Pato O’Ward has turned down any prospect of jumping towards feeder series like Formula 2, saying that any possible move to Formula 1 in the future would come straight from IndyCar.
Arrow McLaren SP driver O’Ward was promised an F1 test by CEO Zak Brown if he won a race at IndyCar this year – something he did twice in Texas and Detroit – and took the opportunity at the F1 test the season on Tuesday in Abu Dhabi.
O’Ward said F1 machines “bend the laws of physics” after a day in the car “destroyed” him, and especially his neck, from the added G-forces.
It’s not the first time O’Ward has tried his way into F1 as he was a Red Bull Junior in 2019, but their ways parted when O’Ward joined McLaren for IndyCar in 2020.
When asked if he would consider changing his career path to get to the F1 ladder, O’Ward said, “I’m very happy with where I am now at IndyCar. I’m going to be an IndyCar driver at Arrow McLaren SP over there next year.
“But if I move here, it will be directly from IndyCar.
“I have no plans to go to another junior [series], F2 or F3.
“I drove the F2. I don’t have a lot of good things to say about it, to be honest with you. “
O’Ward’s F2 experience came when he was brought in by Red Bull in May 2019 to fill a void in his youth program.
At the time, O’Ward was the reigning Indy Lights champion and had impressed immensely in his early IndyCar races.
But Red Bull may have been interested in him too because there was a misunderstanding about the number of super license points he could get from an IMSA class title.
It turned out it was going to be a struggle for O’Ward earning the points necessary to qualify for Formula 1 in 2020, and the Red Bull deal started too late in the year to get a title in every possible one Win series. I put him up for a super license points hunting championship bid.
He left Carlin and IndyCar for a single F2 weekend in Austria – he replaced the suspended Mahaveer Raghunathan at MP Motorsport – before moving to Japan and Super Formula, a series in which few drivers are likely to enter the midseason and be successful could.
It was an affair that seemed doomed from the start. In the F2 car – aside from the apparent lack of seating times, a fighting team, and a very strong F2 starting field that reached mid-season – O’Ward struggled to cope with the razor-sharp Pirelli tires and the specific path they will become switched on and saved.
O’Wards experience with another new machine – this time the top motorsport directors run in F1 – felt much better, however, and he believes switching straight from IndyCar to Grand Prix racing would be no problem .
“It would be a step straight from IndyCar and to be honest I don’t think I would have a problem with that,” he added.
“In the end I was very at home, just experienced everything.
“I think the team can say more about that, they see a lot more than just the analysis and everything, but from the driver’s point of view it was definitely more pace that I could get out later when I got to know the car a little better.
“But in terms of getting a very good baseline, I’m very happy.”
Just as the transition from Formula 1 to IndyCar has been in the spotlight lately thanks to Romain Grosjean and Marcus Ericsson, O’Ward would have to go the other way and experience a similar adjustment.
It was something that hit the headlines this year as speculation grew that Colton Herta would be sent to F1 with Andretti Autosport’s planned takeover of what is currently Alfa Romeo Racing until that deal was hit.
The IndyCar is driven extremely aggressively with a lot of oversteer and catches the car for the entire lap. There is no power steering and very little room for error.
In Formula 1, O’Ward would have to be much more precise, make greater use of the available data from his teammate and apply it to his own driving style, and also understand how he can adapt to the constant changes in vehicle development over the course of the year.
It might be premature to talk about O’Ward’s F1 future as an unlikely blockbuster move from a bigger team to snatch Lando Norris or something similar for Daniel Ricciardo – or Ricciardo not to better adapt to McLaren’s car next year – would be a prerequisite for an open position at McLaren.
And even then, O’Ward would be a huge gamble from another series.
Brown has called O’Ward a “young Montoya,” and O’Ward certainly lacks enthusiasm and natures like Juan Pablo.
Brown has not hesitated to say that O’Ward will be considering a move in the future.
Such a move is still a long way off, but at least we now know that it will come straight from IndyCar when it happens.
