behind. Palou gets right behind him, and he [Foster] just lets him cruise by.

"I still think Palou would have got us sooner or later. Obviously that just makes it a bit more of an annoyance."

Beating Palou

"It's tough seeing this guy beat us every week, we've got to find a way to stop him," said Lundgaard with a smile after the race, something he repeated shortly after in the post-race press conference.

Asked how much closer to Palou he felt McLaren was compared to a year ago, O'Ward said: "Definitely better.

"This probably was one of the tracks where I personally felt like we really didn't have a fighting chance. We put two cars on the front row, and we got some hard work.

"Like Christian said, it just seems like every time someone is winning, it's always Palou in the #10. He's obviously figured it out. He's got a great team behind him. We just need to keep pushing. There's really not another way."

Palou has delivered two strategic masterclasses to start the season and make himself look invincible on road and street courses.

But as much as it feels right now like he might win 17 races this year, he won't. And he's still yet to win on an oval, which are arguably O'Ward's forte.

So these are vital building blocks being put in place by O'Ward and McLaren to challenge Palou further down the line. Especially when you consider they are currently closest - though Palou is already sleeping easy at night with a 39-point advantage after two races.

After leading 51 of 65 laps it "sucks to lose it there in the end", O'Ward added.

The qualifying improvement by O'Ward and McLaren will be vital, as will the pace of Lundgaard, who has already shown how important he'll be in backing up, pushing on and sometimes beating O'Ward, as he has already done.

"It's been great, whether he believes me or not," smiled O'Ward of going up against Lundgaard at McLaren.

"I strive to be better, and I really hope that everybody on the team also is in that same attitude because, yeah, OK, it's fine to be the lead car or whatever, but it's always good to have that benchmark.

"Whenever maybe you're not the best, you can always kind of look over and be like, 'Hey, the car can do this. So let's go out and explore'.

"I’m happy to have strong team-mates, and I'm happy to have people that are very fast, and that's just going to make me better. It's going to make the whole team better."

No McLaren team-mate has come in and been immediately at O'Ward's level, a list that includes Felix Rosenqvist and Alexander Rossi, two very well-respected drivers.

The reason there was such a weird vibe this past weekend is because after dominating in qualifying, it seemed like the story was written that O'Ward would win and McLaren would emerge as this almighty Palou challenger, scoring double 1-2s on the same day for the first time since 1976 after its Chinese Grand Prix Formula 1 win earlier on Sunday.

The fact McLaren is still suing Palou almost certainly ensures an undertone of motivation, even if the drivers and teams are civil.

But really, teams and drivers can't afford to get upset when they are beat by Palou, because it's going to happen a lot.

The weekend was such a resounding and overwhelming success for McLaren, and it should be treated as such.

Especially given how far its car has come from Thermal last year, and with what might be a crucial breakthrough in qualifying for O'Ward.

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