IndyCar is racing's most exciting series – but does anyone care?

Last year, McLaughlin won three races while earning three poles, but his championship hopes were sabotaged by a handful of unforced errors. This year, according to Indy car driver-turned-TV announcer Townsend Bell, McLaughlin’s biggest title rivals promise to be his two team-mates – Will Power and Josef Newgarden – along with Scott Dixon and Alex Palou at Chip Ganassi Racing. “McLaughlin is the legitimate fifth guy in the mix,” Bell says. “He’s just a total winner – been there, done that, gonna do it again. I think year one was harder than he expected. Now he’s ready to put it all together. There’s not a place where he’s weak except maybe Indy.”

McLaughlin admits that he’s still learning on ovals. “Coming up to speed, I’ve been fine,” he says. “Having team-mates who know the limit has helped a lot because if they can do it, I can do it. But the race side, experimenting with the lanes and running the high lane, has taken a little time to get comfortable with.” Another nuance he’s still mastering is left-foot braking, a technique he didn’t use in V8 Supercars but which is critical to bleed off speed and balance the car in high-speed corners.

In 2023, McLaughlin returns for his second season with race engineer (and golfing buddy) Ben Bretzman, who helped shepherd Simon Pagenaud to an IndyCar championship and an Indy 500 victory. “Now, it’s just a matter of polishing what I’ve learned,” McLaughlin says. “I’m not saying I’m going to come out and dominate. But we’ve got some of the best cars, and my team-mates are probably the two best drivers. So if we can beat them, we’re doing a pretty good job.”

Will McLaren challenge Penske, Ganassi and Andretti for IndyCar supremacy?

Zak Brown established a beachhead in IndyCar in 2020 with the newly named Arrow McLaren SP team and immediately started restructuring. Although Sam Schmidt and Ric Peterson retained ownership of the team, both of their drivers were axed. Since then, Schmidt and Peterson have been reduced to minority partners. In November, team president Taylor Kiel decamped to Ganassi. Now, the operation – known simply as Arrow McLaren – is being run by rising star Gavin Ward, a Canadian who helped Red Bull win four F1 World Championships before spending four productive years as Josef Newgarden’s race engineer at Penske.

Last year, Pato O’Ward – a 23-year-old phenom with the lightning-quick hands of a Wild West gunslinger – won two races, but his team-mate, Felix Rosenqvist, managed only a single podium. This won’t cut it in 2023. “We did a deep dive after the season,” Ward says, “and one of the things that came out pretty clearly is that where we were let down, really, was reliability. We need to minimise mistakes and the bad days that sunk our championship hopes, frankly. Also, we weren’t on the level of performance of Penske, specifically, and we need to find that.”

By the fall, a deal had been hammered out. Palou would race for Ganassi in 2023 and be free to drive a McLaren F1 car after his IndyCar commitments were fulfilled. It’s probably no coincidence that Palou soared like an eagle whose wings had just been unclipped at Laguna Seca, the final race of the season, where he crushed the field in one of the most dominant performances in recent IndyCar history. “It was one of those days when everything was perfect, and you feel like you can do anything in the car,” Palou says. “Between my days in karting and single-seaters, I have had like four of those days only, so it’s not like they come very often.”

Penske drivers finished 1-2-4 in the championship in 2022, won nine of 17 races and led more laps than the rest of the field combined. But Ganassi prefers to accentuate the positive, pointing out that his three drivers – Palou, Scott Dixon and surprise Indy 500 winner Marcus Ericsson – each scored a victory and denying that any hard feelings linger from last year.

“Everything’s fine,” he says. “Alex and I are fine. We all get along fine. We’re moving forward.” Like Dixon, Palou rarely makes mistakes, never gives up and always gets everything out of the car. He could easily follow in Dixon’s footsteps as a multi-year IndyCar champ.

Can last year’s bumper crop of rookies make a difference in 2023?

In baseball, batters often suffer through a so-called sophomore slump as pitchers discover and exploit their weaknesses. Not so in racing. “I feel like your biggest gain in IndyCar is from your rookie year to your second year,” says Andretti Autosport’s Colton Herta, who, at 24 is a grizzled veteran of four IndyCar seasons. This augers well for last year’s newbies.

