2026 Snap-on INDYCAR Weekend

O'Ward Wins One Race at Milwaukee While Still Leading Another

Pato O'Ward closed out the Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250 on Sunday afternoon with a situation no IndyCar winner has had to think about in a long time: he had another race to finish before the day was over, and he was leading that one too.

O'Ward took the lead of the No. 5 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet on Lap 196 and held it through the checkered flag, beating Scott McLaughlin by 0.7916 of a second for his second win of 2026 and the 11th of his IndyCar career. It made him a two-time winner at the Milwaukee Mile and delivered Arrow McLaren a first-and-third finish, with Christian Lundgaard 2.7457 seconds back in third.

Saturday's Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 had been stopped by rain after 89 laps with O'Ward in front, and it was scheduled to resume Sunday evening.

"First time I win a race and I'm leading another one at the same time," O'Ward said. "That's a new one."

Alex Palou set the terms of the afternoon early and looked, for a long stretch, like the driver who would end it with a championship. Starting from pole in the No. 10 DHL Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, he ran 155.963 mph on Lap 2 — the fastest lap anyone would turn all day — and led the first 33 laps.

Josef Newgarden ended that on Lap 34 with a pass in Turn 3, but the No. 2 Snap-on Team Penske Chevrolet held the lead for only five laps. A caution came out on Lap 35 when Romain Grosjean quarter-spun at the exit of Turn 2 without contact, the leaders pitted on Lap 38, and Palou won the race off pit road to reclaim the top spot.

He held it until lap traffic intervened. On Lap 100, Rinus VeeKay went by in Turn 1 while the two worked through slower cars, and the No. 76 Juncos Hollinger Racing Chevrolet led the next 25 laps before Palou took it back at the halfway mark on Lap 125.

The race turned on Lap 141. Newgarden spun at the exit of Turn 4, made contact with the SAFER Barrier and slid across the track into the pit wall attenuator. He climbed from the car without assistance from the AMR INDYCAR Safety Team and was seen and released from the medical unit. His car was repaired well enough to return to the track later for a shakedown ahead of the Race 1 resumption, which is why the results credit him with 150 laps despite an incident on Lap 141.

Under the resulting caution, McLaughlin and Scott Dixon stayed out while everyone ahead of them pitted on Lap 147, and the No. 3 PPG Team Penske Chevrolet inherited the lead.

"Right on the edge in terms of tire life," McLaughlin said of the call. "We chose track position and hoped I could hold those guys off as long as I could with the clear air. Once I got hold of some dirty air, that's when the guys with the fresh tires were slightly better. I thought we held on really well."

The restart on Lap 157 lasted a matter of seconds. Grosjean spun again, this time in Turn 4 and into the SAFER Barrier, ending his race after 155 laps and bringing out the third caution of the afternoon. He too was seen and released.

Racing resumed on Lap 168, and Will Power took the lead from McLaughlin in Turn 1 on Lap 175 in the No. 26 Phoenix Investors Andretti Global Honda. He led 19 laps and was still in front when the final round of stops began, but a drive-through penalty for a pit lane speed violation at pit in, clocked at 47.912 mph, ended his afternoon at the front. Power finished 14th.

Christian Rasmussen led two laps in the No. 21 Splenda Stevia Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet before pitting, and O'Ward took over on Lap 196 with 55 laps to run. McLaughlin closed to within eight-tenths at the line but never got a run that stuck.

Second place was McLaughlin's third podium of 2026 and lifted him from ninth to sixth in the standings, but it left him still without a win this season. The last one came at this track, in Race 2 of the 2024 Milwaukee doubleheader.

"I don't care. Like I don't," he said when the championship came up. "I just want to win. Don't care. Just want to drive hard."

For O'Ward, the result answered a season-long problem on the discipline that used to be his best. Four of his 10 previous career wins had come on ovals, including the 2024 Milwaukee Race 1 that opened his account at the track, but his lone 2026 victory before Sunday came at Mid-Ohio, and his best oval finish of the season was fourth, at Phoenix and in the Indianapolis 500.

