The IndyCar rookie the series will miss this weekend

It was probably some 18 months ago when Autosport told someone within IndyCar that the reigning Supercars champion Scott McLaughlin was eager to move to America to continue his motorsport career. The guy looked appalled.

"What a f***ing waste of talent!" he spluttered. "How can he live with that? All that road-racing talent and he's going to end up wanking around in an oval crapshoot week after week. It's gonna be Marcos Ambrose all over again - he'll win the road races and be lost on the ovals because he's got no data. What is he thinking?!"

Yes, as you'll have already guessed, both of us were assuming that McLaughlin's move to the US meant he was considering a future within NASCAR. And if our assumption was wide of the mark, we weren't alone: it seemed Roger Penske was thinking the same way when Autosport first broached the subject with him.

He talked of the New Zealander needing to learn the US stock car ropes in NASCAR's second tier, the Xfinity Series, before moving up to Cup. He had learned, he said, from the Sam Hornish Jr experience, when his 2006 Indy 500 winner and IndyCar champion was zapped by the culture shock when he moved from open-wheel to stock cars and went straight in at the top level. Hornish's performances were painfully mediocre.

McLaughlin is as sharp as a fresh razor and if his ego is as healthy as that of any top driver, so too is his self-awareness. He knows the history of uber-talents who have tried and failed to adapt to NASCAR, and is desperately keen not to invalidate his multiple years of Supercars experience by becoming, as my friend put it, "Ambrose all over again".

Ambrose, you may recall, scored two Supercars championships and 28 wins before departing at the height of his powers in 2005 to NASCAR, where he scored five victories in what was then the Nationwide Series - four at Watkins Glen and one at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve - and two at Cup level, both at the Glen. But on the ovals, he only occasionally sparkled, and that must surely have been dispiriting, year after year.

When he returned Down Under and rejoined the Supercars fray some nine years later, Ambrose looked a shadow of his former self. It took just a few races into the 2015 season before the near-40-year-old sensibly decided that his time was up.

McLaughlin is now 27, but should have more than a dozen years left in racing, and he has become the man to beat in Supercars over the past three seasons. His first eight wins came while racing for Garry Rogers Motorsport. The 36 victories he has accrued since then, including two last week when Supercars resumed at Sydney, have come at the wheel of a Dick Johnson Racing Team Penske Ford.

The first year of this union, 2017, had McLaughlin narrowly beaten to the title at Newcastle amid controversy over a post-race penalty by series legend Jamie Whincup, the Triple Eight driver thereby notching up his seventh such honour in 10 seasons. Since then, however, McLaughlin has been pretty much unstoppable - but is also getting restless.

He has publicly stated that he has little enthusiasm for remaining a Supercars driver in perpetuity, shooting at Whincup's record numbers of championships, race victories and pole positions.

PLUS: Why Supercars aces are as good as F1 juniors

It's understood that McLaughlin's desire to cross the Pacific for his next career step is, at least in part, due to his New York-born wife Karly and her keenness to return to the States. But it's also because he's driven by ambition and inquisitiveness.

"He had a good handle on describing how the car was behaving. When the team was making changes to the car, he had a good feel for what was happening to the car's handling and what the changes did" Rick Mears

In terms of diversifying his career path, he's lucky to be a Penske employee because not only does his boss value an innate winner, he also has the power to offer race-winning cars in all three primary U.S. series: NASCAR, IndyCar and IMSA.

Had Penske offered McLaughlin a ride in the IMSA SportsCar Championship, it would have not been too surprising. Two of his Acura ARX-05 drivers, former IndyCar aces Helio Castroneves and Juan Pablo Montoya, are obviously far nearer the twilight than the dawn of their careers and either could be reasonably expected to surrender his seat to a young replacement in the next couple of years.

The Captain will also be aware that over the past three decades there have been several top-tier touring car drivers like McLaughlin who possessed sufficient talent to step up to prototype sportscars - Jo Winkelhock, Steve Soper and Frank Biela come to mind.

McLaughlin making a transition to Penske's IndyCar Series line-up seemed far more unlikely, but then he went and set truly startling times on a simulator around a virtual version of the IMS road course. A few months later, it was confirmed that McLaughlin would test an IndyCar for real at Sebring in January of this year.

Both RP and team president Tim Cindric had previously said that such a distraction from McLaughlin's Supercars campaign would not be contemplated until DJR Team Penske had won not only the series title but also the Bathurst 1000. By the end of 2019, both those boxes had been checked and there were no more barriers.

