Pato O'Ward will start his seventh Indianapolis 500 on Sunday as McLaren fields four cars in the 33-strong field, a full-throttle bid to end a 50-year drought that has kept the team from winning the race since Johnny Rutherford's 1976 victory.
McLaren arrives in unusually deep form. O'Ward, coming off a 2025 season in which he won twice and finished second in the standings, is joined by Christian Lundgaard, who scored his first IndyCar win for McLaren two weeks ago at a road course event at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The team also points to the wider momentum the company enjoyed last year: McLaren won both world championships under Zak Brown's ownership, a line the team now leans on as it chases an elusive oval prize. Rutherford, whose 1976 win remains McLaren’s last at Indianapolis, will serve as a McLaren team ambassador for the 2026 race and has praised the build-up as "perfect," adding that "I’ve been there and done that, you know" and "It’s an opportunity to relive it, and to enjoy the team company and the team."
The present push is plainly tied to Zak Brown’s long engagement with American open-wheel racing. Brown became McLaren Racing's CEO at the end of 2016 and lived in Indianapolis for 20 years; team insiders call the IndyCar program Brown's 'baby.' McLaren’s history at Indianapolis is checkered: the team entered Fernando Alonso in a one-off Indianapolis 500 effort in 2017 with Andretti, then three years later bought into Schmidt Peterson Motorsports. That partnership produced heartbreak as well—Fernando Alonso failed to qualify for the 2019 Indianapolis 500 in a McLaren entry—evidence that even well-resourced attempts can come up short.
The friction in McLaren’s story is obvious. The organization has converted recent speed into tangible wins elsewhere and is fielding more cars in the race than it has in years, yet the Indianapolis 500 remains resistant to momentum alone. Brown put the relationship plainly: "Indianapolis is kind of a second home," he said, and added that "The racing that I grew up with was Indy car racing." Those personal stakes sharpen expectations, but past efforts—including Alonso's failed 2019 qualification—underscore that pedigree and resources do not guarantee success on the Brickyard oval.
Still, the facts that matter this weekend favor McLaren more strongly than they have in decades: four entries in a 33-car field, a driver who has been among the series' best in 2025, a rookie-turned-winner in Lundgaard, the moral and historical weight of Rutherford as ambassador, and a leadership team that points to unprecedented championship success in the past year. Brown framed the moment without hedging: "And here we are, coming off the most successful year the team’s ever had under our ownership," he said. If McLaren does not end its half-century drought in 2026, the explanation will be performance on the track alone; if it does, the victory will read as the culmination of a deliberate, decade-long campaign by Brown to restore McLaren as an American racing powerhouse.
