Pato O’Ward desperately wants to win an NTT INDYCAR SERIES race this season. He left Portland and comes to this weekend’s season finale riding a 22-race drought. However, it’s not like he hasn’t been close this season either. Last Sunday’s BITNILE.com Grand Prix of Portland was the young Mexican stars ninth top five finish of the season as he brought his No. 5 Dallara-Chevrolet home in fourth.

O’Ward started the race from sixth but elected to start on the primary tires. With most thinking this would be a primary dominated race, which is completely different than every other year here, they swung for the fence in thinking so.

That proved to be the right move.

That allowed him to cut into Josef Newgarden’s gap to P3 in points to now being nine points down. Unfortunately for O’Ward, Newgarden rebounded from starting 12th to finish one spot behind O’Ward in fifth.

O’Ward was also 4th at Portland last year and 4th, 2nd, 3rd, 8th, 3rd, 4th on natural road courses this season too. He had a top five finish in Monterey a year ago too.

Now, he’s only nine points back to being the best Chevrolet finisher in points which is a massive feat. He’s finished 4th, 3rd, 7th in points in his first three years and on the verge of a top 4 finish again.

“One last rodeo for the 2023 season,” O’Ward said. “It’s an enjoyable track to drive, even though I haven’t had the result there in the NTT INDYCAR SERIES that I’ve been hoping for the last couple of years. Hopefully this time is the charm. The track is repaved, so I’m looking forward to that new challenge and making it a good one for all of us on the team.”

He’s closing that gap to the big teams. The last 20 champions have hailed from the Penske, Ganassi or Andretti camps. Ganassi will make this 21 straight.

The last time a team other than the “Big 3” won a championship was Panther in 2002 with Sam Hornish Jr. 

His only issue is not having a win thus far with his crux this season has been being overly aggressive at times.

O’Ward had 3 runner-up finishes in the first 5 races of the season. He was 4th in 1 of the other 2 races. The one that he wasn’t was being overzealous in Long Beach.

The Indy 500 he was aggressive on the Lap 192 restart with Marcus Ericsson in Turn 3. He was first, slipped to third by time we got to Turn 1 and when trying to get back, he overstepped it. In Detroit, a bad pit stop while leading and pushing too hard to make up for it saw him catch the wall.

Take those three races out, his average finish on the season is 4.53.

He comes to the season finale with finishes of 3rd, 8th, 8th, 3rd, 10th, 8th, 3rd, 2nd, 4th in the last 9 races.

Unfortunately, he’ll come from 10th at the start. O’Ward got off course in practice on Saturday morning and into the Turn 3 wall. It cut his session short. Then in qualifying, he made the second round but had an issue late in the session and would only qualify 12th best.

With grid penalties for Juri Vips and Santino Ferrucci, it promotes O’Ward up two spots for 10th.

“Not the best qualifying for us,” O’Ward admits. “It was probably one of our worst all year. I’m not sure what made the balance shift so much in Q2 versus Q1 for me. I just couldn’t extract the lap time. But I’m happy for the team with Felix’s pole. Tomorrow we’ll have three cars with pace starting in three parts of the field, the front, middle and rear. We’re going to give it everything we have to finish our season strong.”

This was O’Ward worst starting spot since 11th in Iowa 2. It was his worst qualifying performance since July 1 at Mid-Ohio when he got off track in the opening round and would start 25th as a result.

Outside of those two instances, he’s qualified in the top 10 in every other race.