"I've never struggled in an oval. I've always been really strong," he said. "This year it's been the absolute opposite a lot of places, sadly."

Asked what changed, he pointed at method rather than machinery. "Hunger, kind of not taking no for an answer. Putting all our cards on the table really."

Even so, the car was not the one he wanted. "Yesterday was better," O'Ward said. "Today with the hotter track temps really exposed it. I was struggling with it so much more."

Lundgaard's third place was the other half of the Arrow McLaren afternoon, and it was the first oval podium of his IndyCar career. It came in his 16th career top-three finish and his seventh of a season in which his previous best oval result was 10th at World Wide Technology Raceway.

"I felt pretty good yesterday. I knew Race 2 was going to be just fine," Lundgaard said. "I think we probably have one of the fastest cars out there. We put it to use today, which was nice."

The subtext was hard to miss. Lundgaard will not return to Arrow McLaren in 2027, a decision team principal Tony Kanaan addressed without being asked twice.

"I've always said that he was going to be a threat," Kanaan said. "The question was not that he could win on the oval, the question was when." He added: "If that actually is what he needed, we're going to give him a hell of a fight next year, and likewise. The sport is going to be better."

Both podium finishers spent time on the same complaint. Lapped cars racing the leaders cost McLaughlin and Lundgaard track position and patience in equal measure.

"They're air blocking. Mirror driving," McLaughlin said. "I get more frustrated when you're five or six seconds back of the leader, I'm trying to chase down Pato. Yeah, you just got to get out of the way. At that point you're done."

Lundgaard put it more simply: "The traffic is miserable out there. I don't know if it's the wind direction compared to last year that makes it so tough."

David Malukas finished fourth in the No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet, and Palou came home fifth after leading 115 laps, more than twice as many as anyone else. Kyle Kirkwood was sixth in the No. 27 Sam's Club Andretti Global Honda, the most improved driver of the race with a gain of 18 positions from 24th on the grid. VeeKay took seventh, Rasmussen eighth, Marcus Ericsson ninth and Louis Foster 10th.

Palou leaves Milwaukee with 587 points to Kirkwood's 490, a 97-point margin that leaves the championship undecided with Race 1 and the season finale at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca still to run. Lundgaard sits third on 478, O'Ward fourth on 450 and Malukas fifth on 443.

"It's obviously a stretch to Alex. I don't even know if we can reach him now," Lundgaard said. "But obviously Kirkwood is what we're aiming at. We got some points on him today."

Honda clinched the IndyCar Manufacturers Championship, its 12th.

The race ran 1:57:50.2411 at an average speed of 129.204 mph, with 10 lead changes among eight drivers and three cautions covering 37 of the 250 laps. The field produced 661 total passes, 333 of them for position, across 213 green-flag laps.

Conditions were considerably warmer than the cool, cloudy morning that produced Saturday's qualifying speeds. At 11:55 a.m. the ambient temperature was 87 degrees with 60 percent relative humidity under mostly sunny skies, and Firestone engineers measured the track at 106 degrees. Nick Pinchuk, Snap-on chairman and chief executive officer, gave the command to start engines at 12:06 p.m.

O'Ward, meanwhile, had a few hours to think about the other race.

"Not much of a reset," he said. "Kind of like an extension of closing out this year strong. We want to keep it up later today with Race 1 that we haven't quite finished."

O'Ward Sweeps Milwaukee, Palou Clinches a Fifth Title

Pato O'Ward walked back into the Milwaukee Mile media center on Sunday evening with a grin and an opening line.

"It's me again."

He had won the Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250 five hours earlier. Now he had won the Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 as well, taking the lead on a restart with 25 laps to run and beating David Malukas by 1.7535 seconds to complete a sweep no IndyCar driver had managed in 45 years. The last to win twice in a single day was Rick Mears, who swept a doubleheader at Atlanta on June 28, 1981.