"I've always said I'd race a wheelbarrow if there's a Team Penske sticker on the side!" a bubbling McLaughlin told Autosport after his Sebring outing. "But I think the opportunity today to have a sample, to have a crack at an IndyCar was amazing, and it definitely answered a lot of questions for me regarding strength, regarding fitness. And it didn't feel too dissimilar to how I thought it was going to feel, which is good.

"I'd love the opportunity to be over here in the US, and I've always said that. The opportunity I had today was something you can't really turn down, and I was just trying to enjoy myself and not look like a dick! I had a couple of little moments while I was just trying to find the limits of the car, but apart from that it was all good, and I didn't rip a corner off - that was the main thing."

Even if he did regard it as an exciting privilege to sample a Penske IndyCar, McLaughlin's bright-eyed 'Gee-golly-gosh-wow' routine wasn't fooling anyone. The Sebring run hadn't been a publicity stunt for Team Penske or Shell: there was clearly something more serious in the works, and with good reason.

McLaughlin ended the day about one second slower than 2019 Indy Lights runner-up Rinus VeeKay in the Ed Carpenter Racing-Chevrolet, and half a second off reigning Lights champion Oliver Askew in the Arrow McLaren SP-Chevy. This, despite the fact that McLaughlin's previous open-wheel experience amounted to just a couple of Formula Ford races eons ago.

To place the test in context, Autosport called three-time IndyCar champion and four-time Indy 500 winner Rick Mears - as acute, accurate and honest an observer of racers and racing as you can find - for his verdict.

Mears, who has served not only as Penske's driver consultant since his retirement in 1992, but also as an advisor for up-and-coming Indy Lights and IndyCar drivers, had been watching McLaughlin from various vantage points around the 1.7-mile course and listening to the feedback. Sure enough, he too was impressed.

"Scott did a really good job," Mears said. "There was so much for him to get used to in a short amount of time and at a track he's never been to. The sharpness in handling, the lack of bump absorption compared with the Supercars that he's used to, the amount of car movement you get from those Sebring bumps, the much shorter braking zones, how soon you can get to full throttle, and so on.

"But he just stepped right into it and looked under control the whole time - and he was very smooth, which is hard around a track with all those bumps and surface changes and different kerbs."

Mears added: "I was listening on the radio while he was out there and then his feedback between runs, and he was very strong. He had a good handle on describing how the car was behaving. When the team was making changes to the car, he had a good feel for what was happening to the car's handling and what the changes did.

"It's very difficult for even a talented driver like him to come into a completely foreign category, to not only run it fast but then race it well too" Josef Newgarden

"Obviously at the start of the day he was just sneaking up on the limit and he admitted he still had a lot to learn but he kept chipping away at it. That was smart. He knew he couldn't afford to step over the limit and then come back to it; he had to go the opposite way and just gradually push harder and harder. And that's how he'll do it if he gets to race IndyCars. He's switched on."

Therefore, it wasn't wholly surprising when the next day Team Penske president Tim Cindric admitted to Autosport that the squad was looking to run McLaughlin in a fourth entry at IndyCar's Spring Training session in February, with a view to entering him in at least one race in 2020.

Around three weeks later it was announced that McLaughlin would be racing a fourth Penske entry in the Grand Prix of Indianapolis - a role that in previous years Montoya and Castroneves had used to reacclimatise themselves to open-wheel cars before taking part in the Indy 500.

Penske explained: "Scott has experienced tremendous success in Supercars over the last three seasons with DJR Team Penske and we believe his talent and his drive will continue to shine behind the wheel of an Indycar.

"It will be interesting to see how he continues to develop as we work up to his first race. We know Scott will work hard to improve with every lap and he will represent Team Penske well, as he gets acclimated to the IndyCar Series."

About a week before Spring Training at Circuit of The Americas, Autosport was speaking to Roger's two-time and reigning IndyCar champion, Josef Newgarden, and inevitably the McLaughlin topic came up.

"It's very difficult for even a talented driver like him to come into a completely foreign category, to not only run it fast but then race it well, too," said Newgarden, who managed to clinch the IndyCar title in his first year with Team Penske in 2017. "I don't think the expectations should be too high for Scott. If he can finish in the top 10 in the race, then I think that should be regarded as extremely successful for a one-race outing.

