McLaren should see a painful defeat to Palou as a big victory

Pato O'Ward's Thermal IndyCar weekend went from lamenting his recent qualifying performance to scoring an outrageous pole position, from looking like a dominant winner about to end a 49-year 'drought' to another painful second place.

It’s fair to say O'Ward is box office. He's so important for IndyCar because of the entertainment he brings and the fanbase he's cultivated.

After he lost a race win which seemed buttoned up before a fight with Alex Palou on Sunday, we're now left to piece back together the jigsaw of a crucial weekend which told us so much about O'Ward, his McLaren team, his fight to adapt to a key change this year, his current frame of mind and just how inevitably dominant Palou appears in 2025.

Qualifying 'turnaround'

O'Ward was the fifth-best full-time IndyCar qualifier in 2024 and has rarely been out of that top five in his entire IndyCar career. But that didn't prevent him saying he had been disappointed last year with his performances.

That was compounded in St Petersburg, which teams tackled with the new hybrid unit for the first time this year. The device was introduced at Mid-Ohio last July, which means the first seven races of 2025 are still new territory for it.

Like with the introduction of the aeroscreen in 2020 - albeit to a lesser extent for most teams - the hybrid has altered the weight distribution of the car and therefore the set-up philosophy. At the very least, it's forced major tweaks that have impacted how the car is set up.

Any driver who likes a bit more play in the rear end has found the added weight has made the rear more secure and introduced an undercurrent of understeer. Or, in O'Ward speak, the cars "just plough like pigs".

See, I told you: box office.

O'Ward is one of those drivers who enjoys an amount of oversteer as part of his set-up and it's clear the hybrid has hit him harder than many other drivers in the field.

"Maybe I figured out how to drive quickly again, I don't know," he smiled after qualifying on pole and being asked about a turnaround.

"It's been a struggle because Mid-Ohio was the first race that we did with the hybrid, and it was great for me [he won the race]. But all the ones after that, you can't take the car, or at least I can't, where I used to have it.

"You guys can probably see it in the onboards. It was a car that was very on the edge. It was just right there where it was almost too much, but I could make it work without a doubt in qualifying.

"Even if it was just one lap, even if we didn't quite have the pace, I knew I could take it there and extract the laptime that truly wasn't available for it.

"The problem now is with this hybrid is we've got so much more weight and the car is a lot lazier and it just can't do that anymore.

"It's been a bit of an adjustment. I’ve had to change my driving style, or the approach to how you extract laptime from the car is very different now because you can't have it strong at the front. It's a snowball effect.

PATRICIO O'WARD.

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