Opinion: Scott McLaughlin should switch to NASCAR in 2027

When three-time Repco Supercars champion Shane van Gisbergen took the checkered flag in the inaugural Chicago Street Race nearly three years ago, it sent a shock wave through the NASCAR industry.

Six decades had passed since Johnny Rutherford won a Duel race at Daytona International Speedway as the last driver to win their Cup Series debut. But the dominant Kiwi deftly maneuvered through the Windy City streets to supplant the eventual three-time Indianapolis 500 champion.

When the Cup Series returned to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course later that summer in 2023, van Gisbergen saw his former Supercars rival, Brodie Kostecki, make his debut in the Cup Series, though it wound up being a pedestrian performance in comparison.

Since then, Supercars drivers Will Brown and Cam Waters made an appearance at Sonoma Raceway in 2024.

Brown’s Cup debut in wine country saw him experience electrical gremlins before returning to the premier stock car series at Chicago in 2025, where he was wiped out in a multi-car wreck before he was able to show what he was capable of on the street circuit.

Waters also found himself collected in an accident at Sonoma while making three starts in the Craftsman Truck Series, where he notched a best finish of fifth at Lime Rock Park in 2025.

In addition, Jack Perkins came stateside to drive for Joe Gibbs Racing in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series in 2025. In both of his starts, the veteran Supercars racer failed to contend due to an incident at Chicago and mechanical gremlins at Portland International Raceway.

All of that to say, the drivers that have come over since SVG’s dynamic debut have failed to reach or eclipse his caliber, which is no disrespect to those talented drivers. His 16-year career Down Under included 80 race wins, which is fourth most on the all-time wins list in Supercars.

However, there exists one driver with a Supercars background who’s capable of making an even more seamless fit in a stock car than van Gisbergen.

That driver is none other than NTT IndyCar Series star Scott McLaughlin.

McLaughlin’s name floated around stock car circles before making the move to the United States to go open-wheel racing after he piloted Joey Logano’s 2018 championship-winning Ford Fusion around Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast, and he looked like a natural doing it.

In his nine seasons in Supercars, McLaughlin collected 56 victories in 253 career starts (his 22.1% winning percentage exceeds SVG’s 15.7 percent average) and three straight titles from 2018 through 2020.

Roger Penske puzzled onlookers when he gave four-time Indy 500 champion Helio Castroneves the boot after the 2020 season and replaced him with the New Zealander.

It took time for McLaughlin to get the hang of the increased speed and downforce of the Indy car, going winless in his rookie year in 2021.

The Christchurch native impressed in his oval starts, finishing second in his oval debut at Texas Motor Speedway and snagging top 10s in the second Texas race and at Gateway.

McLaughlin came back in 2022 and immediately made his presence felt, claiming victory in the season-opening Firestone Grand Prix of St. Pete and bringing home the top prize at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course and Portland as well.

After a one-win season in 2023 that saw him finish a solid third in points, the three-time Supercars champion replicated his points performance and returned to his winning ways in 2024, repeating at Barber Motorsports Park while recording his first oval triumphs at Iowa Speedway and The Milwaukee Mile.

Had it not been for a devastating disqualification at St. Petersburg for a Push-To-Pass violation, the driver affectionately known as “Scotty Mac” likely would have contended for the championship rather than coming home a distant third.

Since that Milwaukee victory, McLaughlin appears to have struggled to adapt to the hybrid unit introduced to IndyCar in July 2024 at Mid-Ohio, particularly on the road and street courses.

Excluding his rookie year, McLaughlin ran in 43 total races with 32 of those coming on road and street courses. Of those 32 races, the Kiwi nabbed five wins – all on road courses – as well as 10 podiums and a 68.8% top-10 finish rate.

McLaughlin proved to be no slouch on the ovals – a style of racing that was completely alien to him before his jump to open-wheel racing – as he notched four podiums and eight top 10s in 11 career starts.

Since the final race of the previous engine era at Road America in June 2024, McLaughlin entered all IndyCar races, with 13 of them coming on ovals.

