25 June 2026 16:00 (UTC)
"There are a lot of tracks that we like in the second half of the year where we can keep pushing"
Arrow McLaren kicked off the second half of the 2026 NTT INDYCAR SERIES season in a big way last weekend at Road America with Christian’s spectacular come-from-behind win.
Now, at just past the halfway point on the INDYCAR calendar, the team has totaled 11 top-five finishes, highlighted by Christian’s two wins and four podiums. Both Christian (4th) and Pato (5th) sit firmly in championship contention while Nolan continues to trend upward.
With 10 races complete and eight to go, we checked in with the Race Engineers across the team’s three entries to get their thoughts on the season thus far and what’s ahead.
“I think the first half has been kind of frustrating, honestly, on the 5 side. There’s been many positives. We’ve had some consistency at places we haven’t been consistent at before. We have really kind of turned street courses into our strength, developing from the win in Toronto last year and working hard in the offseason. But there have been disappointments. Barber was a miss, and we also should have done a better job at the Indy Road Course, though not a lot you could do there getting taken out on Lap 1. And then at Road America, the yellow really just didn’t fall our way. That’s part of racing. The good part is that with all the frustration and lack of results, we’re still P5 in the championship, and there are a lot of tracks that we like in the second half of the year where we can keep pushing and score the results we know we’re capable of.”
"I think the first part of the season has been challenging due more to circumstances than anything performance related. It’s difficult to see the positives when you’re not putting any points in the bank as far as the end results go. But, once we got to Long Beach, we started to make some progress. We had a weekend without any unforeseen issues, just a productive race weekend where we executed well. That’s been our focus – just controlling the things that we can control, doing the obvious things right and executing well. That’s led to Nolan being able to focus on driving, and you saw that this past weekend at Road America. It was a solid race weekend. The race results were unfortunate with the timing of yellow flags plus the incident at the end of the race that was out of our control. But, we just have to continue to focus on race execution and controlling the things we can control and let Nolan do what he does best – drive a race car fast.”
"I think our season has been more of a roller coaster this year than last. We had more consistent performance in 2025, but this year we’ve had some more ups and downs. Obviously, the ups are the wins at Road America and Indy Road Course, and Barber was a very good weekend for us, as well. St. Pete we were also strong. But we had some struggles not having the complete package and the right feel at the Indy 500, and we had an unfortunate puncture in Long Beach with no real strategy options to recover from that.
"A big focus for us on the 7 is working on developing Christian’s oval driving skills, and also just him knowing what he needs from the car and me being able to deliver that. The focus is really the whole package on ovals. We still need to improve in that area. We’ve got Nashville and Milwaukee coming up to hopefully make some good gains there."
Arrow McLaren will look forward to a busy summer stretch ahead, with races at Mid-Ohio (July 5), Nashville Superspeedway (July 19), Portland International Raceway (August 9), Streets of Markham (July 16), Streets of Washington D.C. (August 23), Milwaukee Mile (August 29-30) and Laguna Seca (September 6) ahead.
