Scott McLaughlin's No. 3 Team Penske Chevrolet on track at Mid-Ohio in the 2024 IndyCar season

Scott McLaughlin: 8 IndyCar Wins, the Fastest Indy 500 Pole Ever, and a Comeback Season

November 05, 2026

Nov 05, 2026 · 6 min read·

Scott McLaughlin: 8 IndyCar Wins, the Fastest Indy 500 Pole Ever, and a Comeback Season

Welcome to the Happy Hour Racing IndyCar Driver Spotlight - where we pull one driver into the garage, look at the career, and tell you what makes them tick. This week: the number 3.

Scott McLaughlin's No. 3 Team Penske Chevrolet at speed during the 2024 IndyCar race at Mid-Ohio — Scott McLaughlin's No. 3 Team Penske Chevrolet on track at Mid-Ohio in 2024. (Photo: YellowstoneTrinity, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Short Version

Scott McLaughlin is a three-time Australian Supercars champion from New Zealand who moved to America, climbed into a Team Penske IndyCar, and turned himself into one of the fastest qualifiers in the sport. He holds the fastest pole run in Indianapolis 500 history at 234.220 mph. He has 8 IndyCar wins and 14 poles in 103 starts. And in 2026 he closed the book on the worst two years of his career by winning the season finale from pole and leading almost the whole thing.

From Christchurch to the Gold Coast to Indianapolis

Scott Thomas McLaughlin was born June 10, 1993 in Christchurch, New Zealand. His family moved to the Gold Coast in Australia when he was nine, and he had already been karting since 1999. That path led him into Supercars, Australia's big touring car series, and that is where he became a star.

He won three straight Supercars championships in 2018, 2019 and 2020, with 56 race wins and 76 poles along the way. The 2019 season was the one people still talk about. He won 18 races in a single year, a series record, and he won the Bathurst 1000 with co-driver Alexandre Premat. He had nothing left to prove in a touring car.

So Roger Penske moved him. McLaughlin made his IndyCar debut late in 2020, went full time in 2021, and took Rookie of the Year honors at that year's Indianapolis 500 after finishing 20th. That put him in some good company. The three Penske drivers who won Indy 500 Rookie of the Year before him were Mark Donohue, Rick Mears and Helio Castroneves, and all three went on to win the race.

Signature Moments

His first IndyCar win came in the 2022 season opener at St. Petersburg, and he added Mid-Ohio and Portland later that year for a three-win season. He won again at Barber in 2023, then had his best year in 2024 with three more wins: Barber, the first Iowa race, and the second Milwaukee race. Those two 2024 campaigns produced back-to-back third-place championship finishes, his career best.

The single biggest day of his career so far came on May 19, 2024, in Indianapolis. McLaughlin put together a four-lap qualifying average of 234.220 mph and took the Indy 500 pole, the fastest pole run in the history of the race. Penske swept the front row. He finished sixth in the race itself.

Then came the day he would like back. In 2025 he crashed on the warm-up lap before the Indianapolis 500 even started, wrecked the car, and never took the green flag. He called it the worst moment of his life. A year later he answered it. He started ninth in the 2026 Indianapolis 500 and charged to third, his career-best finish at the Speedway, in what turned out to be the closest Indy 500 finish in history.

Scott McLaughlin's No. 3 XPEL Team Penske IndyCar being pushed through the Road America paddock in 2025 — McLaughlin's No. 3 XPEL Chevrolet at Road America in 2025. (Photo: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The 2026 Season and the Drought That Ended

By the time 2026 rolled around, McLaughlin had not won a race in two years. The streak reached 35 races, the longest of his career at any level. Penske rebuilt the group around him, bringing Tim Cindric back as his strategist and putting Raul Prados on the car as race engineer.

He bookended the season. He took pole at St. Petersburg in the opener, then took pole again at the Laguna Seca finale, which also happened to be Chevrolet's 250th pole in IndyCar competition. On Sunday he led 87 of the 95 laps and won by 1.37 seconds. Eight career wins, drought over. He finished the year sixth in the standings with 482 points, one win, three poles, seven top fives and twelve top tens.

The Career in Numbers

Here is the whole IndyCar career so far, laid out in the parts that matter.

Scott McLaughlin's IndyCar career by the numbers. Graphic by Happy Hour Racing. Stats via indycar.com.

Off the Track

McLaughlin lives in Charlotte, North Carolina now. He married Karly Paone, a schoolteacher from Long Island, in 2020, and their daughter Lucy Violet was born on October 10, 2024. They have two dogs, Chase and Luna. On April 29, 2025 he became a United States citizen, which is a real milestone for a kid from Christchurch who grew up watching this sport from the other side of the world.

He is also one of the more open drivers in the paddock. He streams, he jokes, he cries on camera when the day goes wrong, and he picked up American sports teams along the way. He follows the Mets, the Knicks and the Panthers. When IndyCar announced in October 2026 that it is going to Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in 2027, he posted about it in Spanish.

¡Hola, España! Me hace mucha ilusión competir en Europa por primera vez; después de la carrera, caerán un buen montón de paellas y cervezas Estrella.
- Scott McLaughlin (@smclaughlin93) October 23, 2026

Fun Stats

His 234.220 mph four-lap average in 2024 is the fastest pole run in Indianapolis 500 history, and it beat the previous mark by three thousandths of a mile per hour.
He won 18 Supercars races in the 2019 season alone, a series record, and he still took the title with an event to spare.
His pole at the 2026 Laguna Seca finale was the 250th IndyCar pole in Chevrolet history.
That same Laguna Seca pole, his 14th, tied him for fifth on the all-time Team Chevy list with Michael Andretti and Danny Sullivan.
He led 87 of 95 laps in that finale and won by 1.37 seconds, which is about as lopsided as a modern IndyCar road course race gets.

The Bottom Line

Scott McLaughlin is the fastest one-lap driver of his era who has not won the Indianapolis 500 yet. He already owns the record for the fastest pole run anyone has ever put together there, he already has a third-place finish, and he is 33 with a Penske car under him. The 500 is the one box left to check, and he has been close enough to touch it.