In those 13 races, the pilot of the famous No. 3 “Yellow Submarine” Pennzoil machine claimed the first oval victory of his career in the first race of the Iowa doubleheader in 2024, as well as the second race of the Milwaukee doubleheader later that season.

McLaughlin has logged two race victories, six podiums and 10 top 10s in those 13 starts, good enough for a close to 5% boost in top-10 percentage and bumping his podium percentage by nearly 10% while slightly dropping his average finish.

To the shock of many, McLaughlin’s road and street course performances have been much less dazzling. His 20 road and street course starts featured a 13.5% drop off in his top-10 percentage and an even more drastic 1.77-position drop in average finish.

In addition, he has scored just three podiums, one in each year – the debut race at Mid-Ohio, Barber last season and a runner-up at St. Pete earlier this year.

To give a sense of the scale of McLaughlin’s struggles, the same sample of races was observed for three other drivers with varying circumstances.

First was Alex Palou, the reigning four-time IndyCar champion, who has found a new level in the hybrid era. Much like McLaughlin, the Spaniard made his way into great equipment in 2021, moving from Dale Coyne Racing to Chip Ganassi Racing as the Kiwi entered the series with Team Penske.

The second is McLaughlin’s Penske teammate, two-time IndyCar and Indy 500 champion Josef Newgarden. The Tennessee native used to flash pace at road courses and ovals, but the hybrid unit appears to have blunted his once sharp road-racing skills.

Finally, I chose a slight outlier, Arrow McLaren driver Christian Lundgaard. The Danish driver came into the series as a rookie in 2022 and spent the first three seasons of his career with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing before moving to the papaya-colored outfit last season.

The Danish racer’s move to the Zak Brown-led outfit proved to pay dividends immediately as he earned career-highs in the final standings (fifth) as well as podiums (six), making it hard to hammer down whether his performance jump is due to his rising experience, a team change or the addition of hybrid power.

Of this quartet of drivers, Palou led in all categories of the pre-hybrid part of the sample from the beginning of 2022 through the Road America race in 2024, except race wins, where Newgarden beat him by one. McLaughlin came in third with five, while Lundgaard landed in last with just one victory.

That said, McLaughlin appeared to only be a step behind Palou by the 2024 trip to Elkhart Lake, scoring four fewer wins, five fewer podiums and seven fewer top 10s. If the hybrid era got off to a better start for McLaughlin and Penske, perhaps the 32-year-old driver would be dueling every week with Palou’s No. 10 team at the front of the field.

Instead, McLaughlin looks to have stagnated.

From the Mid-Ohio race in 2024 to the current day, Palou obviously paces this group in all categories, but the gap on the road courses stands out as the most severe.

The four-time IndyCar champion holds a record of nine wins, 15 podiums and 18 top 10s on road and street courses in 20 starts, compared to a nine-win, 12-podium and seven top-10 gap to the No. 3 team in the same span.

Palou and McLaughlin keep in touch on the ovals, where the latter pulls ahead in top 10s while staying even in wins and podiums. At his best, McLaughlin shows he can duke it out with the series’ top drivers, but his equipment is no longer keeping him in contention.

While Newgarden has become less consistent on all tracks, his oval success has lost only a slight bit of luster as he leads the series in that time with oval wins. Still, his road and street-course performance cratered at the hybrid’s introduction, while Lundgaard’s has risen.

Lundgaard’s numbers in the hybrid era jump off the page, seeing him leaping into title contention last year with a strong campaign for Arrow McLaren and, more critically, Chevrolet.

The 24-year-old Dane showed in his most recent race why he will be a threat for years to come, storming to a dominant victory at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course in the No. 7 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet, just the second victory of his IndyCar career after his six-podium 2025 season.

Since Mid-Ohio in July 2024, Lundgaard leap-frogged in wins, podiums and top 10s with marked improvement on the ovals, improving his average oval finish from 17.54 to 13.23.

Before I proceed, what I am about to say is not to suggest that McLaughlin and Penske cannot turn their fortunes around in the coming years, should their partnership continue its focus on IndyCar.

Will Power showed plenty of pace in his last starts with “The Captain’s” organization, taking the top step of the podium twice at Portland in back-to-back seasons during the hybrid era.

