Scott McLaughlin recently said that they’re going to start swinging for the fences more. They’ve backed those words up too by proving just that in each of the last two Sunday races.

At Toronto, he was second but didn’t pit when he should have. It cost them four spots in the process. In Race 2 at Iowa, he was second at the time of pitting to go off sequence. It cost him three spots in the end.

That’s 20 points he’s given away (11 at Toronto, 9 in Iowa) by doing so. But, even if he didn’t, getting 20 more points back isn’t going to help his championship hopes. He’s 148 points down. He’d be 128 points if he had those decisions back. That would only moved him up 1 spot in the standings.

“Yeah, we’re at the point now where we you can risk a lot, whether that’s strategy and whatnot,” said McLaughlin.” Ultimately you don’t want to fall any further down in the championship standings.

“I think we’ve got to put pressure on Alex. We have to make sure he doesn’t get too far ahead. We know how crazy of a race Nashville is. Laguna is new because of the new pavement. I generally think it’s not over. We’re full steam ahead, just pushing.

“At the end of the day we have to put pressure on Alex as well. That comes from our team and how we work.”

McLaughlin has six straight top eight finishes now and seven in the last nine races. The only exception was the Month of May to where he qualified 16th and 14th in the GMR Grand Prix and Indy 500 and finished in the same spots too.

Since, he’s qualified 2nd in 4 of the 6 races with finishes of 7th, 8th, 5th, 6th, 2nd, 5th. It’s just turning those starts to a win.

He was held up in Detroit with Romain Grosjean, he should have pit at the end of last Sunday’s race in Toronto, didn’t have enough for Newgarden on Saturday and then swung for the fence on Sunday and it didn’t pan out.

He qualified on the pole and finished second here a year ago. He was fourth in the return trip to IMS on the road course. He was third in World Wide Technology Raceway, won in Portland and sixth in Laguna Seca.

If he can replicate that, watch out.

It’s been that type of season but he still moved up to 5th in points (-148) in Iowa. He’s one point behind Marcus Ericsson for fourth and only 28 back from Scott Dixon for third.