One Point Separates Top Two Midway Through INDYCAR Thrustmaster iRacing Pro Series season

We’re halfway into the 2026 INDYCAR Thrustmaster iRacing Pro Series season, and the competition is as tight as ever at the top of the leaderboard. 33 drivers—20 returning and 13 new faces—started the season with hopes of grandeur. While nobody is officially out of contention just yet, a slightly different batch of drivers have risen to the top, yet there are still some surprises—both good and bad—scattered among the standings.

Team Redline’s Luke McKeown, winner of the opening round on the Streets of Long Beach, currently leads the way, but only by a single point over Drago Racing’s Michael Romanidis. While Romanidis has yet to win, he has the most podium finishes this season, scoring two runner-up finishes so far—at Portland International Raceway in the second race, and at the most-recent event, virtually overseas in Mugello.

Both drivers are competing for new teams this season, and so far, both are thriving as a result. McKeown raced (and won a race) with Apex Racing Team in 2024, where Romanidis was on Coanda Esports. It wasn’t like their first seasons were bad, by any means. Both drivers stayed locked-in for Season Two by virtue of their points standing back in the 2024 season. However, their new respective teams look to be the formed powerhouses this year, with 13 drivers represented among the two—eight drivers on Team Redline, five on Drago Racing—and four of the top-five places in the standings representing both teams with two drivers apiece.

That’s been the main story, besides a single oval outlier at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the third week. Team Redline and Drago Racing find themselves near the front of the field every time there’s been both left and right turns. Coanda Esports and Williams F1 Team Gaming have shown flashes of strength here and there, but the raw speed from Redline and Drago has been staggering, and it’s proving to be shaping up for a battle until the last lap of the season.

These two teams aren’t just fast, but they’ve been doing it on opposite ends of strategy. Granted, in the second race of the season in Portland, the clash resulted in disaster as McKeown and Drago Racing’s Alx Spetz collided racing for the lead. However, at Mugello, Team Redline’s Edoardo Leo was trapped lower down the qualifying order in sixth place, but he put on the opposite tires of Romanidis, Spetz, and Nicolas Mateo, and went on to run a perfect 30 laps on the two tire compounds, out-strategizing Romanidis and the rest of the Drago Racing crew on that day.

Officially, Team Redline has two wins, while Drago Racing has two pole positions, but no checkered flags. The other two wins belong to WSR Esports, with Jaden Munoz capitalizing on the McKeown-Spetz spat at Portland, and Team VRS, with Michele Costantini sniping the victory from Powerslide Motorsports’ Alexander Russell on the final lap in a three-wide photo finish at Indianapolis.

While Indianapolis is its own specialized discipline, even among all the ovals on the schedule, the 66-lap event earlier this season proved one thing—that there is a clear divide among the top-33 between oval and road specialty. Most of the drivers that were in the mix the entire day at Indy have been struggling on the road and street. Meanwhile, the drivers often found at the front of those tracks with left and right turns were mostly outside the top-10 for the majority of the 66 laps in Speedway, Indiana.

Costantini could ultimately prove to be the master of both disciplines, despite only having two career oval wins—this season at Indy and two years ago at The Milwaukee Mile—as he enters the next two races only 21 points back of McKeown. A 10th place at Mugello keeps him in the conversation, for sure. Team Hype w/ Powerslide’s Philip Kraus was in that position in the first season. Both Costantini and Kraus, as well as Robert Maleczka III and the rest of the Team Hype and Powerslide crew, have to be looking at these next two races at Phoenix Raceway and Nashville Superspeedway as chances to put themselves into the championship discussion.

Despite the season having a road slant with the schedule, both Costantini and Kraus find themselves in a much better position than the driver that did win the inaugural title, Team Redline’s Diogo Pinto. The 2024 champion started off his title defense with a runner-up day at Long Beach, but it’s been downhill ever since. At Portland, Pinto was punted early in the going, and couldn’t recover to get more than the minimum amount of points available, finishing 26th. Finishing 11th at Indianapolis was likely a best-case scenario for Pinto on the oval, but he followed that up with a speeding penalty to finish 28th at Mugello, which puts him in 14th place halfway through the year.

Technically, Pinto is still within a race of the points lead, but even winning out from here couldn’t guarantee him doubling up. Plus, he has four teammates ahead of him, including McKeown, Florian Lebigre, Gustavo Ariel, and Leo following his home-turf win in Mugello. Last season, Pinto had the advantage of being ahead of all of his teammates, including Leo, who was a two-time winner in 2024. This year, he’ll not only have to go through the rest of the field, but his talented teammates as well.

After the oval races shake up the status quo, the season will end with back-to-back road courses. Race 7 will take place at the fan vote winning track—the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course—and WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca will conclude the season in Race 8. Mid-Ohio was a race won by Leo in the first season, while Laguna Seca was Pinto’s only victory enroute to the title. That’s a pretty good sign for Team Redline to close the year out, but then again, Drago Racing has proven to have the pace to keep up so far.

How much will the next two oval races mix up the order? Can the oval specialists build up enough of a gap to hold off the road warriors? Will Drago Racing and Team Redline continue their head-to-head battle into the final two races of the season? Tune in on Thursday night to see how the second half of the season begins! All of the action from Phoenix starts at 8:00 p.m. ET, and will be live on INDYCAR’s YouTube channel, as well as across all of iRacing’s social media channels.

DRIVERS STANDINGS ENTERING RACE NO. 5 AT PHOENIX RACEWAY

Originally published on IndyCar.com

For more information on the INDYCAR Thrustmaster iRacing Pro Series, visit www.iracing.com/indycar-esports/.
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