- Arrow McLaren & Jimmie Johnson’s Legacy Motor Club form partnership for Indy 500.
- 2014 winner Ryan Hunter-Reay will pilot No. 31 Chevrolet in the team’s bid for victory.
- The team has assembled “dream team” of championship-winning engineers and crew.
With an Indy 500-winning driver and a crème de la crème lineup of specialists anchoring the effort, Arrow McLaren and Jimmie Johnson are going all-in for the 2026 rendition of the Indy 500.
For this year, though, the NASCAR great and former IndyCar ace isn’t donning the helmet and scratching the racing itch; instead, he has partnered with former teammate Tony Kanaan (Arrow McLaren), with an ambitious new setup.
Inside Jimmie Johnson’s IndyCar alliance with Tony Kanaan
Following the two-year alignment between Arrow McLaren and Hendrick Motorsports, which saw Kyle Larson take on “The Double” in 2024 and 2025, this year’s approach feels more focused. Instead of chasing headlines, the team has doubled down on experience, with Johnson stepping in for a deeper, more calculated collaboration alongside Kanaan.
At the center of it all is Ryan Hunter-Reay, the 2012 IndyCar Series champion and 2014 Indy 500 winner, returning to the No. 31 Chevrolet. And around him is a group that feels less like a standard entry and more like a deliberately assembled lineup of specialists.
And then there’s the “Superman” Johnson himself. While the seven-time NASCAR Cup champion won’t be behind the wheel, his influence runs deep. Through Legacy Motor Club, he has linked up with Arrow McLaren, reuniting with former Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Kanaan in a partnership that looks as intentional as it is ambitious.
It also builds on recent momentum. The Larson-led program brought massive attention to the Indy 500, but it came at the expense of divided priorities. This time, there’s no split focus but a clear objective as McLaren’s team principal Kanaan himself revealed.
“We’re not f****ing around,” he told RACER.com during an exclusive. “After the Kyle Larson effect, the challenge was, ‘What are we going to do?’ Not to match popularity, but in talent. If you look at the history of that car, it’s had some winners in it before with (Juan) Montoya, myself, and Kyle was as talented a guy you could ever ask for.”
“So finding the right person to take the car and step it up even more was what we needed so it was looking at names to be able to win the Indy 500.”
The answer was to put Hunter-Reay in the car and build outward from there with proven winners at every layer.
Kanaan, 51, added, “Ryan’s that guy for us, but then it was looking at how do we surround that car with Ryan with other champions, so that started the conversation with me and (McLaren Racing CEO) Zak (Brown) and then we started talking about Jimmie and it came together with all of us working together for this project.”
The mindset driving McLaren’s IndyCar super team
Inside McLaren, veteran engineer Olivier Boisson, brought in during the offseason to strengthen the team’s technical foundation, and call the shots on the engineering side. Whereas, on the pit lane, Didier Francesia (Indy 500-winning crew chief) takes charge of the mechanical operation.
And then there’s Brian Campe, the 2015 Indy 500-winning engineer who guided Juan Pablo Montoya to victory. Johnson brings him as a race strategist and car communicator, bringing not just experience, but familiarity from the Hendrick/Larson program.
Even the pit crew has been reinforced. Several over-the-wall members from Johnson’s NASCAR Cup Series team have been folded into the McLaren group, already working alongside them in the shop.
Campe summed up the mindset simply- “Why would you go to Indianapolis without a plan to go win the thing, especially if you’ve done it before? You go there to win, and then you start stacking the people that are going with you.”
“And it’s building a dream team. It’s like the NBA; you’re calling up all the best players you can put together to go take on the world’s best. And I’m taking that approach and try to play my part and prepare as if it were my full time job.”
That said, Hunter-Reay, now 45, might not have been the flashiest name available, but he has done it before. And for Johnson, the project is another extension of his post-full-time driving career, though less about seat time, more about building something meaningful.
Recently, the team named GXO Logistics and Armed Services YMCA (ASYMCA) as official partners for its No. 31 Chevrolet for the 110th Indy 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
For now, the partnership between Arrow McLaren and LMC is limited to the Indy 500. But given the people involved, Johnson, Kanaan, and CEO Brown, it’s hard to see this as just a one-off collaboration.
