Arrow McLaren reorganizes ahead of 2025

09/26/2024 06:20 PM

Arrow McLaren has been busy in the days following IndyCar's September 15 season finale at Nashville Speedway with staffing additions, promotions, title changes, and reorganizations to aid in its quest to win its first NTT IndyCar Series championship.

Having won three races with Pato O'Ward with the No. 5 Chevy and placed fifth in the standings, taken 10th with former driver Alexander Rossi in the No. 7, and dealt with the revolving cast of drivers in the No. 6 entry that was eventually taken over by Nolan Siegel, the team was competitive but not in title contention.

Driven to erase the lingering chasm between its results and those of Chip Ganassi Racing, Team Penske, and the resurgent Andretti Global, team principal Gavin Ward and Arrow McLaren's leadership have initiated a sweeping range of changes for 2025, starting with adding more responsibility to sporting director Tony Kanaan, who will take on some of Ward's day-to-day duties in his new elevated position of deputy team principal.

For Ward, a championship-winning race engineer at Team Penske with a vast technical and engineering background in Formula 1, the streamlining of his workload with the help of Kanaan is designed to give the Canadian a greater ability to apply his core skills and improve the team's performance.

"It stems from some really great introspective analysis and deep conversations with Zak Brown, our board, and the leadership team said, 'How do we make the best use of him, but also have him run the team as well as possible," Ward told RACER. And I certainly feel like the last few years, I’ve not been able to use my real strength of background as much as I like to, and really, frankly, it is my passion.

"Making race cars go fast, and working with race drivers is what gets me going the most, and really building a healthy team culture. Those are the things that I’m most passionate about and really add the most value. And TK (Tony Kanaan) has just shown so much energy, and he’s so good with our partners, as well as having the competitive experience and knowledge and his connections; he’s got a real broad reach pegged down.

"The sporting director role for him initially was kind of tricky, because he goes across so much of what the team does and navigating all of that, so seeing how well he's done everything, eventually, I was like, 'Well, why don’t I just make him my right-hand man?' He’s great to take the load off when it comes to PR and he's such a popular character with our partners that he could take on some of my areas and he’s just very good at it."

The team has hired Brad O'Brien as its VP of finance and business, promoted Lauren Gaudion earlier in the year to VP of marketing and communications and she continues to be entrusted with more areas of importance to oversee, and with Kanaan's new appointment plus the ongoing support of general manager Brian Barnhart, Ward is surrounded by an executive group that should allow him to make a more direct impact in how Arrow McLaren fares between green and checkered flags.

"In addition to the TK change, we’ve really upped our game in our business acumen with Brad O’Brien, which takes a lot of that load off my plate," he said. "Lauren is just crushing as VP of marketing and comms. She’s a superstar, so with everyone there, I can get pretty hands off in the running of business and commercial side of the team.

"Now I can plug myself into more of our overarching strategic thinking and do a little less firefighting. We’ve had a heck of a lot of firefighting this year, on the driver front, particularly – a lot of that outside our control – so we're looking forward to some stability over the next couple years, and really just investing in performance, execution, drivers, team, morale, culture, health and wellbeing. I really want to build the dream team that we’ve got here to be better than it is. That’s all part of the picture."

The team has also added the well-traveled, championship-winning Scott Harner to the operation as its director of race operations to look after the shop floor and logistics, among other duties.

"You bring in someone like Harner, who’s got so much experience and he knows what a championship team looks like, and he buys into what we’re trying to do.," Ward said of Horner, who was part of Ganassi's dominant years with Scott Dixon and Dario Franchitti and Tony Kanaan.

"Culture-wise, he’s got tons of respect and connections across the paddock. He's a huge asset, and it fit another gap where with my background, I don’t know how to run the shop floor, machine shop, bodywork shop, mechanic workflows over a 100-person IndyCar team, that’s not really my expertise. Scott lets me not end up having to dive into those things, which can really take a lot of time and really don’t play to my strengths. So that was the other motivation there."

Kyle Sagan, brought on in 2024 to improve Arrow McLaren's pit stops, has been promoted to deputy chief mechanic, and he'll report to Chris Stafford, another colleague on the rise, who moves from being a car chief to the crew chief overlooking all three entries in support of the individual car chiefs with the Nos. 5, 6, and 7 Chevys.

"Stafford came to us with a ton of experience from his time in F1 where he was a No. 1 mechanic over there for quite a while with Williams," Ward said. "He was Kyle Larson's car chief at the Indy 500 and was on Nolan's car a bit, and he really gave me the confidence to put them in this position with Sagan supporting him. We’ve got awesome car chiefs across the board. I’m happy with the depth.

"The idea is to put truly exceptional people running each car, and then have someone like Chris to be there to help them set the standards, make sure we’re building the cars the same. Make sure we’re really capturing any issues that come up and solving them, and solving them across the board, and just standardizing what we do. When you grow the team as we've done, you need more of that and Chris gets that, and I think he’s the guy to help us up our game."

More personnel are headed to Arrow McLaren in the coming weeks once they put in their notice or clear 'gardening leave.' And there's one more big promotion in the works as O'Ward's performance engineer Kate Gundlach, an IndyCar champion at her former Ganassi team with Scott Dixon, has accepted the offer to become a race engineer in 2025. Gundlach and the team are working through placement, with Siegel's No. 6 Chevy being the most likely destination.

"What makes Kate the star that she is that she just wants to absolutely nail it and be in the right place to do that," Ward said. "She’s been, in my opinion, the best performance engineer in the pit lane for a while and no one’s more deserving of a chance to step up than Kate.

"As I said to her after the last race in Nashville, I’m going to do everything I can to turn her into the most badass race engineer in pit lane. So we’re really there to help and support her as she gets up to speed. We're super-excited."