Christian Lundgaard, a 21-year-old Dane, was crowned Rookie of the Year on the strength of one second-place finish and seven top 10s. Quiet but supremely confident, he often matched team leader Graham Rahal on pace and regularly outperformed more experienced team-mate, Jack Harvey. Next year, he’ll benefit from some critical upgrades at Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, which has installed longtime F1 engineer Stefano Sordo as technical director and moved into a brand-new state-of-the-art race shop near Indianapolis. “It means more space, having more simula-tion guys, being able to manufacture more parts in-house,” says Graham Rahal, who’s been frustrated for years by a lack of technical resources. “We have a whole room dedicated to damper dynos. It’s definitely going to help.”

The biggest revelation of the year was David Malukus, also 21, whose breakout moment was a ballsy outside pass of Scott McLaughlin to finish a close second to oval-meister Josef Newgarden at Gateway. Despite driving for the low-budget Dayle Coyne Racing team, he nearly edged out the more highly touted Lundgaard for the Rookie of the Year title. Says Townsend Bell: “He was super impressive at Detroit, made the Fast Six. At Mid-Ohio, he was on some monster laps before hitting traffic in qualifying. Then he finished second at Gateway. Those are three totally different samples in the data set that suggest he’s something special.”

Although Kyle Kirkwood – who’d nipped Malukas for the Indy Lights title the previous year – generated the most headlines coming into the 2022 season, he had the most disappointing season of all the rookies. Some of this came down to his team; AJ Foyt Racing hasn’t been really competitive since the glory days of the Indy Racing League. But Kirkwood admits that he was sometimes guilty of overdriving. “At the end of the day, when you’re 20th and you feel stuck, naturally, you’re not going to just give up,” he says. “You’re going to push to the absolute limit.” Despite Kirkwood’s mistakes on track, Michael Andretti tabbed him to fill the seat that Alexander Rossi had occupied for the past six years. The hope is that Kirkwood, along with returning rookie Devlin DeFrancesco, can bring some swagger back to a team that’s lost its edge.

Less was expected of Callum Ilott when he arrived last year. Although the 24-year-old Brit had finished second (to Mick Schumacher) in the 2020 Formula 2 Championship while accumulat-ing plenty of F1 testing experience, he was joining a one-car team, Juncos Hollinger Racing, with limited resources. But he showed impressive pace straight away, especially in qualifying, and he survived a heavy crash at Indy before wowing the paddock by starting P2 at Laguna Seca. The good news is that he gets a team-mate this year. The bad news is that Argentine champion Agustín Canapino is a touring car specialist.

“I’m a bit nervous for him, and I admire the jump because it’s not easy to do.” Ilott says. One way or another, though, getting a second set of data traces should help Ilott. “If you put me in the quickest car,” he says, “I don’t think there’s many people quicker than me, honestly.”

Can reality TV put IndyCar on the radar of fans with no special interest in racing?

IndyCar drivers and fans have been clamouring for years for a made-for-TV program like Drive to Survive. In 2023, thanks to a deal negotiated by Penske Entertainment, they’ll get their wish. The six-episode series, titled 100 Days to Indy, will be co-produced by Vice Media and broadcast on The CW Network. “They could do a lot to move the needle for the sport,” Graham Rahal says. “If you look at the demographic of Vice, it is to a T who we need to hit.”

At first glance, reality TV seems like an awkward fit here in the States, where drivers are trained early and often to relentlessly plug their sponsors and play nice with the media. But as the late, great motorsports journalist Robin Miller was fond of saying, “Hate is good,” meaning that rivalries – whether on-track competition of off-track fisticuffs – pump up interest in the sport. So drivers will be encouraged to publicly air the feuds that are usually resolved behind closed doors.

“I told the producers and the director, ‘Really get in our faces right after the races. That’s when we really will be honest about what happened or what’s going on or who did what to who,’” says Conor Daly, who already practices what he preaches on his Speed Street podcast. “The more talk, the better. If it causes a conversation, great.”

Fierce action on the track is a given for IndyCar in 2023. How successful 100 Days to Indy may come down to how combative drivers are after they climb out of the cockpit.