Penske has gotten off to a great start as a company in 2026 with Power’s replacement, David Malukas, currently stationed in third in the standings while Newgarden hangs tough in fifth after his win at Phoenix Raceway and a top-five at the IMS Road Course.

Outside of St. Pete, McLaughlin’s pace has not allowed him to compete, nabbing just one other top 10 on the Streets of Long Beach. This is not to sound the alarm for the eighth-place driver in the championship, even if Palou has him outgained by 96 points before the 110th Indy 500.

I suspect that McLaughlin’s team can rebound at some point, as the speed exists in the No. 3 Chevrolet. They just need to find a way to extract it, but have fallen behind in their search.

That brings me to a unique opportunity that I think could satisfy racing fans all over the world.

As I understand it, the Cup Series has many drivers racing on expiring contracts entering 2027. One of them is Josh Berry, driver of the historic No. 21 Ford for Wood Brothers Racing.

The Wood Brothers have offered their flagship car up to a few open-wheelers in their team’s history, which included a Daytona 500 triumph with AJ Foyt in 1972 and a start at Riverside with Bobby Rahal in 1984. They also gave two-time Supercars champion Marcos Ambrose his first start at the premier level of stock car racing in 2008.

Due to that lineage, I find myself wondering more and more nowadays if McLaughlin could finally make the move to stock car racing for the 2027 season by replacing Berry.

This is not an indictment of Berry’s abilities, as he proved he belongs at this level with his maiden Cup Series victory at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2025, and in the right situation, he should be a fringe Chase contender for years to come.

However, Berry’s glaring weakness shines brightly on road courses, where his best finish is 13th at Sonoma last season, and he possesses a 27.54 average finish in 13 starts.

To clarify, Berry’s non-drafting oval average finish during the same stretch lands him at 20.59, which is solid for a driver still getting his legs beneath him in the Cup Series.

The question that the Wood Brothers and Roger Penske should be asking themselves is: Could McLaughlin outperform Berry so much on the road courses that they would be willing to wait while he sharpens his oval skills?

When defending Cup Series champion Kyle Larson made his second attempt at doing “The Double,” he remarked on FS1’s First Things First that the pre-hybrid IndyCar handled similarly to the Next Gen Cup car:

“So, I’ll just start with the cars,” Larson explained. “Surprisingly to me, when I first got in it – you look at an Indy car and you look at a NASCAR – they look completely different. But, the feel that I have between the two cars, it’s not that crazy different. 

“In 2022, [NASCAR] designed the Next Gen car, so completely different than a stock car used to be. We now have independent suspension, we’ve got underbody aerodynamics that we’re relying on, the sidewalls of the tires are shorter – a lot like in IndyCar.

“So, what I feel in the car is honestly pretty similar. You’re going a lot faster in the Indy car. We’ll be 235–237 [miles per hour] probably in the race at the end of the straightaways. NASCAR will, at Charlotte, be 195, maybe. But, the sensation is still the same.”

Your mileage on how you view Larson as a talent may vary, but he is inarguably one of the most talented drivers in the Cup Series and in other American open-wheel racing platforms, such as winged dirt sprint cars.

For him to say that the Next Gen car and the hybridized IndyCar race similarly, I believe there is more of a ceiling for McLaughlin as an oval racer than folks might think in NASCAR. And on top of that, he would likely outperform Berry and his Penske stablemates on road and street courses right out of the gate.

That is not meant to diminish the capabilities of Blaney, Logano and Cindric, all of whom have experienced success at road courses in NASCAR’s national series.

Having said that, I believe that if van Gisbergen can come to America and have this manner of success, his old Supercars rival should be able to take his IndyCar experience and channel it into positive returns should he make the jump to stock cars.

If McLaughlin leaves IndyCar at season’s end, his time in the series should be viewed as a massive success for a driver who came from full-bodied cars in Supercars.

In just over 90 career IndyCar starts, McLaughlin has earned seven wins and 23 podiums (a podium in a quarter of his starts), as well as touting a stout 55 top 10s. He also currently holds the record for fastest pole run in Indy 500 history.

But he could be even better in NASCAR. If only “The Captain” had enough imagination to make this theory a reality.