Scott McLaughlin’s No. 3 Chevrolet hit the grass at 165 mph entering Turn 1 at Barber Motorsports Park on Saturday morning, and the next four seconds were the kind that make you hold your breath.
His right rear tire caught the dirt on the edge of the racing surface. The car snapped into a half-spin, shot backwards through the gravel trap, hopped the tire barrier, and punched clean through the catch fence before coming to rest tangled in cables and fencing material. From the in-car camera, you can see McLaughlin bring his hands up to brace his neck and face just before impact.
He climbed out with help from the AMR safety team. He walked to the medical center under his own power. He walked out a few minutes later.
“It looked a lot worse than it felt,” McLaughlin told Fox Sports.
That’s the kind of sentence only a driver can deliver with a straight face. The car carved such a clean path through the foam and fencing that Team Penske initially considered repairing it for qualifying. They decided to switch to a backup car, a call that tells you the damage was worse than the surprisingly tidy exit wound suggested.
Cables running through that section of fence were compromised, and IndyCar called Practice 2 early with just under four minutes remaining.
McLaughlin had been the fastest driver on track Friday, posting a 1:07.3840 in the opening session. He was 12th in Saturday’s running order when the red flag ended things, having turned a 1:06.8700 before the crash. The speed was clearly there. The margin wasn’t.
“It’s not a laughing matter,” McLaughlin said. “It’s a mistake, and I have to be better.”
That kind of self-assessment from a two-time Barber winner tells you everything about where his head was. No excuses about cold track temperatures making the car loose, though he acknowledged both. No finger-pointing at setup. He dropped the right rear, he spun, and he owned it.
Alex Palou, who dominated this race last year, led the session at 1:06.4680 in the No. 10 Chip Ganassi Racing Honda. Series points leader Kyle Kirkwood was second. Rinus VeeKay continued a quietly impressive weekend in third for Juncos Hollinger Racing, with Romain Grosjean fourth and Marcus Armstrong rounding out the top five.
None of that mattered to anyone watching. The story was the No. 3 car sitting in a wrecked catch fence and the Kiwi walking away from it.
Team Penske’s crew pivoted to prepping the backup car for qualifying Saturday afternoon, a task that sounds routine but requires rebuilding a competitive machine under time pressure with zero margin for error. The equipment exists and the personnel exist. The question is whether they can dial it in fast enough to matter.
McLaughlin came to IndyCar from Supercars in 2021 and has built himself into a legitimate contender on every surface the series offers. Barber is one of his strongest circuits. Losing a practice session and switching cars on race weekend is a setback, but it’s not a death sentence for this team or this driver.
The 90-lap race goes green Sunday at 1 p.m. ET. McLaughlin will be in a different car than the one he started the weekend with. The fence at Turn 1 will need repair, and somewhere in the Penske garage, a crew is working through lunch to make sure their driver gets the shot he asked for.
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