The livery is only a slight evolution of what he ran in 2023, with McLaren’s papaya orange and black being the predominant colors, with bright blue coachlines on the nose and stripes on the top of the sidepod. It is very much in the same ‘family’ of colorschemes as those of his teammates, Alexander Rossi’s car on Tuesday and Felix Rosenqvist’s car on Wednesday.
With Rossi’s arrival at Arrow McLaren, the team has expanded to three full-time entries, with a fourth for the Indianapolis 500 to be driven by Tony Kanaan. The former Andretti Autosport driver has taken over the #7 entry formerly driven by Rosenqvist, with the Swede switching to the new #6 entry but there is less change for O’Ward, whose race engineer remains Will Anderson.
O’Ward, the 2018 Indy Lights champion, made his IndyCar debut for the Andretti Autosport-affiliated Harding Racing team at the end of that year at Sonoma, qualifying a remarkable fifth and finishing ninth. However, when the team evolved into Harding Steinbrenner Racing for 2019, the team took his erstwhile Indy Lights teammates Colton Herta, and O’Ward was left to salvage an eight-race ride with Carlin while also dabbling in Super Formula and Formula 2.
For 2020, O’Ward wisely elected to focus on just one series – IndyCar – with what was then known as Arrow McLaren SP. He scored four podium finishes and a pole position on his way to fourth in the championship, while in ’21 he took the title fight down to the wire after scoring two wins, three other podiums and two poles. He ultimately finished third in the points race.
Last season, O’Ward scored two more wins and two other top threes, but he slipped to seventh in the standings, largely thanks to three DNFs, none of which were his fault (two mechanicals, one accident in which he was blameless).
Outside of IndyCar, 2022 was also a big year for O’Ward. He shared the LMP2-winning DragonSpeed Oreca in the Rolex 24 Hours with Herta, Devlin DeFrancesco and Eric Lux, and he also made his Formula 1 free practice debut with the McLaren F1 team at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
