After a strong runner-up finish in Saturday’s IndyCar race at Iowa Speedway, Scott McLaughlin secured a fifth place finish in Sunday’s Hy-Vee One Step 250.
Starting second, McLaughlin remained near pole-sitter and early leader Will Power but fell to third as eventual race winner Josef Newgarden overtook both drivers in one move exiting Turn 2 on Lap 31 of 250.
McLaughlin moved back up to second shortly thereafter and remained there through the vast majority of the race, but knew he had to do something different to try and overtake Newgarden.
When Sting Ray Robb’s left-rear tyre fell off after his Lap 154 pit stop, McLaughlin and his crew decided to pit for new tyres, along with Pato O’Ward, Alex Palou, Kyle Kirkwood, and Romain Grosjean.
“We just had to do something different, man,” McLaughlin said.
“I don’t know, we were just trying to do something off-sequence, we knew that we were basically the same as Josef [Newgarden] if we were together.
“Well, we had to sort of go off-sequence slightly; I mean, that Caution that we took that no one else took was probably the biggest change.
“We netted two positions less, we were second ended up fourth, and then obviously the restart we were dead anyway.”
Restarting in ninth, the 2019 Bathurst 1000 winner started to pick off the positions in front of him, moving back up to fourth place before the top three pitted on Laps 195 and 196.
McLaughlin pitted from the lead on Lap 197 and remained in fourth through much of the final stint.
A late yellow flag for Ryan Hunter-Reay’s wall contact on Lap 240 gave McLaughlin one more shot at challenging for the lead. However, Palou moved around the outside of the #3 Team Penske machine in Turn 1, dropping McLaughlin to fifth.
McLaughlin claimed fourth from Rosenqvist that same lap, but the Swedish racer took back fourth position on the backstretch on the penultimate lap, leaving McLaughlin in fifth for the final lap and a half of the race.
As lapped cars passed McLaughlin left and right during the final lap of the race, it took every bit of talent for the three-time Supercars champion to not crash his car.
“I had run out of tools,” McLaughlin said.
“I was fully stiff on my front bar, I was fully soft on my rear bar and I was all the way to the right on my weight jacker and really just had zero tools left and I was just driving this thing.
“It was fun, I learned a lot.
“It’s not fun when you restart with the whole field behind you but it is what it is and I’m learning every lap around these ovals and what I learned this weekend was huge and I can’t wait to come back here in the future.”
McLaughlin has gained a lot in his form on oval racing in the IndyCar Series.
While it is true that the Kiwi finished second in his first IndyCar oval race at Texas Motor Speedway in 2021, there are many differences between super speedways like Texas and bullrings like Iowa, where he also had a podium in the second race of the 2022 double-header weekend.
“I’m so confident around the top now,” McLaughlin said.
“Know when to find it, when to go there, like that’s what I really struggled with last year on the short ovals was like getting up high and trusting the car and trusting what it’s going to do and I’m super excited for the next short ovals.
“Hope there’s more coming on the calendar, which I hear there is, and yeah, just learned a lot.
“But like I said yesterday, I owe a lot to Josef. He helped me a lot.
“I’ve still got a long way to go obviously to try and beat him, but certainly think the promise is there to do it and I think he knows that too.”
McLaughlin is fifth in IndyCar points, one point behind fourth-ranked Marcus Ericsson and 148 points behind Palou in the championship lead.
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