Team Penske has had success hiring young drivers, but is 23-year-old David Malukas ready?

After four years of constant questions around whether David Malukas might be IndyCar’s next big thing, or merely one of so, so many drivers who log podiums here and there and maybe even the occasional blue moon win, but never truly reach stardom … well, there’s still more waiting left to do, but one way or another, we’ll soon have our answer.

Because straight into the fire the 23-year-old has been thrown, hired into Team Penske’s pressure cooker of an IndyCar team without so much as an IndyCar victory or a top-10 championship finish or a junior category title of any kind to show, all while charged with filling the shoes of a 17-year veteran of the team who won 42 times — more than any one of its stars Team Penske has birthed in its 50-plus years — and sat on pole 65 others in the same No. 12 Verizon Chevrolet cockpit Malukas stands to occupy on his multi-year deal.

Team Penske stands to be the young driver’s fifth team just four years after his runner-up Indy Lights finish in the fall of 2021. The driver he battled neck-and-neck with that season? Kyle Kirkwood, one of the best American open-wheel ladder system drivers there’s ever been, a five-time race-winner in his own right who just finished fourth in the championship and who won more races in 2025 than any IndyCar driver not named Alex Palou.

We all remember that rookie year of Kirkwood’s when the AJ Foyt Racing driver toiled in what was then back-marker machinery, only to blossom almost immediately once he hopped into Andretti equipment — winning from pole in just his third start at his home of now three years and counting.

Malukas’ path into a championship-caliber ride has been far more circuitous, featuring two seasons oftentimes running in the back half of the field with an occasional top-10 run and pair of flash-in-the-pan podium performances at World Wide Technology Raceway with Dale Coyne Racing. From there, he was Arrow McLaren’s third choice for the No. 6 Chevy in 2024 after Palou breached his contract and pledged to never show and Marcus Ericsson turned down the opportunity.

Malukas' dreams of running far more often near the front disintegrated with the shattering of his wrist in a preseason mountain-biking crash and a voided contract four races into the year. Meyer Shank Racing’s lifeline, having cut its own driver loose midseason, gave him a lifeline that caught the eye of then-Team Penske president Tim Cindric, who is believed to have inked Malukas in the summer of 2024 to some sort of deal that bonded the young driver to the program and helped land him a ride with its technical alliance member, AJ Foyt Racing, for 2025.

 And after one season there where he finished 11th in points with five top-10s, two top-5s, a third-place finish on the road (and second in the record books) at the Indianapolis 500 and a year’s worth of speculation about his prospective fit as Penske material, he’s been handed the equipment that should allow him to fight Kirkwood and Co. at the front, consistently, once again.

The question looming, though, is: Is he ready?

Team Penske's history of successful, front-running drivers

By no means has Team Penske hired sure-fire champions with every driver they’ve selected. Look no further than Helio Castroneves’ two years in CART before he was pegged as Roger Penske’s next hire in the fall of 1999, replacing driver Greg Moore who died in what was meant to be his final race before teaming up with Penske, Cindric, Gil De Ferran and Co.

But Castroneves’ freshman and sophomore seasons in the sport were run at a time with four engine manufacturers, five chassis builders and a head-to-head battle in the tire wars. Picking, or being picked, to run the fastest combination of all three was such an advantage, and so a program like Team Penske truly had to trust its gut when hiring a driver who’d never finished higher than 15th in the championship, who’d never won a race and who’d registered DNFs in 23 of his 39 starts.

A quarter-century later, the 50-year-old Castroneves continues to race on in pursuit of being the first driver ever to win the Indy 500 five times — with three of those Borg-Warner trophies, as well as 30 wins and four runner-up championship finishes coming as a Team Penske driver. We’ll never know what his career might’ve featured had he not been hired by the winningest team in series history, but there’s no question Penske and Cindric’s intuition was spot on.

For Malukas’ sake, they rarely have been wrong. Among drivers who’ve driven a full season in IndyCar for Roger Penske, only four have left the program without either an Indy 500 victory or a championship, or both, to their name. Penske has a consistent history of either hiring the series’ best after they’ve risen to stardom elsewhere or managed to polish a stone with minor blemishes into a diamond.

Over the last 25 years, all but one of Team Penske’s IndyCar pilots have reached at least one of those career-altering milestones while racing for the captain, with Ryan Briscoe the lone outlier. In five years partnered with Castroneves and Will Power, Briscoe won seven times with no championship finishes outside the top 6 and a best finish of third, along a pole at the Indy 500 (2012).

