INDIANAPOLIS – Indianapolis 500 polesitter Scott McLaughlin has a secret – or rather, a secret weapon – and it may just have the fourth-year IndyCar driver primed to chug some milk, kiss some bricks and race himself into immortality.
From Tuesday’s driver bullpen to his team’s Fast Friday presser, his TV hit immediately after he hopped out of his No. 3 Chevy with NBC and in a solo sit-down with IndyStar two hours later – the Team Penske driver had been dropping hints.
“I’ve tried to lean on people I won’t disclose…”
“There’s one person I know that’s watching this who’s helped me all week. You know who you are, brother. Thank you so much for your help.”
“He’s taught me…”
It’s an ex-driver – “A good driver,” McLaughlin interjected Friday – but he’s chosen to reveal nothing else, out of respect for the driver’s privacy.
“It’s told me that what I was doing and thinking wasn’t too far off. This is about your intensity level and controlling that,” McLaughlin said about the lessons learned over the last 12 months. “When I get in the car, I want to get the best possible outcome, but Indy is such a long month. You have to look after your car – after your baby – and I think he’s taught me that.
“Just build, build, build, and then you get to the peak of (qualifying) weekend, and you go and execute and nail it however you can, and the rest will take care of itself. It’s been a lot of fun.”
Not dissimilar from his ex-Bus Bro turned nothing-but-acquaintance teammate Josef Newgarden, McLaughlin has gone through a complete rethink of his mental approach over the last 12 months. Two years ago, one of the winningest drivers in Team Penske history came into his second Indy 500 a hyper-focused animal. He’d read, watched, talked over and thought about any resource one could imagine.
For the effort, he qualified 26th and crashed out 50 laps from the finish in 29th.
A year ago, McLaughlin was loose as one could be as he readied his body and mind to reach speeds topping 230 mph inches away from bitter rivals, trusting again and again through 800 corners that he’ll come out unscathed. And again, McLaughlin’s results were lackluster at best – qualifying and eventually finishing 14th.
Both approaches had their benefits, but attacking the two weeks with a singular mindset just wasn’t a fit. Through introspection and guarded counsel, McLaughlin says he’s found a middle ground. Until the Iowa doubleheader weekend last season, the three-time V8 Supercars champion was not yet ready to win an IndyCar race on an oval – not when Newgarden executed a last-lap pass on him to win a couple years ago at Texas, nor when Team Penske clearly had the cars to do so last year, leading to Newgarden’s maiden 500 victory.
“I’m not going to come out and say I’m a completely different driver, because I’m not. I’m still the same dude, but I think I understand the sequences a lot better and can see it better, easier, faster and make a pass or come through feeling strong,” McLaughlin said Friday. “I’ve watched all of Josef and Will’s race footage from last year. I can’t tell you the amount of hours I’ve sat in front of a computer and watched it – it kills my wife.
“But at the end of the day, it’s also about executing, and I feel like I’ve given myself the opportunity to. Hopefully we’ve got a fast enough car to make it happen.”
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All questions of that were assuaged less than 36 hours later, when the Yellow Submarine barreled around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway faster than any 500 polesitter ever has – a four-lap average of 234.220 mph, edging his Team Penske teammates by mere tenths-of-a-second, securing a front row lockout for Roger Penske’s operation for the second time both in team and race history.
Over the course of roughly two hours for his runs in the Fast 12 and the Fast 6, McLaughlin’s newfound approach, one that marries an unmatched intensity with an inner focus that blocks out the noise, was put to the test.
As he tells it, he arrived back in the team garages to see his teammates Power and Newgarden poring over data and setups and strategizing about their final runs. Calmly, McLaughlin strolled in and sat down with his engineer Ben Bretzman, exchanged thoughts with the veteran on his timing stand for a moment or two and then snuck away back to his motorhome.
“I sat in the dark, watched golf and listened to music, and it was just the coolest, chilliest period ever,” McLaughlin told IndyStar on Sunday night. “There was no point in me going, ‘Oh, I wonder what they’re doing?’ I think I just accepted the fact that, one, they’re really, really good, and, two, all I can do is my best. You can’t do anything more than that, and you have to accept that.
“That’s really hard to do as a race car driver, because sometimes your best isn’t as good as theirs, but that’s the respect level between the three of us. They’re definitely the best teammates, better than I’ve had in my entire life, and that’s pushed me to new levels.”
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In the wake of finishing as the top Team Penske driver in the championship a year ago – a nine-point cushion on Newgarden he sealed by virtue of finishing runner-up in the season-finale, while the driver of the No. 2 trundled home in 21st – McLaughlin sat in co*ckpit of his yellow bullet with a single number in his head: 234.1. The final driver didn’t want to roll off pitlane last in line to close the Fast 6 with digits clouding his brain, and he also didn’t entirely want to know his entire target.
Both of his teammates had run initial lap speeds in the 234.1s to kickoff their Fast 6 runs just moments prior, and so McLaughlin’s idea was this: if you can come out ahead of that after 2.5 miles trust your intuition, feel and precision with your tools in the car and let it guide you the rest of the way.
And those two minutes are where everything finally clicked.
“One little change in my line, and the amount I had to use my tools dropped 75%. It was crazy. That’s the knife’s edge you’re on here, and it was just an amazing run,” he said. “I’ve been missing trust – trusting my feel, but also trusting what the car does, and what that limit of adhesion is. You see those crashes, whether it’s Nolan (Siegel) or (Rinus) VeeKay, and you’re like, ‘How close am I to that?’
“But you’ve got to understand that edge and when your car (which he clarifies is a ‘she’) talks to you, she’s always saying something, and she was talking to me in that run. It sounds crazy, but I made an adjustment on Lap 2 that was really preemptive for Lap 4, and that’s just what you’ve got to do to be ready for what’s ahead.”
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McLaughlin was so hyper-focused on himself, in fact, that after going through the pomp and circ*mstance on pit lane – the hat dance, the photos, the trophy presentation, the celebration with ‘The Thirsty Threes’ and the press conference in the media center with his two teammates joining him on the front row – that he all a sudden realize mid-sit-down with IndyStar that he didn’t know whether Power or Newgarden was starting next to him on the front row in 2nd.
“I just tried to get that first big lap average (in his case, one at 234.526 mph), and after that, it’s about you and your car and feeling everything and trying to make the best of what you’ve got,” McLaughlin said. “I knew our speed had been pretty consistent across all three cars, and we were able to control the tire deg, and it would just be about who did that the best.
“I was super locked-in, man. I just knew what I needed to do. At the end of the day, if Josef went out and put up a 235 mph lap, and I can only do a 234.5, I can’t control that. The best I can do after that is accept it and control what you can control. It sounds very simple, but it’s very hard to get into that mindset.”