"There's things for him to get used to like the extra grip from the Firestone reds [softer-compound tires] that even rookies from other open-wheel categories can struggle with at first. But I'm thinking primarily about the racing aspect of it. He's a great racer with a ton of racing experience, but racing a Supercar compared with racing an IndyCar are very, very different things.

"So to expect him to light the world on fire in only one race is pretty tough, which is why I'd say a top 10 would be a huge achievement."

Then the IndyCar field descended on COTA for the test, and McLaughlin ended up third fastest. Yeah, yeah, it was only a test and sure, he was half a second off his pace-setting teammate Will Power. But we're talking about a 3.4-mile track, the entire IndyCar field was present, this was only his second outing in this type of car and he outpaced two of his champion teammates, Newgarden and Simon Pagenaud.

That evening, Autosport caught up with race engineer Jonathan Diuguid who used to run Castroneves in IndyCar and switched with the Brazilian to IMSA at the end of 2017, but has run the fourth Penske entry at the GP of Indianapolis and the Indy 500. He's a placid guy in the Penske tradition, someone who tends to downplay any surprise he feels, but his words were those of someone who'd been impressed.

"Scott's a champion driver," said Diuguid. "He did a good job, he's a good talent. It's just higher speed corners with IndyCar levels of downforce that he's not used to. That's probably where he can still find time.

"But he worked up to the limit and that's good; he's got a very methodical approach."

Regarding braking at the limit, something with which McLaughlin admitted he struggled in his first IndyCar test at Sebring, Diuguid nodded, "Oh yes. He's tough. He's got it."

A couple of days later, McLaughlin passed his rookie oval test at the Texas Motor Speedway, admitted he loved the experience, and so everything was looking rosy. But the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant revisions to the calendars of both Supercars and IndyCar have put McLaughlin's open-wheel ambitions on ice for now, as have the understandable travel restrictions between Australia and the USA.

At the start of last month, Cindric explained: "With the schedule that he has and the quarantine rules that exist within travel at the moment, going to and from Australia... I don't see [a McLaughlin IndyCar outing] is feasible. It's just not possible to be able to clear quarantine and actually have him continue with the Supercars schedule and the schedule that we have..."

Some four weeks later, the situation hadn't improved. "Right now, what's hard is the quarantine," McLaughlin told Autosport. "That's what's stuffing me around. I'm basically a month out. Some states in America have a two-week quarantine, and when I come back here [to Australia] it's definitely a two-week quarantine.

"I think he was pretty impressive. I expect him to be able to come over here and within a couple of years - maybe his second or third year he'll be contending for a championship" Will Power

"My main focus is Supercars and it always has been. And we don't want to take away from that. It was just a bonus to have the calendar to be able to do [both]. It's just a wait-and-see kind of thing right now. I've been waiting and seeing for about a month and not much has changed."

The situation is annoying to say the least for McLaughlin, but is also frustrating for those bowled over by his versatility a few months back. To provide context for such rampant enthusiasm, two years ago, this correspondent was among the many waxing lyrical over Robert Wickens' arrival in IndyCar, because it dispelled any concern that the Canadian's six years in DTM might have blunted the open-wheel racing skills that had seen him finish as the 2010 GP3 runner-up and win the Formula Renault 3.5 title in 2011.

That Wickens so clearly recaptured that sparkling form in his rookie IndyCar season was testament to not only his great talent but also his technical understanding and desire to put in the necessary hard work. But McLaughlin has apparently shown similar promise without any useful open-wheel background on which to draw.

So are we right to be excited by the prospect of his eventual arrival in the IndyCar Series? Autosport put this question to both 2014 IndyCar champion Power and another of Penske's aces, 2012 NASCAR champion Brad Keselowski, who sampled a Penske IndyCar at Road America a few years back.

"He's clearly talented when you look at his results in Supercars," said Power. "And he's got a great chance of winning his third straight championship this year.

"He adapted really well [to IndyCar] to be honest. Obviously we haven't seen him in a race weekend situation yet, when practice is short and you've got to be very sure of what you want from the car. But as far as speed in a whole test day, I think he was pretty impressive.

"I expect him to be able to come over here and within a couple of years - maybe his second or third year - he'll be contending for a championship."

Keselowski added: "IndyCars are a joy to drive and it's a whole different world going from having something over your head to not having something over your head. Makes it feel real fast!

"But yeah, I see a lot of talent in McLaughlin. I think he will be able to succeed if he follows that path - and I hope he does, because I don't want to see him beat my win total for Team Penske, and if he comes to IndyCar I can maybe save face a little bit!

