Pato O'Ward will start the 110th running of the Indianapolis 500 in a chassis with a story of its own — the backup car he used to win his most recent IndyCar Series race — after his primary Arrow McLaren No. 5 Chevrolet was destroyed in a three-car practice crash earlier in the week.
The Mexican has spent the past 12 months trying to convert what was, by any measure, a defining 2025 — runner-up at the 500, a deep run in the championship — into the missing scalp on his Brickyard resume. That conversion is now complicated by hardware and circumstance: O'Ward, Alexander Rossi and Romain Grosjean were all caught up in the same Monday smash, with O'Ward's primary chassis declared a write-off and Rossi requiring a hand procedure that briefly threatened his start.
The backup car comes with its own personality. Arrow McLaren has confirmed that the chassis O'Ward will race on Sunday is the same machine he piloted to victory in his last IndyCar success, a result that snapped a podium run. The team's choice to lean on that car rather than rebuild around a fresh tub is partly logistics, partly superstition.
In a paddock exchange caught in the team's pre-race media briefing, Felix Rosenqvist captured the moment with a familiar Brickyard barb. "It's got a name. It's a she. She's got quite the resume," O'Ward said of the car. "It's going back to his ex, basically," Rosenqvist quipped.
The numbers behind O'Ward's Indy 500 record explain why even a backup-car start does little to dent his status as a logical pre-race pick. He has finished in the top six in three of his last four 500s, led laps in each, and was the only driver able to genuinely shadow Alex Palou and Josef Newgarden in the closing stages of recent runnings. His 2025 runner-up finish to Palou — the Chip Ganassi Racing star's maiden Indy 500 — was the latest "almost" in a career increasingly defined by them at this circuit.
"I can't wait to get the green flag, have the best view that I've ever had starting an Indy 500," O'Ward had said earlier in the build-up. "There's a lot of new things." Speaking last year about why he keeps coming back, he was franker: he had had his "heart broken here," he wrote in an open letter to the race, "but it also fuels me."
The race itself sets up as a Honda-versus-Chevrolet engine fight, with Palou again on pole and the Penske trio of Newgarden, Scott McLaughlin and Will Power firmly in the conversation. Newgarden, twice an Indy 500 winner already, has framed the weekend as a chance to launch what he called "a full attack rebound" after a difficult start to 2026. McLaren's hopes effectively run through O'Ward and Christian Lundgaard, with the Danish addition still chasing his first Brickyard start of true championship consequence.
Weather will likely shape the strategy. A 30-plus percent rain probability hangs over Sunday afternoon, and the timing of any caution-laden restart will be critical. O'Ward has acknowledged the storm risk could compress his options, but is unmoved on the bigger picture. "If we do our jobs correctly, close to zero" was Rossi's blunt verdict on how much margin teams have to play with in such conditions — a statement that arguably applies equally to O'Ward's day.
Whether or not Sunday delivers the elusive scalp, McLaren's longest-serving driver heads into the race with the same belief that has carried him through every Brickyard near-miss to date: that the 500 owes the team nothing, but is increasingly inviting an answer.
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