It was O'Ward's third victory of 2026 and made him a three-time Milwaukee Mile winner in the No. 5 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet.

"We were determined today," O'Ward said. "We were determined to keep ourselves in the fight, keep ourselves in the opportunity of anything that came our way that we could take advantage of."

The race that produced it had been running since Saturday afternoon. Light rain began falling at 1:25 p.m. Saturday, Race Control sent teams back to the garage eight minutes later, and the field eventually took the green at 2:32 p.m. after Claire and Emma Uhler, auto repair students and Snap-on Partners in Education, gave the command to start engines. O'Ward led into Turn 1 from pole and held the lead until Felix Rosenqvist went by in Turn 2 on Lap 22.

Rosenqvist led 30 laps in the No. 60 SiriusXM Meyer Shank Racing Honda before the first green-flag pit sequence scrambled the order. Will Power, Dennis Hauger and Romain Grosjean each led briefly, and O'Ward passed Grosjean on Lap 58 to take it back. Five laps later the caution came out for conditions, and on Lap 89 the red flag flew at 3:20 p.m.

It stayed out for 25 hours and 40 minutes.

When the race resumed Sunday evening, the field went green on Lap 100 with O'Ward still in front. The decisive stretch belonged to Malukas. He cycled to the lead during the stops around Lap 119, and by the halfway mark he had pulled 15.1470 seconds clear of Marcus Armstrong. He led 93 laps in the No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet, more than anyone but O'Ward, and stayed out under a Lap 150 caution — brought out when Mick Schumacher spun off Turn 4 without hitting anything — to keep the lead when the rest of the leaders pitted.

Two late cautions changed it. Power made light contact with the wall in Turn 4 on Lap 199 and limped to pit lane, his race finished at 199 laps. Caio Collet hit the SAFER Barrier on the frontstretch on Lap 213 in the No. 4 Combitrans Amazonia AJ Foyt Racing Chevrolet, climbing out unassisted. That set up a restart on Lap 226, and O'Ward took the lead at the line.

"I can't really get too creative here," O'Ward said of the laps behind Malukas before that. "Like, really I just had to let something come to me. That's what ultimately gave me the opportunity."

He was generous about the driver he beat. "David did a phenomenal job. No one was going to catch him. He was doing such a great job through traffic. He was on fire."

O'Ward also noted a peculiarity in his own season. "I have three podiums, but all three of them have been a win," he said. "Before the last yellow when I was behind Malukas, I was like, the two podiums I've had have both been wins. It would suck for the third one to be a second. Racing gods heard me."

Told he had joined a list of two-in-a-day winners that includes Al Unser, Mario Andretti, Bobby Unser, Dan Gurney, Johnny Rutherford and Mears, he laughed. "Those are heavy names. Then you hear mine, you're like, What?"

Rinus VeeKay took third in the No. 76 Juncos Hollinger Racing Chevrolet, a result built from 24th on the grid after a nine-position engine-change penalty. Scott McLaughlin finished fourth in the No. 3 Clarience Technologies Team Penske Chevrolet, Christian Rasmussen fifth and Christian Lundgaard sixth, with Josef Newgarden seventh, Marcus Ericsson eighth and Armstrong ninth.

Alex Palou finished 10th, and it was enough. The No. 10 DHL Chip Ganassi Racing Honda driver leaves Milwaukee with 607 points to Lundgaard's 507, a margin larger than the maximum available at Laguna Seca, and with it a fifth NTT IndyCar Series championship and a fourth in a row — matching Sebastien Bourdais' run from 2004-07.

"I can't. It's very tough, man. It's tough to put into words," Palou said. "It's been an absolute joy of a year. The last two years have been just magical for us."

He was blunt about how the weekend itself had gone. "Not easy, man. It's hard," he said. "You saw last weekend, even today, we were struggling. There's moments where I don't really feel as good as some other weekends."

The title is the 18th for Chip Ganassi Racing, moving the team past Roger Penske for the most in series history — a distinction Ganassi framed carefully.

