Arrow McLaren Re-Signed With Chevy for an Engine Nobody Has Raced Yet

Most engine deals get signed on the strength of what an engine has already done. The multi-year extension Arrow McLaren and Chevrolet announced on October 6 is a wager on something nobody has raced yet: the 2.4-liter twin-turbo hybrid V6 that goes into IndyCar’s new IR-28 in 2028, an engine whose final horsepower targets the series hasn’t even handed to the manufacturers.

That’s the real story here. Not the renewal itself, which nobody in the paddock seriously expected to go the other way, but the timing. McLaren has tied its next era to Chevy at the exact moment the scoreboard says Honda, and at the exact moment McLaren is filling two of its three full-time cars with drivers who spent 2026 in Honda-powered machinery.

What was actually confirmed

The extension covers Arrow McLaren’s engine supply from the 2027 NTT IndyCar Series season onward. Neither side disclosed the length or the commercial terms. It continues a relationship that dates to 2020, when McLaren Racing joined Schmidt Peterson Motorsports full time to form Arrow McLaren SP. By the team’s count, the Chevy-powered program has since produced 14 wins, 54 podiums and 13 poles.

McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown called the deal “key to our overall goal of winning both the INDYCAR championship and the Indy 500.” Team principal Tony Kanaan said the relationship with Chevy is “the strongest it’s ever been.” GM’s Eric Warren, vice president of global motorsports competition, described Arrow McLaren as “an important part of Chevrolet’s INDYCAR program.” Nobody was expected to say anything else, so the quotes matter less than the numbers sitting behind them.

Chevy’s best team in a Honda year

Honda clinched the 2026 manufacturers’ championship at Milwaukee on August 30, its second straight title after Chevrolet’s run of three in a row from 2022 through 2024. Alex Palou sealed his fifth championship and fourth in a row that same weekend, and finished 86 points clear of Kyle Kirkwood.

Run the final 2026 standings by engine and the split is Honda 10 wins, Chevrolet eight. Arrow McLaren drivers scored five of those eight: Pato O’Ward won three, including both Milwaukee races, and Christian Lundgaard won two. The two of them also finished third and fourth in the championship, ahead of every Penske car. The team adds that it had the lead Chevrolet finisher in 11 of 18 races, that Lundgaard was the only driver in the field to complete every lap of the season, and that O’Ward missed just one.

Read that as leverage. In a season where Chevy’s own flagship Penske squad didn’t produce its best result, McLaren carried most of the bowtie’s wins. IndyCar has two engine suppliers, so McLaren’s alternative was always going to be Honda. That it didn’t go there suggests the team believes what Chevy is building for 2028 matters more than what Honda did in 2026.

Why sign before the 2028 engine has a number

IndyCar unveiled the IR-28 on July 28. The Dallara chassis is roughly 100 pounds lighter than the current car, with a 2.4-liter twin-turbo V6 rated at up to 760 horsepower, an Xtrac gearbox that sheds 25 pounds, and a new battery-based energy storage system holding about 14 times the energy of the supercapacitor used today. Alexander Rossi in an Ed Carpenter Racing Chevy and Palou in a Ganassi Honda handled validation running at Indianapolis, on the road course in early August and the oval in early September. Rossi’s uneventful oval laps were exactly what the engineers wanted.

According to IndyCar’s own test follow-up, the next step is the series giving Honda and Chevrolet horsepower targets derived from that test data. That is the window McLaren just locked itself into.

Here’s why that matters on track. With a spec Dallara chassis, team-to-team differences in the IR-28 era will come down heavily to how well each operation integrates the power unit: cooling layout, engine calibration, and above all hybrid deployment. Fourteen times more stored energy turns deployment from a push-to-pass afterthought into a genuine strategy lever, on restarts, on fuel-saving stints and in qualifying. The teams whose engineers work beside the manufacturer’s software people while those maps are being written will start 2028 with a head start. Teams that switch suppliers at a regulation reset spend the first year learning a new toolset while everyone else is optimizing. Kanaan’s point about engineers collaborating “during this period of major technical change” was the most useful line in the release.

The Honda-bred lineup Chevy now has to win with

Now for the irony. Arrow McLaren’s 2027 roster pairs O’Ward with Scott Dixon and Felix Rosenqvist, and both of the newcomers spent 2026 in Honda cars. Dixon leaves Chip Ganassi Racing after 24 full-time seasons, six championships and 58 of his 59 career wins. Rosenqvist, who drove for McLaren from 2021 to 2023, returns from Meyer Shank Racing as the reigning Indianapolis 500 winner. He took that race by 0.0233 seconds, the closest finish in its history, over David Malukas’s Penske Chevrolet.

So Chevy’s most important team has hired the man who beat Chevy at Indy by two-hundredths of a second, plus the most decorated Honda driver of his generation. Brown’s stated targets are the title and the 500; his two new signings between them hold six championships and two Indy 500 wins (Dixon’s in 2008, Rosenqvist’s this May). Dixon will race the No. 6 and Rosenqvist the No. 7, and Dixon’s Indy 500 sponsorship is already sorted.

Traffic runs the other way, too. Lundgaard, Chevy’s every-lap man in 2026, takes over Dixon’s No. 9 at Ganassi next year, which puts him in a Honda. Chevrolet loses its most reliable finisher of the season and gains two drivers who already know what Honda’s current engine does better. That kind of reference point is not nothing for Chevy’s engineers.

What to watch in 2027

The 2027 season is the last for the current car, which makes it a transition year with a real deadline. Watch three things. First, how quickly Dixon and Rosenqvist adapt to Chevy’s power delivery and hybrid behavior, because every lap of feedback they give now feeds the 2028 program. Second, whether Chevy can break Honda’s manufacturers’ streak before everyone resets to new engines, since entering a new formula on a three-year losing run would change the conversation in Detroit. Third, how the horsepower targets IndyCar sets for 2028 land, and whether either manufacturer signals it needs more time to reach them.

McLaren has picked its side for that fight. If the 2.4-liter Chevy arrives strong, this extension will look like foresight. If Honda’s run carries into the new formula, the team will have three drivers who know exactly what they gave up.

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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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