Scott McLaughlin walked into the 2025 Indianapolis 500 expecting to start from 10th and chase another strong run. Instead, his car snapped around without warning as he approached Turn 1 on the final pace laps, slammed into the inside wall and destroyed itself before the race even began.
The crash played out in front of more than seven million television viewers and about 350,000 people at the track, turning a warm-up lap into the most jarring moment of McLaughlin’s career. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,” he said. “It was absolutely the worst moment of my life.”
McLaughlin had arrived at Indianapolis with momentum. In the previous year’s race, he led 66 laps and finished sixth, a result that reinforced why he had left a successful career in Australia’s Supercars series for IndyCar. But on that cold May day, after a delay caused by persistent drizzle, the buildup of months, practice laps, interviews and sponsor appearances ended in seconds.
He still says he does not know what caused the wreck. “To this day, I still have no idea what happened,” McLaughlin said, adding that he felt like he was simply warming his tires and that the tire warm-up was a little aggressive. “It was a little aggressive on the tire warm-up, but the way it just went like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, “it was tough.”
That uncertainty has lingered longer than the damage to the car. McLaughlin said he received texts from around the world after the crash and later heard from other Indianapolis 500 drivers who told him they had nearly done the same thing. He also said the spectacle of it all made it harder to absorb. “The fact there was seven and a half million people watching that whole thing is what made it so hard,” he said. “It was embarrassing, but there was also shock in there as well.”
The wreck also cut against the image McLaughlin had worked to project before the race. He said he was laser-focused in the final moments before the start and thought the incident showed how quickly a perfect-feeling day can turn. “Even when things feel great, it can go bad,” he said. The painful part, he added, was not only the loss of the car but the public nature of it, with the images likely to be seen one day by his infant daughter Lucy.
McLaughlin said his father taught him as a young go-kart racer never to show too much emotion, and that instinct stayed with him after the crash. “If you’re going to cry, you go into the trailer and you do it alone, because you need to be strong for your team,” he said. “That was the closest I got to not being strong for my team.”
He returned to Indianapolis in 2026 carrying that memory with him. The crash remains a reminder that the race can turn on a single snap, even after all the buildup that precedes it.
