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Scott McLaughlin enters his fifth NTT INDYCAR SERIES season with a championship mindset. That’s not new, but this is the first time entering a new season racing in America that he has all the attributes needed to hoist the Astor Cup championship trophy on Labor Day weekend at Nashville Superspeedway.
McLaughlin has been chipping away at becoming an all-around open-wheel driver after a successful career racing full-bodied touring cars in the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship, where he won three championships.
New Zealand native McLaughlin climbed from 14th in points as a rookie in 2021 to fourth in 2022, when he also became a first-time victor. He finished third in points the last two seasons and earned the NTT P1 Award for last year’s 108th Running of the Indianapolis 500 presented by Gainbridge to go along in 2024 with his first two oval victories, at Iowa Speedway and Milwaukee Mile.
The comfort of knowing what to expect in the series, how to win at every discipline of racetrack and settling into the American dream provide McLaughlin the tools to succeed.
McLaughlin closed on a house in North Carolina last offseason and became a dad this offseason. Does that equate being a champion next offseason?
“I feel like I’ve lost all my habits that I had in touring cars,” he said during INDYCAR Content Days. “I feel very – with my fitness and all that stuff, my neck and stuff that is outside of the car, I feel very comfortable with.
“I also know a lot of faces in here. I know what this day is all about. I know what airports to fly into. It’s just like so many different things that you come to a new place that you forget how easy it is.
“But I feel a lot more comfortable now.”
McLaughlin doesn’t describe 2025 as a championship-or-bust season, but he expects to catch Alex Palou to halt the Spaniard’s pursuit of becoming the first driver since Dario Franchitti (2009-11) to win three consecutive championships.
Copying what Palou did the last two years isn’t the target. McLaughlin is confident the speed in his No. 3 Team Penske Chevrolet was as fast, if not faster, than Palou’s No. 10 Chip Ganassi Racing Honda. His average starting position was 6.4 compared to 8.4 for Palou. McLaughlin had three wins and led 637 laps, while Palou had two wins and 263 laps out front.
Being a champion over the course of a 17-race season is about consistency from start to finish and not throwing away good finishes with great race cars or being too aggressive with a car that’s not capable of a top-five result.
“I think you’ve just got to do it your own way,” McLaughlin said. “As much as you can plan and think about what you can do and what you can’t, we all know the right path is just consistent results, with a few wins along the way. I think you need a couple wins. But consistency is key, and we all know that.
“But you’ve got to eliminate those big bad results, and we had a few of them last year, which really hurt.”
McLaughlin pointed to three instances in 2024 where he threw away a championship. He crashed by himself on the streets of Detroit (finished 20th) after starting fourth. He had incidents with teammate Will Power at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca and in Toronto. He started seventh and fourth, respectively, in those races and was competing for spots well inside the top 10 when those incidents dropped him to 21st and 16th, respectively.
Those mistakes cost a lot of points.
“We can all learn from that and get better,” he said.
