Pato O'Ward has delivered a blunt assessment of Arrow McLaren's 2026 title bid: the team is in the middle of a painful "transformation," and unless it starts converting its strongest weekends into wins, the championship is already slipping out of reach.
The Mexican is chasing a runaway Alex Palou, whose Chip Ganassi machine has set a relentless standard at the front of the NTT IndyCar Series. O'Ward, who has spoken openly about Arrow McLaren reshaping itself behind the scenes, framed the team's current form as a deliberate, if uncomfortable, phase.
"With transformation you can expect some other areas to be maybe a little bit more trouble for a short-term of time," he said. "I think right now we are in that transformation, which is why maybe sometimes it can feel a little bit kind of like, 'Hey, you know, I feel like we've gone backwards.'"
He reached for an analogy to explain the dip. "Sometimes you got to go backwards in order to go forwards, take a bigger step forward," he said. "I think that's the best way I can explain it."
O'Ward was at pains to stress that effort is not the issue, singling out team principal Tony Kanaan and CEO Zak Brown. "It's not a lack of effort at all. I know everyone here is working so hard. I know T.K. is pushing so hard along with Zak (Brown), and everybody that's leading this team is working extremely, extremely hard," he said. "But we're also realists, and we understand that some things do take time."
"Obviously Honda is a great competitor of ours. Team Chevy has been so helpful to us in honestly everything that we've asked from them," he said. "I think right now Honda's got the upper hand, but doesn't mean that we can't catch up." He added: "I think right now we're still kind of trying to play catch-up, especially in these street courses where Honda always has been the lead."
If there was defiance in his diagnosis, there was also a stark warning about the margin for error against Palou. "We've just got to maximize every weekend, man," O'Ward said. "They've obviously done a way better job than we have pretty much everywhere almost."
The bottom line, he conceded, is that solid points days will not be enough. "So we need to raise our game, we need to stay focused, and we need to make sure that we not only are maximizing weekends, but when those are maximized weekends, they've got to be wins and podiums, because otherwise, I really do think we have no shot."
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/pato-oward-arrow-mclaren-transformation-title-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
