'It drives you to work hard': Arrow McLaren teammates lock out Thermal front row

Though he retired from IndyCar competition with an Indianapolis 500 victory and an Astor Cup on his resume, Tony Kanaan says his accolades are a testament to what tight inter-team competition can produce.

Having been teammates throughout his career with perhaps the three greatest drivers of his generation — Scott Dixon, Dario Franchitti and the late Dan Wheldon — Kanaan labored the last two years, since stepping from the cockpit onto the timing stand, to try and find Pato O’Ward, long Arrow McLaren’s Batman, a teammate who could be more than just his Robin.

In the 51 races since the start of the 2022 season, O'Ward, the seven-time IndyCar race-winner, has finished tops for Arrow McLaren 30 times. Over that same span at Rahal Letterman Lanigan, young Danish race-winner Christian Lundgaard had paced the three-car team 25 times. Both have for years been two of the fastest drivers on the grid on Saturdays but have struggled to work themselves into top-5s and onto podiums on Sundays as often as required to legitimately challenge for a championship, even as they frequently held the mantle at their respective teams.

So, Kanaan thought last summer, as he juggled an ever-changing driver lineup and stared at a Silly Season chess board where, at the same time, Arrow McLaren owned the first move: Why not partner together a pair of genuine No. 1s and see where they might push each other?

Two races in, the new Arrow McLaren team principal has a front-row lockout — the first since McLaren Racing rejoined IndyCar in 2020 in tandem with what was then Sam Schmidt and Ric Peterson’s operation.

“In my career, I had the best guys around, and if you think about it, I was the least successful of my teammates — and I was still able to be successful," Kanaan said. "Just psychologically, it does something to you. You wake up in the morning, thinking about how someone’s on the same team, and they’re pushing you, and somehow, you find the strength. This is the nature. You only improve, because someone else has raised the bar.

“Having that on your team is quite important, if you’re able to manage it the way that we did. You have to be competitive. You have to want to beat your teammate, but you also have to be part of a team where, if it’s not your day, you’re happy for your teammate, and you push to try and elevate the entire team.”

In capturing pole Saturday at The Thermal Club in the track’s first points-paying IndyCar race, O’Ward snapped a 43-race drought without a pole after snagging five in his first 39 starts with the team. To drive the point home, the NTT P1 Award on the 3.067-mile, natural-terrain road course comes three weeks after O’Ward turned the second-worst qualifying performance of his Arrow McLaren IndyCar career, starting 23rd on the streets of St. Pete to open the 2025 campaign.

Lundgaard, on the other hand, surprised even himself, by pacing Arrow McLaren both in qualifying (fifth) and the race (eighth). Saturday, he told IndyStar that entering his second race weekend with his new team, he rolled up to sunny Southern California feeling “more prepared,” having gone through a pre-race preparation process he deemed “more detailed” than those he was used to at RLL.

“You want to beat your teammates. It’s as simple as that. I want to beat Pato as much as he wants to beat me," Lundgaard said. "It’s very simple, and I think it drives you to work harder — physically, mentally, on track. You do more for it, at the end of the day, and you go into deeper detail. Obviously, we’re studying each other’s data, which in the past I’ve only studied my own. I have a lot more information than I’ve had previously.

“And I showed up with a lot more hope, in a sense. It drives me more, knowing that we’ll hopefully have two cars fighting, and then we can push each other. Previously (for both of us), I think that had only been on occasion, where I feel like that’s going to be more consistent now. I think we’re just both going to be better at the end of the season. We’re going to evolve each other and develop each other.”

O’Ward has been the rock of Arrow McLaren for six seasons now, having seen four full-time teammates come and go while he’s finished with a record four top-five championship finishes across five seasons. Though the likes of Felix Rosenqvist, Alexander Rossi and Co. have combined for four poles and six podiums during that stretch, the young Mexican driver says he’s long grown tired of being his team’s unquestioned No. 1 driver, something McLaren has altered in its F1 program in recent years, too.

In Year 2 with Oscar Piastri alongside team veteran Lando Norris, McLaren took home the constructors championship in 2024, with Norris pushing four-time defending drivers champion Max Verstappen as much as anyone had in three years. Together, the duo combined for six wins and finished seconds and fourth in points.

To kick off their third year together, Norris and Piastri locked out the front-row at the Formula 1 season opener last weekend in Australia, leading to the polesitter Norris' victory. This weekend, Piastri starts on pole as he searches for his third career F1 win.

“It’s fine to be the lead car or whatever, but it’s always good to have that benchmark,” O’Ward said. “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 teammates, 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.

“We need multiple team cars to be at the front. We can’t just have one that’s fighting up there. All three Penskes are always fighting at the front. All four Ganassis (including the affiliated Meyer Shank Racing pair) are always at the front. It’s what we need in IndyCar. Every weekend, (the field) is stronger, and some guys can be a surprise. I think we’ve been a surprise this weekend, so I think we’re in good shape, and we’re pushing forward. We want to beat the big guys. We’re still the underdogs.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Arrow McLaren's Pato O'Ward, Christian Lundgaard lock out Thermal front row

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'It drives you to work hard': Arrow McLaren teammates lock out Thermal front row

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