"I'm just kidding. He's got some stiff competition in IndyCar with Will, Simon and Josef, but he seems the type of guy who's versatile enough to be successful. I think of him a lot like Marcos Ambrose in the early 2000s - a super talent that will certainly carry over."

Assuming that the move does go ahead in 2021, it will be interesting to see how McLaughlin's current racing style, characteristics and methodologies carry from Aussie tin-tops to IndyCar.

Autosport's Supercars correspondent Andrew van Leeuwen has closely observed the Kiwi's career Down Under and had this to say: "Scott's number one strength is his pure car pace, particularly over a lap. He can almost always get the best out of a car, and never seems to wilt under the pressure of a final qualifying run or a Shootout lap.

"I'd say his confidence has blossomed during his time working with [DJR Team Penske technical guru] Ludo Lacroix and it dovetails perfectly with his God-given ability.

"He also has a very clear idea on what he wants from the car. That's something he, Lacroix and race engineer Richard Harris have homed in on over the past few seasons. From what I've seen, it seems the basic theory is 'make sure the car points, I'll worry about the rear end'."

That sounds a similar philosophy as the one adopted by the fastest of the current IndyCar breed. So far, so good. Questioning van Leeuwen on the few chinks in McLaughlin's armor is equally enlightening.

"Top talent is top talent, whatever the car, and the best talent can drive whatever he sits his butt in. Scott hasn't done what he's done in Supercars without a heck of a lot of talent" Rick Mears

"Standing starts have caused him issues, although it was less of a problem last season and it won't really apply to IndyCar," he said. "I'd also say that Scott's dominance in Supercars could also mean he's got to re-learn how to race in a pack because he'll have to go wheel-to-wheel with other cars more often than he's done recently."

Out of the cockpit, McLaughlin already does his homework and is good at relaying his car's 'feel' to the engineers. The only additional demand for IndyCar will be weight management, according to van Leeuwen.

"McLaughlin is naturally a large-frame sort of bloke," he explains, "which means he can be heavy without being even close to overweight. It's less of an issue in a Supercar which carries ballast, but I reckon it could pose a problem in an IndyCar where just the tiniest amount of extra weight can hurt laptimes.

"But he seems to be aware of that and looks to have used the lockdown to get a headstart on that open-wheeler physique. He's dropped 10 kilograms through a strict fitness regime."

About a month before the start of the 2018 IndyCar season, Autosport listened to Wickens berate himself for being unable to consistently extract the best from a new set of Firestones - the closest that any driver can come in testing to replicating the extra grip provided by the red-sidewalled 'soft'-compound rubber.

Then at the season-opener, his IndyCar debut, Wickens edged traditional St. Pete polesitter Power by a couple of hundredths to grab pole on a wet-but-drying track. Should McLaughlin replicate this last-minute leap in performance and master the art of fuel-saving - the other of Wickens' big challenges as a rookie - there seems little reason not to expect him to fulfill Power's prophecy of becoming an IndyCar title contender within two or three seasons. He really is that good - and, apparently, versatile.

Mears adds: "To me, it all boils down to just talent in general: that's how I judge drivers. Top talent is top talent, whatever the car, and the best talent can drive whatever he sits his butt in. Some may take more laps to figure out the last one percent, but at the end of the day the talent will come to the top.

"I think about Will and how little oval experience he had when the [open-wheel] merger happened in '08, the year before he joined Penske. I was watching the oval rookies at the first race [Homestead] and after three laps I could see from Will's natural line that he knew what he was doing. I thought, 'Oh, he's fine, he'll be alright.' He just had that natural ability to pick the correct arc into the corner and drive with smoothness.

"So then when Will joined us it was only a matter of time before he got his first oval pole nailed and got a first oval win under his belt. He had picked up ovals right away, even though his results were not as good as he was. As far as I was concerned, he had the ability almost instantly: then it was a matter of getting the confidence and dealing with all the other things that a race can throw at you.

"Now I'd say the same for Scott in adjusting to IndyCars. He hasn't done what he's done in Supercars without a heck of a lot of talent. I mean, it's not like his wins have been here and there one-offs; he's spent a lot of time winning over the past few years! So you've got to classify him as one of those top talents."

For us as observers, as well as for McLaughlin himself, the next opportunity to see him in an IndyCar cannot come soon enough.