Scott McLaughlin celebrates with the Team Penske crew after ending a 36-race winless streak at Laguna Seca. Photo: INDYCAR.com
Alex Palou’s margin over second place in the final 2026 NTT INDYCAR SERIES standings was 86 points. The entire gap separating second through fifth was 31. Read that twice if it doesn’t sound right the first time: the five-time champion’s cushion over his closest challenger was nearly three times larger than the spread covering four other cars and three other teams in a fight that went to the final lap of the season. Palou’s coronation was never really the story this year. It was over the moment he crossed the line 10th at Milwaukee. What came after that was the only thing left to decide.
Entering the finale at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, INDYCAR had already flagged where the drama actually lived: Kyle Kirkwood, Christian Lundgaard, and Pato O’Ward were separated by a combined four points in the race for second, with Team Penske’s David Malukas sitting further back in fifth as a mathematical longshot. Ninety-five laps later, the order had settled, but not by as much as the final gaps might suggest.
Kirkwood Won the Argument by Refusing to Take the Bait
Kirkwood arrived at the finale boxed in between two Arrow McLarens and left with room to breathe: a runner-up finish behind Scott McLaughlin’s dominant win was worth 40 points, enough to secure second place in the championship with an 86-point gap back to Palou and a 10-point cushion over Lundgaard in third. Ten points is not a landslide. Nothing in this top five was. But it was enough, and how Kirkwood built it says more about Andretti Global’s season than his two wins do.
He spent the second half of the race mirroring McLaughlin’s pit sequence stop for stop, then watched his deficit shrink from nearly four seconds down to 1.2 by lap 72 after switching to Firestone’s faster, shorter-lived alternate tire. That’s usually the moment a challenger commits to the risk. Kirkwood didn’t. “We played it safe there,” he said. “Second place is best of the rest.”
That’s not a driver settling. It’s a driver who understood that his best championship finish in three INDYCAR seasons was worth more than a low-percentage swing at a race win that wouldn’t move the standings at all.
Arrow McLaren’s Finale Cost It Nothing and Everything
Lundgaard and O’Ward didn’t really lose the fight for second at Laguna Seca — they lost the fight for third and fourth between themselves. Lundgaard, who Arrow McLaren chose not to re-sign for 2027 in favor of a three-car lineup built around Indianapolis 500 winners, finished sixth in his farewell start and still held third overall, 13 points clear of O’Ward, whose own day unraveled into an 11th-place finish. It’s an odd way for a season to end: Arrow McLaren’s best championship result this year belonged to the driver it’s replacing.
Buried under both finishes is the number that actually defines Lundgaard’s year. He was the only driver in the series to complete every one of the season’s 2,462 laps, joining Tony Kanaan, Simon Pagenaud, Josef Newgarden, Will Power, and a two-time Scott Dixon as the only drivers in series history to finish a full season without missing a lap. He also led the field in points scored on road and street courses, winning at Indianapolis and Road America and finishing second twice more. Of Palou, the driver he was chasing on those same road courses a year ago, Lundgaard said only that “he was by far the guy to beat on road courses” — before adding that Arrow McLaren had closed that gap by the second half of 2026.
That’s the strange part Arrow McLaren will spend the offseason sitting with: arguably its best road-course season in years, delivered by the driver it just decided to replace.
Malukas Is Playing an Entirely Different Game
If Kirkwood’s fight was about restraint and Lundgaard’s was about a farewell tour, Malukas’s fifth-place season was about survival. His first year at Team Penske produced four second-place finishes, including the Indianapolis 500, and zero wins — a line that flatters and frustrates in equal measure. He’s also been racing since early July with a wrist injury that turned every Sunday into a pain-management exercise as much as a points chase. “It’s more just surviving,” he said at Laguna Seca.
That he still out-scored a three-time race winner in O’Ward across the year’s closing stretch says as much about Penske’s execution and Malukas’s tolerance for discomfort as it does about anyone’s raw pace.
What the Gap Actually Sets Up for 2027
None of this touched the top of the standings, because nothing was going to. Palou closed out a fifth title in six seasons — and a record-tying fourth in a row for Chip Ganassi Racing –– with an eighth-place drive at Laguna Seca that had all the tension of a lap of honor. But the 31 points separating second through fifth are the more useful number heading into 2027, because they represent the actual distance the field has to close, and none of the three ways it got covered this year — Kirkwood’s caution, Lundgaard’s consistency, Malukas’s endurance — looked much like outright speed. Andretti Global, Arrow McLaren, and Team Penske each found one piece of the formula. Nobody found all of it, which is why the fight for second is still the most honest measure of how far this field has to go — and it starts again at St. Petersburg in March.
About the Author
