INDIANAPOLIS — Pato O’Ward finished a career-best second in the NTT IndyCar Series championship last season, but he was never in position to challenge four-time champion Alex Palou for the crown.
As the 26-year-old Mexican driver begins his seventh season with Arrow McLaren he understands his team will need to step it up if it’s going to challenge Palou and Chip Ganassi Racing for the series title.
“The guy (Palou), we keep saying he can’t raise the bar the previous year. I have no idea how he’s going to raise the bar from last year,” O’Ward said. “If he does, then I think everyone is toast. We got to keep chasing, keep on going and seeing how we can make him slow a little bit more. It’s been too easy for him.”
O’Ward knows he and his team need to improve to win the championship, but he also knows the competitive nature of the NTT IndyCar Series.
“It’s such a competitive championship,” O’Ward said. “I do think he and Ganassi have made it look very easy. So for us it’s just important to make sure that we just got to execute. What I mean by that is we can’t have the little slip-ups that you might see from us. We’ve never had a year where there hasn’t been any slip-ups. We’re still striving for that perfection and still striving to see that.
“That’s what you see from the 10 car (Palou),” O’Ward added. “Like that is what you see championship-winning car have. If they do have a slipup, it’s usually quite small. It’s important for us to focus on what we can control, but by doing that, that should put us in a pretty healthy spot getting into Laguna at the end.”
O’Ward had two victories and six runner-up finishes en route to finishing 196 points behind Palou. He knows he has the team and the skills to take the next step.
“Just got to keep on building to what we’ve been able to accomplish,” O’Ward said. “We don’t want to stay static. We always want to move forward. Even if it’s a small step, we want to make sure we don’t stay where we’re at. We always want to go better.
“That’s what we tend to do every single year. I believe that we’ve come to a point where that big step to getting that 500, getting championship, we’re right there,” O’Ward added. “That little extra step I believe is in doing so, it’s not actually doing something to be able to get that.
I think we’re already there. We just have to get it done. That’s what we’re going to be looking forward to doing.”
