The Arrow McLaren driver passed Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou on the opening lap before falling back behind him a few corners later, and then he concentrated on conserving fuel. He stopped a lap before Palou, a fellow two-stopper, and got ahead of him but he couldn’t find a way around Romain Grosjean, because three-stopping David Malukas was between them.
Then when the race’s only caution came out, eventual winner Scott McLaughlin came out of his second pitstop in second place. While Grosjean and McLaughlin pulled a 10sec gap on O’Ward, his attention in his middle stint was fully occupied with holding off Palou, Christian Lundgaard of Rahal Letterman Lanigan and Scott Dixon (Ganassi). With his pace limited as a two-stopper, O’Ward then lost out to the three-stopping Will Power in another Penske.
O’Ward: “I was just lifting so much, I just had to get a massive [fuel mileage] number and I really don’t know how we managed to keep up the pace like that.
“Great car, very happy with how we did this weekend. Obviously when you look back, we were on the wrong strategy. But nobody made a mistake, that’s just the roll of the dice that you have to take at the beginning of the race. Scotty and Power were on the good end of it. Happy with the fourth.
Asked if grabbing the lead in the opening stint might have ultimately altered his fortunes, O’Ward replied: “It might’ve changed it a little bit. Scott was behind us and he made it work.
“We didn’t make the call to do the three-stopper and that’s just it, when you look back now, you’d do it differently with how the yellow played out… but it was a one-in-a-hundred.
“But we really maximized it, we were against three Hondas that were really strong, and it had us on the edge of our seat to keep them behind.”
One of his teammates, Alexander Rossi, did run a three-stop strategy, starting from 10th on the grid. However, following the first round of stops, he didn’t seem able to keep pace with the Penskes of Josef Newgarden and McLaughlin, and following the second stops, he also lost out to Power. For the remainder of the race he was bottled up behind the O’Ward-led train of two-stoppers, and ultimately claimed eighth.
That was one spot ahead of the third Arrow McLaren of Felix Rosenqvist, who started eighth but finished the first lap in last place having been tapped into a spin after a hit with Newgarden. His team switched him to a three-stopping race and he climbed through to tenth by half-distance, which became ninth when Newgarden’s damage cost the #2 Penske speed on worn tires and ultimately track position.
