Changes at Arrow McLaren, Frenchman Olivier Boisson arrives

Constantly looking for new staff, the stable led by champion Tony Kanaan IndyCar Arrow, the 2004 and 2013 Indy 500 winner, faces further changes ahead of the 2026 season. Brian Barnhart, the team's managing director, is leaving for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. This departure is expected to have little impact on the team, which fields drivers Pato O'Ward, Nolan Siegel, and Christian Lundgaard, as Kyle Moyer, formerly of Team Penske, has taken over as racing director. Kyle Sagan was recruited in late 2023 to manage Arrow's pit stop program. McLarenHe also left to join Barnhart in Bobby Rahal's team.

With the foundations of the team, which recently moved into its new Indianapolis headquarters, now laid, Tony Kanaan and Zak Brown are clearly trying to dig deeper in search of performance for the team's Dallara-Chevrolets. Engineer Olivier Boisson, who notably served as Sébastien's race engineer, is also involved. Bourdais and Romain Grosjean within Dale Coyne Racing (then at Andretti Global), he joined Arrow McLaren as head of shock absorber engineering.

In an increasingly uniform championship, shock absorbers represent the last remaining development opportunity for the various teams, from a purely mechanical standpoint. While IndyCar has begun testing a shock absorber package common to all teams, it won't arrive until 2028 at the earliest, thus leaving two full seasons of development for the participating teams. While his exploits as a race engineer have been documented in recent years, it is particularly in the field of shock absorbers that Boisson honed his skills, notably winning the Indy 500 in 2013 with KV Racing Technology, in a car driven by… Tony Kanaan. What a small world!

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"Olivier and I have known each other for several years, as we worked together during my victory at the Indy 500.", declared the Brazilian. “He’s very well known in the paddock as an excellent engineer, but also as a shock absorber specialist. In the last two years I’ve been here, this department has welcomed many promising young shock absorber engineers, but we knew we needed a guru. Olivier is one of the most talented shock absorber engineers around, and I trust him completely. When I learned he was available, I thought, ‘Well, that’s very interesting.’”

Boisson will work closely with Eric Cowdin, now Arrow McLaren's engineering director. Cowdin also worked for KVRT in 2013, on Tony Kanaan's car. Seeing this dream team come together like this is sure to please Pato O'Ward, who is still searching for his first victory at Indianapolis Motor Speedway…

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