"When I look at this guy next to me here, five championships in six years, the team has 18 now, I passed my pal Roger," Ganassi said. "But the fact of the matter is, I wouldn't be here without him. If it wasn't for Roger setting the bar, there wouldn't be a bar to exceed or to shoot for."

He was more expansive about what he thinks he is watching. "We're in the midst of a generational thing here, a generational driver," Ganassi said. "Four in a row has been done before, but five out of six hasn't been done before. That's something that's kind of unprecedented. We're in the midst of that right now. It's not over."

Asked whether Palou could reach eight titles, Ganassi did not hedge. "Absolutely. I mean, you'd be crazy not to believe that."

Team manager Barry Wanser credited the driver's appetite for information. "I just think his ability to constantly learn and take advantage of the resources that we have at Chip Ganassi Racing," Wanser said. "Alex can't perform as well as he does without such a great team behind him."

Palou, who turns 30 next year, sounded less certain about the run continuing than the people around him. "I don't know how long this is going to last. One year, 10 years, 15, five years," he said. "I don't know how long are we going to be able to be up top. But I'm enjoying every single day with this team, with this car."

O'Ward, who has spent the season chasing that car, put it another way. "The guy lives rent free in everyone's head in the paddock. He's raised that bar, him and Ganassi. That 10 car has been unbelievable."

The race produced 12 lead changes among eight drivers and four cautions covering 70 of the 250 laps, with 696 total passes and 372 for position across 180 green-flag laps. O'Ward's fastest lap, 159.455 mph on Lap 2, came Saturday afternoon and stood through everything that followed. The running time was 2:11:42.1669 at an average of 115.601 mph. Hauger drew a drive-through penalty on Lap 233 for being out of line on a restart.

Conditions at the resumption bore no resemblance to Saturday's washout. At 4:45 p.m. the ambient temperature was 75 degrees with 78 percent relative humidity under cloudy skies, and Firestone engineers measured the track at 89 degrees — 17 degrees cooler than the surface for Sunday's earlier race. Engines fired again at 5 p.m.

The season concludes next weekend at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, where Ganassi said Palou's car will carry a tribute to Alex Zanardi, the team's former champion who died this year.

"It's going to be very, very special," Ganassi said.

McLaughlin and Palou Split Milwaukee P1 Awards as Penalties Reshape Race 1

Scott McLaughlin and Alex Palou each claimed an NTT P1 Award in a single 60-minute run at the Milwaukee Mile on Saturday morning, but neither will line up where his lap suggests.

The format gave every driver one attempt at two timed laps, the first setting the field for Saturday's Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 and the second setting it for Sunday's Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250. McLaughlin took the Race 1 award with a lap of 22.0738 seconds at 165.536 mph in the No. 3 Clarience Technologies Team Penske Chevrolet, the quickest lap anyone turned all weekend. Palou answered on the second lap of his own run, the last of the session, going 22.1915 seconds at 164.658 mph in the No. 10 DHL Chip Ganassi Racing Honda to take Sunday's award by three ten-thousandths of a second over Pato O'Ward.

Both drivers carry nine-position grid penalties into Saturday's race. INDYCAR Officiating announced Friday that the Nos. 3 and 12 Team Penske entries, the No. 10 Chip Ganassi Racing entry and the Nos. 76 and 77 Juncos Hollinger Racing entries had made unapproved engine changes after the race on the Streets of Washington, D.C., a violation carrying a nine-position penalty at oval events.

The official lineup hands the front of the field to O'Ward, who qualified fourth at 164.019 mph and will start the Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 from pole in the No. 6 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet. Newgarden lines up second and Power third, with Hauger fourth in the No. 19 Ault Block Chain Dale Coyne Racing Honda and Rosenqvist fifth. McLaughlin drops to 10th, Palou to 11th and Malukas to 12th. VeeKay falls from 19th to 24th, and Robb, who qualified 23rd, starts 25th and last.

