When he joined McLaren Racing in the IndyCar Series on Sept. 8, 2023, David Malukas was expected to be the next big thing in the long line of successful drivers for McLaren’s team principal, Zak Brown.

But Malukas’s time with McLaren will never appear in his career racing stats, as the Chicago native never even competed in one race for McLaren before he was surprisingly released from his contract, cast away like a bad tire that had imploded.

To be fair, Malukas’ quick departure from McLaren was due to a non-racing accident, riding a mountain bike in early February 2024, preparing his body for the IndyCar season that was due to start less than a month later, when he suffered a severe left wrist injury and torn ligaments that required surgery to fix it.

Unfortunately, with Malukas missing the first four races of that season, McLaren decided to axe Malukas from the team and moved on. Malukas was able to catch on for the final 12 races of that season with Meyer Shank Racing, then had a full season in 2025 with A.J. Foyt Racing, finishing 11th, including runner-up in the biggest race of the year, the Indianapolis 500.

When Team Penske decided to part ways with longtime driver Will Power after last season, there was only one driver on their wish list to replace Power, and that was Malukas. What was McLaren’s loss has definitely become Penske’s gain. That was most evident with Malukas’s second straight runner-up finish in Sunday’s 110 Running of the Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Even though Felix Rosenqvist was the winner of the 500, Malukas didn’t make things easy for him, finishing just 0.0233 seconds, the closest finish in the 110-year history of the world’s greatest, oldest, and biggest race. Had it not been for a perfectly-timed pass of Malukas by Rosenqvist with just a few hundred feet from the finish line, Malukas would have won, no question about it.

As McLaren’s Pato O’Ward, who finished fourth, said, “Malukas has nothing to be embarrassed about” for finishing second.”

Indeed, Malukas has been the shining star for Team Penske in his first season with the team. In seven starts, he has recorded four top-five finishes — 2nd in the Indy Grand Prix and the Indy 500, 3rd at Phoenix, and 4th at Birmingham — along with two other top-10 finishes of 6th at Arlington and 7th at Long Beach, as well as a 13th-place finish in the season-opening race at St. Petersburg.

Leaving Indianapolis, Malukas is second in the IndyCar standings, just 42 points behind series leader and defending and four-time IndyCar champion Alex Palou, who won last year’s Indy 500 but finished seventh in Sunday’s race.

Meanwhile, Malukas’s teammates are sixth (Scott McLaughlin, 55 points behind Malukas) and eighth (Josef Newgarden, 69 points behind Malukas, even with one win).

Sunday’s 500 should have been Malukas’s race, but it ultimately deprived him of his first career IndyCar win and Roger Penske’s record-extending 21 win at Indy.

But Rosenqvist’s veteran IndyCar experience (120 starts to 68 for Malukas), as well as his scorecard at Indy (eight starts, including two previous fourth-place finishes and Sunday’s win), was just a hair better than Malukas’s four Indy 500 races (including finishing second place in last year’s race as well).

If you don’t think drivers take IndyCar’s biggest race – and biggest paycheck – all you had to do was watch Malukas after the race. He cried when he stopped on pit road, then continued to shed tears on the FOX TV broadcast; he was so upset. The finish line was in his field of vision, just a few hundred feet away, when Rosenqvist literally came out of nowhere and snuck ahead on the right, winning by roughly three-plus feet.

“I don’t know what else we could have done,” said Malukas, driver of the No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet. “We were the fastest car that whole race. I gave it 150%. I almost crashed this damn car every lap and still end up with a P2. I can’t believe it. I don’t know what else I can give.

“I give everything to this team. We’ve had such a stellar season. This whole month, they gave everything to me, everything I need. Just so close, this place, man.”

To his credit, Malukas made an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like promise: “(We’ll be) back. We’re going to bring everything. We’re going to give it 160%, though. Thank you, everybody here for staying here through the rain. Thank you to everybody at Team Penske. Thank you to Roger Penske for believing in me when nobody else did. We’re going to keep on going.”

Malukas was the highest-finishing Chevrolet-powered driver, with McLaughlin right behind in third place, his highest career finish in six starts in the so-called Greatest Spectacle In Racing. Two-time 500 winner Newgarden was involved in a crash on Lap 124 of the 200-lap event and finished a disappointing 28.

McLaughlin can relate to Malukas’s sadness of coming so close.

“I’ve lost plenty of races in my career, and you sort of know how that feels being so close to something so massive,” McLaughlin said. “He’s going to be feeling it. He’s going to go through it himself and have his family around him, but I’ll talk to him when I see him.”

While upset at coming so close, Malukas admitted he gave everything he could.

“I just don’t know what else we could have done,” he said. “We were driving 150 percent that whole race. We had the fastest car out there that whole race. It was ours to win, and I knew that. I’ve never pushed that hard in my whole life.”

After the race, Penske came up to Malukas to congratulate him on his finish. “Roger was one of the first guys to come to me and tell me that he believes in me and told me to keep on pushing,” Malukas said. “Because of him, I can sit here and cry that I’m going for a P2 position.

Malukas ended his interview with the media with an air of disappointment but also understanding of what had played out.

“I think that’s why it’s really emotional for me because I wanted to get a win for this team and just wanted to be written across those history books,” he said. “Everything happens for a reason. I think there’s a reasoning to this. We’re going to just use it as more motivation and just keep pushing forward, and someday maybe it’ll happen.

“Watching the replay and seeing the run that he had, it actually made me feel better because I don’t think there’s anything I could have done. Maybe could have shortened it by a couple of thousandths. I think that was the IMS gods telling me that it’s not my time.

“For some reason in my head, I felt like we got this. We’re going to get it. And we didn’t, by just a few little bits. I think that’s why it hurts because in my mind I really thought we were going to win it, and we didn’t get that right. When you give yourself a goal and when you don’t achieve it, it tends to hurt, and I think that’s why it hurts so much.”