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Cutting a championship deficit from 42 points to 21 in a single race has to be considered a good weekend. Unless, that is, turning it into an advantage and the championship lead was also on the table.
Arrow McLaren SP driver Pato O’Ward finished fifth in the Indianapolis road course IndyCar race last weekend, eating into Alex Palou’s margin. But O’Ward had qualified on pole and a first- or second-place finish could have shot him into the points lead entering the last four races of the season, as Palou was suffering engine trouble.
Asked about the complexity of a bittersweet event on this week’s The Race IndyCar Podcast, O’Ward says: “To be fairly honest, I consider us very lucky.
“It was very unfortunate for Alex to have his engine issue. But that’s the only reason why we actually got to cut into the championship more than what we were.
“We were 49 points back [at one point during the race], now we’re 21 points back.
“We were lucky. We’ve had very unlucky weekends in other points of the season.
“I think Alex has been pretty spot-on all year and this is his kind of first race where things didn’t go his way. That’s going to be racing, there’s no way someone can go one full championship with everything going perfectly.
“So it helped us this weekend. But I think we, in the back of our heads, we know that we have to get better, we have to improve because the Ganassi guys have been on it.
“If they’re not on it with Palou, they’re on it with [Scott] Dixon, if they’re not on it with Dixon, they’re on it with Palou or [Marcus] Ericsson. So we’re kind of in a Ganassi sandwich currently.”
It’s funny that O’Ward speaks of this nagging doubt the Arrow McLaren SP team has in the back of its mind, as it’s one I’ve felt when assessing this team all season.
It has one of the most exciting and talented drivers on the grid in O’Ward, some serious engineering prowess and a Formula 1 team supporting it. But however you splice that together, a fundamental issue remains.
The IndyCar teams engineer their cars in the off-season and because this is a spec formula, everybody is so close together on track that even the slightest defect in your car set-up philosophy can be devastating.
Work with aero balance and dampers is key, and once you settle on your philosophy, you can’t just alter it mid-season as the car becomes a sum of parts geared to work in a certain way.
With AMSP, its car is lively and so far O’Ward is the only driver who has been able to extract anywhere near the maximum. The fact that Felix Rosenqvist and Juan Pablo Montoya struggled to adapt to it is testament not only to O’Ward’s ability but also the difficulty anyone driving this car faces.
A benefit of the car is that on the right day it’s basically unstoppable. One area of strength is its ability to switch on its tyres quickly, but there’s multiple examples over the last two years of the car not keeping its tyres alive as long as its rivals over a stint either.
In a race like last Saturday where the softer tyre was the faster race option, this can be devastating for a team that is harsh on its tyres as other teams aren’t feeling as much degradation and can use a faster, softer tyre for longer.
Tyre wear is one of the key facets O’Ward picked out as an area of “deficit” to the team’s rivals at the moment.
“It’s all in being able to make the tyres last.
“I know, everybody hammers me that I’m terrible on tyres and blah, blah, blah. But to be fairly honest, Felix came from a Ganassi car, and we’re all very well aware that our car is not nice on tyres.
“I think we’re getting better. But the way that you drive an oval obviously is different to how you drive a road course.
“I think our package on ovals is certainly stronger compared to our road course [package], just in terms of actually being able to stay on pace, push the car, hustle the car but not kill tyres.
“That’s something that we don’t have in road courses and that’s something that I see with the Andretti cars, with the Ganassi cars, the Penskes, they’re able to really push and hustle the car.
“But the way that the car uses and extracts the time, and the life of the tyre, it’s just nicer [for the other teams]. And we really use it [the tyre].
“So I feel like that’s where in qualifying, we’re strong, but sometimes we have to take it down a notch and we just don’t have the rhythm because we need to take care of the tyres a little bit more than others.
“That’s what we’ve been really working on, just trying to maximise our stints and not hitting that cliff, especially whether there’s rear limitations on reds [the softer compound] or just really trying to keep them alive.
“I think we’re at a deficit right now. I think we’ve certainly improved, but we’re not there yet and it’s so competitive that, if you’re not on it perfectly, and you don’t have the stints to get track position, you’re just not going to get by people or you’re not going to catch them.”
O’Ward says he has used his IMSA experience to work on driving the car and preserving the tyres over the stint while maintaining pace, but it’s clear to those observing closely that O’Ward is not the problem and if anything he’s taken this car and team to heights above where it should currently be.
Not that the team doesn’t deserve it, but it’s a long-term project and O’Ward has helped give the organisation a lot, quickly.
It’s only a year and a half into its relationship with McLaren, which has now taken a majority ownership, and with that has come a whole new way of working with a team back at Woking on race weekends, just like in F1.
It’s brought in new personnel, had to find the right roles for those personnel, all while integrating a new type of teamwork that hasn’t been done in IndyCar before, in the middle of a pandemic.
So, given all of that, the amount of success it has achieved already is astounding and something that deserves a lot of credit. Young team president Taylor Kiel merits high praise for his role in that.
For Pato, coming off a failed stint as a Red Bull junior, he’s given this team more than it ever could have hoped for and delivered miracles on the track, so much so that it genuinely doesn’t appear unlikely that he’ll at least be in the conversation of a Formula 1 role in the future, if not a full-blown race drive.
Dare he allow himself to think what it would be like if he won the IndyCar title, before he tests an F1 car for the first time with McLaren in November?
“It’d be huge” is O’Ward’s perhaps obvious answer.
“I’m trying not to think about it as much. I’m just trying to take it day by day, session by session and just execute when challenges come.
“But it certainly would be really, really important not just for my career, but just personally, it would be a really, really big accomplishment.
“And if in the future, the F1 option comes available, I wouldn’t feel terrible leaving because I’d be able to leave as a champion. And that’s ultimately what I want to be able to achieve before I even consider leaving.”
Before any of that happens, there’s four races to go starting with Gateway coming up.
O’Ward scored two podiums there last year and absolutely blew me and others away with his car control off pitlane where it was especially visible. At one stage he raced on the apron side by side with Josef Newgarden, who gave him heaps of credit after the race for what he had done – even if it wasn’t enough for victory.
“I’m actually really looking forward to this weekend,” says O’Ward, “I think it’s going to be a great weekend for us.
“I enjoy that place and we had a very strong car there last year so it’d be really nice to just build on that.
“We have some good tracks coming up. I do think Long Beach is going to be ruled by – like you have seen on many street courses – the Andrettis and the Ganassis, [they] are really really tough to beat around those places. Unless they make a mistake, then we can capitalise.
“But I think the ones coming up Gateway, I have a lot of faith in our short oval package. I think Portland’s going to be good for us, I think Laguna is going to be good for us.
“So I think we have a good stretch coming up where we can really maximise our package and take it to them in the championship.
“Honestly, my goal all this year was; become a race winner, be a contender, but most of all, when we get to Long Beach, I want a legit, realistic shot at winning the thing.
“We’ve been contenders all year. We all want to win it. But even if we come out second, I think it’s a very big accomplishment that we can build on.”
I can’t disagree. Whether O’Ward wins this title or not, his future in IndyCar is very bright, and the fact this organisation is willing to add resources with more investment from McLaren is only a positive.
A tweak to its car’s philosophy over the off-season could really produce big results.
For now, we’ll get to watch a team that could win every race in the remainder of the season, or could finish all of them outside the top 10.
You really don’t know what you’re going to get each weekend – perfectly highlighted by O’Ward qualifying on pole last weekend after being 18th on the same track in May just a few months earlier.
But even with this inconsistency, O’Ward is Palou’s closest championship rival. It might feel intangible, but something in this team is right, and it’s so exciting to watch.
