Christian Lundgaard Gets Ganassi’s No. 9. On 2026 Form, That’s a Promotion for the Car.

Chip Ganassi Racing had two ways to fill the No. 9 PNC Bank Honda once Scott Dixon packed up 59 wins and six championships and headed for Arrow McLaren. It could hire someone whose résumé looked respectable parked next to Dixon’s, or it could hire whoever was fastest and let the sentiment sort itself out. On Tuesday, the team picked option two: Christian Lundgaard signs a multiyear deal to drive the No. 9 starting in 2027.

Look at the paperwork from both teams and this is effectively a seat swap across the Honda–Chevrolet divide. Dixon moves into Arrow McLaren’s No. 6 Chevrolet alongside Pato O’Ward and 2026 Indianapolis 500 winner Felix Rosenqvist. Lundgaard, the driver Arrow McLaren moved aside to build that Indy-heavy lineup, lands in the exact car Dixon vacated. Two teams traded drivers without technically trading anything, and each told you exactly what it values.

The 2026 box score is not close

Nostalgia says Ganassi is replacing a legend. The 2026 standings say it’s replacing the 12th-place car with the third-place driver.

That 204-point gap works out to a little over 11 points per race. In IndyCar’s scoring, that’s roughly the difference between finishing fifth and finishing 10th, every weekend, for a full season. Lundgaard’s two wins came at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course and Road America, and he added his first oval podium in 2026, which matters at a team that expects its cars to contend on every type of track, not just road and street courses.

One season is a sample, not a verdict. Dixon is still second on the all-time IndyCar wins list, and Arrow McLaren didn’t sign him for last year’s points. It signed him because he has an Indianapolis 500 win, and so do Rosenqvist and Indy-only entrant Ryan Hunter-Reay. Ganassi, meanwhile, bought current pace from a 25-year-old. Both bets are defensible. Only one of them is backed by this year’s timing sheets.

Back to Honda, with notes from the other side

Lundgaard arrived in IndyCar in 2021 with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, a Honda team, and earned his first win at Toronto in 2023. He then spent 2025 and 2026 in Arrow McLaren Chevrolets. So he returns to Honda power having now driven both engines in anger.

What a driver can bring across that divide is feel, not files: how a different power delivery changes corner exit, how fuel-saving targets shape a stint, what an engine does to rear stability on a street-course restart. That kind of comparison is useful to Ganassi engineers who have spent years tuning the No. 9 around one very specific driver. Lundgaard will want some things changed. That’s the point of hiring him.

The benchmark is one transporter over

The harder part of the job is the teammate. Alex Palou won the 2026 title with 631 points, six wins, eight poles and 673 laps led. Lundgaard finished 96 points behind him while driving for a different team, and the fight for second behind Palou was far tighter than the fight for first, as the final standings made plain.

At Ganassi, that gap stops being an abstract championship number and becomes shared data. Every session, Lundgaard’s telemetry will sit next to the car that just won the championship. Palou himself joined Ganassi in 2021 and won the title in his first season with the team, which is exactly the development story Chip Ganassi pointed to when he said the team believes Lundgaard can be “the next driver” it turns into a contender. Kyffin Simpson, 13th in 2026 with 327 points, completes the three-car lineup.

The number stays. So does the money.

Dixon ran the No. 9 for all but one of the past 24 seasons, the exception being 2004, when he carried No. 1 after his 2003 title. At Arrow McLaren he’ll drive No. 6. The No. 9 stays behind at Ganassi, and so does PNC Bank, which has partnered with the team since 2013 and been primary sponsor on the No. 9 since 2018.

That sponsor continuity is the quiet business story here. PNC could have treated Dixon’s exit as a natural end point. Instead it stayed with the car, the number and the organization through a driver change. For a team, that’s the ideal outcome: brand equity attached to the entry, not to one person who can leave. Ganassi gets to reset its driver without resetting its funding.

What to watch before St. Petersburg

Lundgaard’s first Honda miles in Ganassi colors are the obvious offseason checkpoint, along with how quickly the No. 9 crew adapts to a driver with a different set of preferences. Then comes the ovals: Lundgaard named the Indianapolis 500 in his own statement, and it’s the one area where his résumé still trails the drivers Arrow McLaren kept.

The 2027 season opens March 7 on the streets of St. Petersburg. From that first weekend, the most useful comparison on the grid won’t be Lundgaard against Palou. It’ll be Lundgaard in Dixon’s old car against Dixon in, effectively, Lundgaard’s old team. Both organizations will get a full season of receipts.

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Elle Puckett

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Elle Puckett covers Formula 1, IndyCar, and endurance racing, with a focus on championship analysis and long-form storytelling.

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