David Malukas Is Second in IndyCar and Has Never Won a Race
Welcome to the Happy Hour Racing IndyCar Race Preview. There is no race this weekend, so we are using the off week to tell the best story in the paddock right now. The season picks back up August 9 at Portland.
The Short Version
IndyCar is on its last off week of 2026, and the standings say something strange. David Malukas is second in the championship with 374 points. He has also never won an IndyCar race in 73 career starts. The 24-year-old from Chicago spent two years watching his career get taken apart by bad luck and bad timing, and now he is in a Team Penske car outscoring every driver in the series except Alex Palou. With six races left, that is the story worth following.
The Winless Guy in Second Place
Start with the number that does not make sense. Malukas has run 73 IndyCar races and won none of them. He has one pole, and he got it this March at Phoenix, in his second start for Penske. Before this season he had led 128 laps in four years of racing. This season alone he has led 189.
That is the whole point. Malukas did not suddenly get fast. He finally got equipment, and the results moved the second he did. Twelve starts into 2026 he has six top fives, ten top tens and five podiums.
The gap to the front is real. Palou sits on 457 points and five wins, chasing a fourth straight title, and nobody is catching that without help. But right behind him is a four-point margin between Malukas and Kyle Kirkwood, who has 370 and an Andretti Global car that has been on the podium all year. Second in an IndyCar championship is not a trophy anyone puts on a shelf. It is the closest fight left on the board.
Two Years of Getting Wrecked by Everything Except Racing
Go back to September 2023. Malukas had just finished two seasons at Dale Coyne Racing, where he was quick enough to put the car second at Gateway as a rookie. Arrow McLaren signed him to a multiyear deal. That was the break.
In February 2024, before he ever raced the car, he went down on a mountain bike, tore ligaments in his left wrist and dislocated it. He missed the start of the season. McLaren released him on April 29 without him turning a competitive lap for the team. He picked up nine mid-season starts at Meyer Shank Racing filling in for Tom Blomqvist, then spent 2025 at A.J. Foyt Racing and finished 11th in points.
That Foyt year is what got him the Penske call. He put the No. 4 second at the 2025 Indianapolis 500, and that is the kind of result owners remember. Penske signed him in September 2025 to take over the No. 12 from two-time champion Will Power, who moved to Andretti Global. Replacing Will Power in a Penske car is not a soft landing. Malukas led his teammates in points inside five races.
He Has Already Been Two Hundredths From Winning the Biggest One
May 24 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the reason this whole thing stings. Malukas led the 110th Indianapolis 500 out of the final restart. He had it. Felix Rosenqvist came back at him on the front straight and beat him to the line by 0.0233 seconds, the closest finish in the 110-year history of the race. It took 70 lead changes to get there, a record for the event.
So Malukas has now finished second in the Indianapolis 500 twice, in back-to-back years, for two different teams. That is a strange kind of resume. It is also the clearest possible evidence that the win is a matter of when.
Nashville Was His Whole Career Compressed Into One Weekend
If you only watch one Malukas race back, make it the last one. On Saturday at Nashville Superspeedway he lost the No. 12 in Turn 2 during opening practice and hit the wall rear-first hard enough that the steering wheel came off in his hands. He went to the hospital.
Trouble for the No. 12!
— NTT INDYCAR SERIES (@IndyCar) July 18, 2026
A heavy impact for David Malukas during Practice 1 at @NashvilleSuperS.
UPDATE: David Malukas is awake, alert and in good spirits while continuing to undergo evaluation following today's practice incident at Nashville Superspeedway, INDYCAR Deputy Medical Director Dr. Angela Fiege announced.
— NTT INDYCAR SERIES (@IndyCar) July 18, 2026
Scans came back clean apart from a badly bruised right knee. He missed qualifying entirely. The team took an unapproved engine change, which added a nine-spot grid penalty on top of it. He started 25th, dead last, on a hurt leg.
He then led 59 laps of the 225 and finished third. "I've never driven so hard in my life," he said afterward. That drive is what moved him into second in the standings. Hospital on Saturday, podium on Monday, second in the championship by Monday night.
Storylines to Watch Over the Last Six Races
The run home is six races in five weeks. Portland on August 9, then Markham on the 16th, Washington D.C. on the 23rd, a Milwaukee Mile doubleheader on August 29 and 30, and the finale at Laguna Seca on September 6, back in its old closing spot for the first time since 2023.
Portland is not obvious ground for Malukas. Palou has won there twice and led 106 laps in five career starts, and the champion has openly said his team has not run a road-course test all season and badly wants one before the run home. What Portland does give everyone is chaos. The tight chicane at Turn 1 has produced more first-lap wreckage than any strategy call ever has, and a driver who needs a win more than he needs points is exactly the driver who takes a swing there.
The Fan Debate
Here is the argument worth having before Portland. Would you rather finish 2026 second in the championship with no wins, or fifth with a race win in the trophy case? Half the paddock will tell you consistency earns the next contract. The other half will tell you nobody remembers who ran second. Malukas has spent two years being the guy things happened to. A win changes how his story gets told. A runner-up championship does not.
The Bottom Line
Six races left, and the most interesting driver in IndyCar is not the one about to win his fourth straight title. It is the 24-year-old sitting second in points who has never once stood on the top step, is four points ahead of Kyle Kirkwood, and has already lost the Indianapolis 500 by two hundredths of a second. Somebody is going to have to beat him to a checkered flag before September 6, and he is running out of patience.
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The Indianapolis 500 is where this story keeps turning, so that is where the gear lives. Everything below is in stock and ready to ship from the Happy Hour Racing store.
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