The second laps rearranged things considerably. Behind Palou and O'Ward, Newgarden was third for Sunday at 163.767 mph and Mick Schumacher fourth at 163.244 mph, one ten-thousandth of a second clear of Power. It matched the rookie's career-best qualifying effort, equaling his fourth at Phoenix. Schumacher ran second in the qualifying order, which is set by reverse entrant points, and his laps stood atop both sheets until Hauger displaced him on the Race 1 side and Newgarden did the same for Race 2 with four cars left to run.

McLaughlin lost the most between laps, falling from 165.536 mph to 162.560 mph and eighth for Sunday, the steepest drop-off in the field. Malukas went from third to 14th. Hauger, second quickest in Friday's practice, slid from seventh to 15th. Moving the other way, Marcus Armstrong improved from 16th to ninth, Scott Dixon from 15th to 10th and VeeKay from 19th to 12th.

Kyle Kirkwood, second in the championship and 91 points behind Palou entering the weekend, qualified 22nd for Race 1 and 24th for Race 2, the two worst results of any driver still mathematically alive for the title. The penalties ahead of him move him up one spot on the grid, to 21st. He described this doubleheader on Friday as the weekend that would decide whether he was racing for a championship or for second. Nolan Siegel qualified 25th on both laps in the No. 6 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet, a day after crashing in practice, and starts 23rd on Saturday.

Conditions bore no resemblance to Friday evening. At 9:45 a.m. the ambient temperature was 72 degrees with 71 percent relative humidity under cloudy skies, and the track measured 77.2 degrees, according to Firestone Racing — nearly 30 degrees cooler than the surface drivers found in practice. The session began at 10:05 a.m. with Robb first out.

Sunday's grid remains provisional. Teams that make unapproved engine changes after Saturday's race would serve nine-position penalties at the series' next event, which is the Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250.

Newgarden Tops the Only Practice as Hauger Crowds Him at the Milwaukee Mile

Josef Newgarden turned the fastest lap of the NTT IndyCar Series' lone practice session at the Milwaukee Mile on Friday, and the driver who nearly beat him to it had never raced there in an Indy car.

Newgarden ran 159.430 mph in the No. 2 Snap-on Team Penske Chevrolet on his 74th of 83 laps, the best of 1,674 turned by the 25-car field across 90 minutes. Dennis Hauger was seven and a half thousandths of a second behind at 159.378 mph in the No. 19 Ault Block Chain Dale Coyne Racing Honda, a result that lands differently for a driver who was 12th quickest at the July test here and who will make his first Milwaukee start on Saturday.

Championship leader Alex Palou was third at 158.890 mph in the No. 10 DHL Chip Ganassi Racing Honda and covered 95 laps, more than anyone. David Malukas followed in fourth at 158.665 mph, with Rinus VeeKay fifth at 158.648 mph, Alexander Rossi sixth at 158.539 mph and Will Power seventh at 158.053 mph. Kyle Kirkwood, Pato O'Ward and Sting Ray Robb completed the top 10.

With qualifying setting both starting grids Saturday morning and no further track time before either race, teams spent the session splitting their attention between single-lap pace and long runs. It did not always look tidy.

"It's hard to try and put in qual sims, race runs, all that kind of stuff," Scott Dixon said. "It seems like everybody doesn't go on the same program, like the speeds on track can be very different."

Complicating that further was rubber. Cars began the session on an older set of Firestone Firehawk tires, and the balance that came with them shaped how the first half hour unfolded.

"The spanner in the works was the first set of tires everybody had," said Dixon, who was 15th at 156.371 mph in the No. 9 PNC Bank Chip Ganassi Racing Honda. "We actually stuck it out for almost I think 50 or 60 laps on that first set, where a lot of people after the first run switched straightaway. Then going through notes from other cars, looks like everybody was very loose on that first set. It wasn't really comparing apples to apples, which was unfortunate."