Just about anywhere else in the series, particularly one where two teams have won 17 of 18 championships since reunification in 2008, that stat line would earn you an extension, but after 2012, Penske scaled back to just two cars for Power and Castroneves, lacking the funding to hold onto Briscoe. For the next decade, the discarded Penske driver would remain the lone exception to one of Cindric’s favorite stat lines from his time atop Team Penske’s IndyCar program: virtually every single IndyCar driver he had ever hired had driven the car given to them to the top of the sport.

Was David Malukas placed in a Team Penske ride too soon?

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That, without question, will be expected in 2026. Though he shares a team now with a driver in Scott McLaughlin who’s neither won an Astor Cup or a Borg-Warner trophy in his five years running for Team Penske, but his rapid progression toward becoming an annual championship-contending shortlist selection with seven victories in Years 2-4 in the sport and a third-place points finish in 2024 to go along an Indy 500 pole that same year has the New Zealander primed for a 500 or championship breakthrough at some point in the near-future.

Add in two-time series champ and two-time Indy 500-winner Josef Newgarden, and Malukas is now a glaring third-wheel at a team that has long prided itself in never fielding — save for McLaughlin’s rookie year — a full-time driver this century who was clearly incapable of delivering a championship at their best form. Though Chip Ganassi Racing has ultimately proven more successful in title chases of late — winning each of the last three, five of the last six and 12 of the last 18 — Penske has virtually always fielded a lineup of championship-caliber drivers.

Whether two, three or four full-timers, you knew for sure that at their best, any one of Team Penske’s cars on any given day could snag a win, and at the beginning of the season, there was rarely, if ever, a moment where the entire lineup wasn’t considered capable of winning it all.

Can you say that about a driver in Malukas who’s never registered a top-10 championship finish and nor won in his career?

Of course there are always surprises. Look no farther than the three-time defending series champ Palou, who after a single season with Dale Coyne Racing in 2020 found himself on Chip Ganassi’s radar, and with a surprise open seat early that offseason, CGR rolled the dice and uncovered a driver who looks primed to break just about every record in the book five years later.

But it’s different when we’ve seen someone for four years, and in those four years, we haven’t quite gotten that one standout race day performance that shows you exactly what’s inside. We’ve seen the rookie that sang his way into a late-race battle for the lead at World Wide Technology Raceway with Newgarden, followed by another podium there a year later. We’ve seen a smattering of Fast Six qualifying performances and even a handful of front-row starts, too. We’ve seen a young Malukas in the hunt late in this year’s Indy 500, and we’ve seen more than a couple times a fearless driver on ovals who, at his best, can cut through traffic and run wheel-to-wheel with the best of them.

But as recent as midway through this year, we also saw a 23-year-old who looked every bit his youthful age, making what he would call “stupid,” “(overly)-ambitious” moves at times when the race simply wasn’t calling for something so daring. We’ve seen a driver start near the front and drift well out of contention without much explanation, who said this summer as a 23-year-old, “I need to act 40.”

It's a career that looks every bit the same as a Newgarden circa 2014 when Malukas’ new teammate was himself a 23-year-old running his third season at Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing, where he’d log seven top-10s, a pair of top-5s and his second-career podium, good enough for 13th in points.

A year later at a revamped version of the organization, CFH Racing, Newgarden broke through for his first win, followed a couple months later by another and then his first-career pole and two more second-place runs to boot. In one more year, at Ed Carpenter Racing, Newgarden was five years into his IndyCar career, had largely remained at the same organization the entire time and had now finished fourth in the title race — beating everyone, save the three Penske drivers that the following year would become his teammates.

The next year, he’d be crowned champion.

Would Newgarden have blossomed all the same had his 23-year-old self been thrown into the fire at Team Penske for 2015? Of course, we’ll never know, but at the time, Team Penske’s chessboard seemed a well-balanced display of incoming and outgoing pieces with a plan for two to three years down the road to keep the program running at full bore.

Just a month ago, Penske brass offered to fly Power out to Detroit with the plan to finally make its winningest driver in program history, its most recent champion and its points-scoring leader in 2025 an offer to stick around 2026 — a sign one would seem to accurately interpret to mean those team leaders felt they’d be best suited in the short-term to have a 45-year-old Power in their car in 2026 and in the medium-term to have Malukas get one more year under his belt under the greater Team Penske umbrella before taking on this task.

Thursday’s confirmation of a new driver in the No. 12, then, seems to have been a backup plan forced into action. It’s not often Penske doesn’t get what he wants, or that we have a Team Penske IndyCar driver whose ceiling we’re mightily uncertain of. But therein lies the curious — and albeit enviable — spot Malukas finds himself in. Of the 24 non-Team Penske drivers in the sport, maybe as many as 20 of them would leap at the opportunity laid at Malukas' feet.

Of course, very few of them would find themselves qualified. Which camp does Malukas belong in? We’ll circle back in a year and see.

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar news: David Malukas ready for Team Penske, replace Will Power?