We don't mean Oscar Piastri since the Australian is by no means a "new" No. 1 driver at McLaren's Formula 1 team. If the rain in Melbourne didn't start to fall exactly when it did, he is likely ahead of teammate Lando Norris by 35 or 40 points in the world championship standings through six races.
Even with that mishap, which saw him start the year 23 points behind his teammate, he finds himself leading by 16 points with four victories to Norris' one, and he has managed to climb ahead of the Briton on the all-time Formula 1 wins list, despite trailing by four years (82 races) of experience.
Bottom line, Piastri being the top driver at McLaren isn't news. But what even fewer people expected coming into the 2025 IndyCar season is that McLaren would have a new top driver on the IndyCar side as well.
McLaren have a new top IndyCar driver
Newcomer Christian Lundgaard might not have beaten Chip Ganassi Racing's Alex Palou on the race track through the first four races of the 2025 season. But he finds himself in second place in the championship standings behind the three-time and two-time reigning series champion with three straight podium finishes to his name.
Generally speaking, when a young prospect from an inferior team joins a top-tier program in any form of motorsport, there are high expectations. And far too often, the pressure is too much, to the extent where those expectations either simply aren't met, or there is an inexplicable fall-off in performance, even in stronger machinery.
We saw it most recently in Formula 1 with Liam Lawson at Red Bull. While Max Verstappen kept contending for wins and securing front row starts, Lawson was at the back in the exact same car, finishing well behind where he generally finished at a slower Racing Bulls team in 2023 and 2024.
But Lundgaard has met and exceeded those expectations, and then some.
Objectively speaking, Lundgaard single-handedly carried a struggling Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team for the first three seasons of his IndyCar career. He managed to win a race and finish eighth in the 2023 standings in a car that was a borderline top 10 contender on a good weekend, and he scored a podium finish in all three seasons.
Now with a team that have front-running pace, he has indeed hit the ground running. His average finish in four starts this season is 4.0, and perhaps most notably, he has beaten Pato O'Ward, the de facto team leader at McLaren since making his arrival in 2020, in three out of four starts.
Let's not sell O'Ward short, here. This isn't some anti-O'Ward propaganda train. The Mexican driver is still fourth in the championship standings, and he is still the only McLaren race winner since the team was still known as Schmidt Peterson Motorsports and James Hinchcliffe, who now calls the races from the Fox Sports booth, won at Iowa Speedway in 2018.
Lundgaard, meanwhile, is still technically seeking the first win for a No. 7 car since, believe it or not, Danica Patrick won at Twin Ring Motegi in 2008.
But Lundgaard has shown us something through four races that has unfortunately kept O'Ward from truly emerging as a title threat: consistency.
O'Ward has three multi-win seasons since 2021, and he tied for the series lead in wins last year with three. But in six seasons in the No. 5 Chevrolet, he has never recorded three straight podium finishes, and you need to go back to 2023, when he was ironically winless, to find the most recent instance of him recording three straight top five finishes.
It took Lundgaard four starts, and in the three most recent, he doubled his career podium output.
What remains to be seen is how strong Lundgaard is on ovals in a car actually capable of not being in the annual Indy 500 Bump Day discussion; he never had a taste of that with Bobby Rahal's team.
The fact that he actually managed to lead laps in the Indy 500 last year, even if on an alternate pit strategy, and the fact that he does actually have multiple oval top 10 finishes to his name from his Rahal days should certainly bode well for him, but until he proves otherwise, O'Ward is most definitely McLaren's driver to beat at Indy, having posted two runner-up finishes since 2022.
But what we have seen out of Lundgaard so far is a complete driver, which gives us no reason to believe that he won't be quick. And that well-rounded element is something that has simply eluded O'Ward and something that he still needs to work on if he is ever to truly make a serious run at an IndyCar championship.
O'Ward is unfortunately sometimes prone to the type of race-altering, weekend-altering mistakes that Lundgaard simply doesn't make, or simply not getting the lap time he needs in qualifying to advance, and it's cost him multiple times already this year.
A higher starting position in St. Petersburg could have seen him in the mix, and he was nowhere to be found in Long Beach while Lundgaard managed to bag another podium despite a wreck in qualifying.
But then at Barber Motorsports Park, we had a situation where Lundgaard was simply quicker, and much quicker, at that.
All things considered, it's a good problem to have for a McLaren team still trying to take that next step toward IndyCar championship contention. Lundgaard has emerged as their top driver, while O'Ward is still performing at an extremely high level.
If ever there were a case of "two No. 1s", this is it, arguably even more so than what the Woking-based team currently have going on in Formula 1.
Now the series is set to head to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, where last year's podium consisted of Palou and Lundgaard. Will a similar result unfold on Saturday?
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