Two cautions carved into the running. The first came 16 minutes in, when Nolan Siegel quarter-spun in Turn 2 and made moderate rear contact with the SAFER Barrier in the No. 6 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet. He climbed from the car without assistance from the AMR INDYCAR Safety Team and was seen and released from the medical unit. His session ended at two laps.

The second was more consequential for the championship. With 24 minutes left, Kirkwood and Christian Rasmussen made wheel-to-wheel contact entering Turn 3. Kirkwood spun and collected Rasmussen, and both cars came to rest against the barrier. Both drivers climbed out unassisted and were seen and released. Kirkwood, second in the standings and the only driver with a realistic path to keeping the title fight alive past this weekend, finished the session eighth at 158.042 mph but with just 32 laps, the fewest of any car that ran. Rasmussen, the defending race winner, was 13th at 157.247 mph with 44 laps.

All three drivers drew five-minute time penalties for causing a yellow flag. Newgarden collected a drive-through penalty of his own earlier in the session for a pit lane speed violation, clocked at 55.807 mph.

None of it dented his read on the weekend. "It was an okay start," Newgarden said. "We'll see what tomorrow brings. It's going to be a tough race."

He was more expansive about the compressed format, which gives teams one session to solve a track before racing on it twice.

"Feels like a go-kart event, which is not a bad thing," Newgarden said. "Go-karting is the most fun that you have in racing, okay? It feels very pure, kind of a little bit kind of chaotic, get after it, just go do it."

The flip side is that a bad Friday has nowhere to go. "It's tough on the teams. Kind of have to show up with your A game when it's like that," he said. "If you don't roll off the truck good, it's very difficult to catch up on a weekend like this, very difficult. You're sort of trying to learn through the race then to fix it for race two, which is a really bad equation on the doubleheader."

Dixon, who won here in 2009, described a car with speed but an unfinished qualifying program. "Speed-wise I think the car's pretty good. I think they rolled off quite well," he said. "We didn't really emphasize enough later in the session on straight-up speed and Q for tomorrow." His second qualifying simulation was interrupted by a caution.

Asked what wins at the Milwaukee Mile, Dixon pointed away from raw pace and toward the thing Rasmussen had a year ago. "Stay out of trouble. I think the starts and restarts, having a car you can really trust," he said. "We saw that from Rasmussen last year. Didn't really have straight-up speed, but he was able to be on the bottom, on the top as well, maneuver the car around quite easily."

For the No. 9 crew, that range has been the harder thing to find. "We kind of have good pace, a certain portion of the track that we stick to, but if we try to move off it, it gets a little bit tougher," Dixon said. "The working window is quite small."

There is a symmetry to the weekend for him. Dixon's time with Chip Ganassi Racing began at this track in 2002, and after informing the team in July that he will not return in 2027 — he joins Arrow McLaren next season on a multi-year agreement — Saturday and Sunday are his final scheduled Milwaukee starts in a Ganassi car.

"Yeah, definitely started here. It was definitely an interesting race. Remember it well. I think almost missed qualifying. I was asleep in the truck, somebody had to come and get me," Dixon said. "That time for me, a lot going on. There was a lot of changes, a lot of uncertainties. Obviously it worked well."

He had not dwelled on the bookend. "I hadn't really thought about much where it started here with Chip," he said. "Hopefully we can finish it well this weekend, as well."

Newgarden, who has never finished better than fifth here, offered the simplest explanation for why the flat mile rewards the drivers who solve it. "It's fun to drive, because it's flat. Unforgiving track if you get it wrong, which makes it challenging and exciting for drivers," he said. "It's gratifying when you make a good car around here because it makes you feel like a hero in some ways."

The session ran green at 5 p.m. under 83-degree ambient temperatures and a 106-degree track surface. Sunday is forecast to be warmer than Saturday, a variable both drivers expect to matter across the two races.

Qualifying is at 10:05 a.m. CT on Saturday, a single-car, two-lap run in which the first lap sets the grid for the Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 and the second sets it for Sunday's Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250.