Quote:
Originally Posted by RWill2073
The only thing I see as a positive of leaving penske, of which there aren't really "better" options is that with newgarden and power he was always going to be second fiddle and not really prioritized in a championship fight.
He's going to Meyer shank racing, so not really a title contending team yet. Though with him and castroneves I could see the team improving development wise and jumping into a race winning contender, and top 10 points finish. Top ten in this series is pretty good, when you figure you have 1 penske, 3 ganassi, 1 mclaren and 2 andretti cars you can pretty much slot into the top ten. That leaves 3 spots for the other 2 penskes, the other mclaren, a third andretti, plus MSR, rahal (×2) and maybe one other out there.
I'm obviously biased, I like pagenaud. Have ever since he was deferran's secret weapon in the p2 Acura in ALMS. But I can't figure out why he was never fully embraced at penske. He struggled year one (similar to mclaughlin) and there was talk of him being on the hot seat in year 2. Don't hear that about McLaughlin. So what did he do? Just won a championship... 2 years later he's back on the hot seat before getting resigned one more time. After that he wins a 500 and is still out. Seems crazy to me.
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Maybe with Pagenaud it was a clash of personalities and he just didn't gel with Team Penske but was always able to deliver the goods when it mattered in order to keep his seat? As you say, he was in the hot seat in his second year at Penske, won the championship in 2016. Two years later he's back in the hot seat, gets re-signed and wins the 500 in 2019 and is finally out at the end of this season.
Penske hasn't signed a fourth driver to replace Pagenaud, so clearly wants to field a three car team and has the drivers he wants in those seats.
As for McLaughlin, he comes from a completely different school of racing and it is his first full season in IndyCar, so I wouldn't necessarily expect him to be right up there and he is sort of Rodger Penke's Golden Boy, having won the Supercars Championship three times in a row.