Pato O’Ward is a driver on a midwestern mission at this weekend’s Hy-Vee IndyCar doubleheader at Iowa Speedway. The Arrow McLaren leader has had a few wins slip from his grasp in 2023, and as he returns to the site of his last NTT IndyCar Series triumph, O’Ward’s fixated on completing two clean runs.
The clean part is important. Mistakes have piled up with O’Ward’s No. 5 Chevy this season, and whether they’ve been made by its driver or his brethren who run the car, the championship challenger isn’t loving the fact that he’s reached the one-year anniversary of his most recent win.
“Ultimately, what’s kept us out of victory lane have been mistakes,” O’Ward told RACER. “Whether that is something I’ve done wrong like crashing, or getting hit by someone, or in the pits, there’s been a lot of things that have been hurting us. What’s keeping us from getting a lot of wins is all the little details we can clean up, because getting those details right adds up to those big, big results.
“Coming out of Iowa with no mistakes is what we’re going for, because it absolutely hasn’t been performance. We’ve never been stronger. We’re qualifying really well. We’re racing well, and we’re always in podium contention. But we’ve just got to handle the details because this is a big weekend for us and there’s a lot of points on the table.”
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There’s an urgency to O’Ward’s needs. He’s fifth in the championship due to the four podiums he’s earned to date and seven runs inside the top eight, but he’s also fallen a mile behind Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou in the drivers’ standings.
On the positive side, O’Ward’s two points away from taking fourth from Ganassi’s Marcus Ericsson and 18 points shy of displacing Indianapolis 500 winner Josef Newgarden of Team Penske from third, but he needs 144 points to take the lead from Palou.
With seven races left to run, including the two in Iowa, O’Ward sees an opportunity to carve into the foreboding deficit and keep his title hopes afloat if he can start putting his name in the win column.
“We’ve had our fair share of [bad] luck and Palau has had none,” he said of the Spaniard and his four wins. “And even if he does, they’re never ‘race enders.’ I don’t know how many podiums he had (six), but every almost every podium he’s on, it’s because he’s winning the race. And what’s his worst result? Like, eighth? It’s been a great year where he’s performing and his team doesn’t make any mistakes. They’re just on it.
“But we can also do that. And I believe nobody’s luck lasts forever. There’s plenty of racing to go. If there is a championship where [things] can go sideways in a matter of three weeks, it’s in IndyCar.”
The 24-year-old Mexican is in his element on short ovals like Iowa, where he earned finishes of first and second on IndyCar’s return with the doubleheader format in 2022. And with a pair of seconds, a third, and a fourth on the 1.25-mile World Wide Technology Raceway oval since 2020, O’Ward is someone for the rest of the field to fear when this weekend’s races go live.
“I am still hunting,” he said. “I’m still in challenge mode. And we’re gonna keep pushing and get fourth place, and third place, and second place in the championship on the way to chasing P1. We’re just gonna keep doing that. Hopefully at the end of the year, we look at it like, ‘Damn, we had a hell of a comeback.’”