"We've turbocharged it"

CEO Zak Brown believes that Arrow McLaren SP are now a "championship-calibre" outfit, hailing the potential of the team we first linked up with in 2020 and the progress that has been made since.

Forty years on from when we last competed in INDYCAR, McLaren joined forces with Arrow Electronics and Schmidt Peterson Motorsport ahead of the 2020 season, before acquiring a controlling stake in the team just over a year ago.

In its final season as Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, drivers James Hinchcliffe and Marcus Ericsson finished 12th and 17th in the drivers' standings, but with two podiums between them, as well as a third from Jack Harvey, who competed in 10 of the 17 races.

Since the initial link-up, Arrow McLaren SP have built on that success, taking four wins and 15 podiums. Two of those wins and five of those podiums came in 2022 when Pato O'Ward finished seventh in the standings and Felix Rosenqvist eighth.

For Zak, the team's potential was obvious, it just needed extracting. "They were a great, great team, but not a very well-funded team," he said. "They always had an awesome partner in Arrow that covered one car, but then they had to piece together the second car.

"They didn't have a lot of infrastructure, so it was a smaller team that we felt had a lot of potential, if we could put our weight behind it, but we acquired this great little team with tons of potential.

"We have a great leadership team that was there from before we were on the scene, so I think we've just turbocharged it, and now we are a championship-calibre racing team with three cars."

We'll debut a new-look team in the 2023 season, but with a familiar feel to it, with ex-Red Bull engineer Gavin Ward stepping up from his role as Director of Trackside Engineering, to become Racing Director, having joined in July 2022 with plenty of prior INDYCAR experience.

During a previous spell with Team Penske, Gavin won the NTT INDYCAR SERIES Championship with Josef Newgarden in 2019 and narrowly missed out in 2020 and 2021, finishing second.

He'll oversee a three-car race team of Pato, Felix and new arrival, Alexander Rossi, who has spent the past six seasons with Andretti, including the 2018 season, where he finished as runner-up in the championship.

"Gavin has a great pedigree in both Formula 1 with Red Bull and INDYCAR with Penske, so I think he can really lead the way. We're still young in that process, but we've been challenging for the championship going down to the last one or two races. So, we've been knocking on the door.

"We think that Alex is a championship calibre driver. He's won a lot of races, he is an Indy 500 winner, and he has that Formula 1 mindset. We like his experience and professionalism because we are a young team.

"We feel that Felix, Pato and Alex are a great combination of youth and experience, and they're all very fast. Much like we're doing in Formula 1, we're investing in the team and building out the infrastructure, but I think we'll be winning races again next year."

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