McLaughlin stays fast, wins first race of IndyCar doubleheader at Iowa

NEWTON, Iowa (AP) — Scott McLaughlin said he didn’t feel like he was an IndyCar driver until he got a win on an oval track.

He reached that goal on Saturday night

McLaughlin continued his fast weekend at Iowa Speedway on Saturday night, winning the first race of the IndyCar Series doubleheader for his first victory on an oval track.

McLaughlin led 164 of the 250 laps, winning by nearly a half-second over second-place driver Pato O’Ward at the 0.875-mile oval.

“I just checked off one of the biggest goals I had this year, personally,” McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin, in his fourth full IndyCar season, came into this weekend with five wins on road courses and street courses in the series.

“I felt like an open-wheel driver, but an IndyCar driver is someone who can win on all three race tracks,” McLaughlin said. “Thankfully, I’m very proud to say I’ve won an oval now as well as a road and a street course. Yeah, proud moment for me.”

McLaughlin had the strongest car all weekend. He had the fastest time in Friday’s practice, set the track single-lap record in qualifying Saturday afternoon on his second lap to earn the pole for Sunday’s race, and started on the outside of the first row of this race after posting the second-fastest first lap during qualifying.

And he was the fastest out of the pits when it counted during two caution-flag stops.

Colton Herta, the pole-sitter for the race, led the first 86 laps, but lost the lead by a narrow margin when McLaughlin beat him out of the pits during a caution-flag round of pit stops. Herta tried to get by on the restart, but McLaughlin was able to hold him off.

“I was saying, ‘I think I got him,’” McLaughlin said of taking the lead coming out of the pits. “I believed I was in front of him. It must have been by a whisker. I don’t know what it was.”

McLaughlin was leading by more than three seconds when series points leader Alex Palou crashed on Lap 177. Herta, who had just pitted before the Palou crash, went a lap down, and McLaughlin kept his lead after the pit stops during the caution flag.

“At the end of the day, I knew I did the job from my perspective, but it was a team win,” McLaughlin said. “They got me the lead, and I was able to show how good that car was, just controlling the pace from the front.”

McLaughlin gave Team Penske its eighth IndyCar win at Iowa Speedway. It was the second win for a Penske car at the track this season — Ryan Blaney won the NASCAR Cup Series race in June.

“Blaney texted me and he said, ‘We’re corn brothers now,’” McLaughlin said.

Josef Newgarden, McLaughlin’s teammate who swept last year’s doubleheader, finished third after starting 22nd. Scott Dixon was fourth, and Rinus VeeKay was fifth.

“You can’t start 22nd,” Newgarden said. “In other years, I would have been OK starting 22nd. This was almost the kiss of death starting that far back.”

The concern, after the partial repaving of the track in May, that there would only be one racing groove proved to be true until late in the race. The only change in the top 10 through the first 80 laps of the race came when Santino Ferrucci, running fifth at the time, had to serve a stop-and-go penalty for being out of line on a restart.

“I’d be lying if I would say I wasn’t bummed with how we raced,” O’Ward said. “It was really tough getting that second lane working. We had a very strong car, a car that was capable of winning. There was just no way to go to get around a car.”

“It was just calculated risk tonight,” Newgarden said. “You were flirting with disaster. It wasn’t a given, there wasn’t the real estate to use. You were just risking the car every time you would move offline to get around somebody. I did it a couple of times, but I had to. We had to take some risks to move forward.”

Palou finished 23rd. He has a 37-point lead over O’Ward, 43 points over Will Power and 44 over Dixon. McLaughlin moved up to fifth place, 59 points back.