The start of the 2025 IndyCar Series season has been a very promising one for new Arrow McLaren star Christian Lundgaard.
Having claimed three podiums in the opening five rounds, he is third in the championship and sits just one point behind Kyle Kirkwood while Alex Palou is the runaway leader.
Such form has led to Lundgaard labelling it as a “rocket start to the season”, with the fourth-year IndyCar driver now confident of contending for a maiden crown in 2025 despite a 98-point gap to Palou.
“The amount of points the #10 car [Palou] has accumulated already, they can lose them as fast as they’ve gained them,” the 23-year-old Dane told Motorsport.com.
“They’re going to have bad weekends. They can’t win every weekend. I know that’s what it looks like right now. But at the end of the day, we need to focus on what we can control.
“After that, I’m pretty confident that we can be in the mix at the end of the year, and that’s all we can hope for.
“I think it’s trying not to get caught up in what the #10 car is doing, because at the end of the day, we need to run our own races, our own season.
“Once we get to the end of the season, we’ll see who we’re fighting. But I definitely always think that there’s a chance.”
Lundgaard even revealed his surprise at having such a start to the year, saying: “If you would have told me six months ago that that was the case, I don’t think any of us would really have believed it.
“We were never really expecting this, obviously we were hoping for it. I don’t think it was ever really an expectation.
“It’s just nice. Coming from where I’ve been the past three years, it’s been a struggle more often than not.
“And I think now, I’m very much at peace, just enjoying driving, and I think you’re seeing that from the results as well. It just feels so nice to finally feel like you get rewarded for the work that’s been put in.”
Before making the move to Arrow McLaren for 2025, Lundgaard spent three full seasons at Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, achieving three podium finishes including a win at Toronto in 2023. So, just five races into his Arrow McLaren stint, he has already equalled his previous podium count.
“The first couple of weeks, times in the car, it was a little bit of a - not necessarily a struggle - it was just very different, and it was something to get used to with the car,” he added.
“The first, I’d say, two-and-a-half weeks, weekends, we were in the car, it was one clear direction. We need to solve this problem for me to feel much more comfortable.
“When you have a muscle memory and you suddenly are being thrown into something different, you have to kind of adjust to that, and I’m now at a point where I’m at peace, and I’m comfortable with the material and how the car handles, and it’s more to my liking.”
Lundgaard also spoke about his relationship with team-mate Pato O’Ward, and how it has been for him adjusting to a new environment.
“My personal honest opinion has really been: going into the season, you’re coming into a team that is kind of known as ‘Pato’s team’, right?,” he said.
“Pato and I have had that conversation prior to even joining the team. Not everybody knew at the time, we had a short little conversation about it, and we’re both very much in the same kind of eye-level of, ‘hey, we know we’re both fast. Let’s not just fight each other, but let’s try to bring the team forward and make these cars as fast as we can’.
“I think already at this point we’ve seen that.”
Lundgaard explained that if “we make a mistake on the #7 car, the #5 car picks up the pieces”.
“I think that’s just proven to be a very strong pairing,” he added. “Because, we can fight, one weekend I’m faster, one weekend he’s faster, and we’re pushing each other in that sense.”
He also spoke about his relationship with his other team-mate, 20-year-old Nolan Siegel, who stepped full-time into the #6 car at the ninth round of the 2024 season, the Firestone Grand Prix.
“I think Nolan is learning a lot from us in that sense, and I think Nolan has a tremendous amount of potential,” Lundgaard said. “He’s going to be a very, very fast competitive driver in the future.
“He’s young, he’s still 20-years-old. He can’t buy a beer in the States yet! One day, he will be there, and he will be as competitive and as strong as we are at the moment, and he will definitely be one to look out for.”
In the lead-up to this weekend’s Indianapolis 500, Lundgaard explained, “I’m calm right now. I think that the weekend is going to bring what it’s going to bring, and I think that’s ultimately just my approach to it.
“I changed my perspective completely after the [Indy] GP to just be: ‘hey, just go out and have fun, go out and enjoy, take it all in, learn as much as you can’, and the result will be what it will be.
“The McLaren cars have been strong at the Indy 500, so now I need to go out and deliver with that.”
He also spoke about the future with the Arrow McLaren team, saying: “They believed in what I was capable of doing and I think already we’ve kind of proven to both of us, to ourselves, to each other, that it was the right decision.
“I don’t think we’re going to see weekends where we’re, to say it straight out loud, going to shit the bed!
“I think from an overall consistency standpoint, I think we’ll be there every weekend. I think their approach and their mentality in the #7 car has been very straightforward.
“Simplicity is key, and don’t really let anything affect us. Just go with the flow. And it’s helped us so far, right? And I don’t see it changing in the near future.”
