There are nine races of the IndyCar season gone and eight remaining. Yet at this halfway point, only two drivers have won races and only one manufacturer has been victorious!
That level of success from a very small group naturally means there are some people behind the eight-ball, and some on this list of drivers with something to prove who've had good seasons but need to build on that to take it to the next level.
We’ve picked out some drivers looking for a big second half of 2025.
The Penske trio
I could write thousands of words about the misfortune Josef Newgarden has suffered this year, but he's also made some uncharacteristic errors and finds himself 17th in the championship. Eighth in the standings is his worst season at Penske, last year, and before that it was fifth!
Scott McLaughlin has had a similar season (only his peaks have been more accessible more consistently), as has Will Power. One of the big differences is qualifying performance, where Newgarden has struggled more.
Power is fighting for his seat and despite feeling like he is doing some of his best driving this year, he's likely not doing enough to blow Penske away. Saying that, he is its top driver in the championship - in seventh.
He should have built enough goodwill for another season at least and he deserves it, but David Malukas looms large at the Penske-affiliated Foyt team.
Power said it might be the end of the season before he and we discover his fate, but Racer.com learned from Penske's Bud Denker that a decision inside the next month is likely.
Penske currently has no team president, managing director or general manager after Tim Cindric, Ron Ruzewski and Kyle Moyer - who has joined McLaren already - were dismissed after the team's Indianapolis 500 qualifying scandal.
David Malukas
Malukas is on the precipice of doing what few American drivers get to do: drive for Team Penske in IndyCar.
But surely if he's to do so he has to have a stronger second half of the year than his first. His initial top 10 didn't come until the sixth race of the season, at the Indianapolis 500 no less, and since then he's added only one more while his Foyt team-mate Santino Ferrucci has an average finish of 3.75 over the last four races.
As has been the case for most of his recent career, Malukas is qualifying really well, but a few mistakes that are creeping in need to be stamped out if he's going to shove Power out of his seat for 2026.
Power's a two-time champion and Indy 500 winner as well as the best qualifier in the series, ever, and still performing at a high level.
Rinus VeeKay
With the top teams outside of Penske set for 2026, VeeKay might be starved of options. But if he continues to excel at Dale Coyne Racing then he's going to make himself impossible for bigger teams to ignore.
An unusual pit spin at the Indy 500 and a mechanical issue in Detroit after he'd qualified seventh dropped him out of the championship top 10, but Veekay's had a seventh and a 10th since then despite a mid-season engineering change and most of the personnel on his team - Veekay himself included - only joining on last-minute deals.
It fielded eight different drivers last year but this looks like a much more settled Coyne team, with a real talent leading the way.
Marcus Ericsson
It's important to note that without being disqualified from second at the Indy 500, Ericsson would be 14th in the points - which feels a million times better than his actual position of 21st.
But it's clear, even if Indy 500 success was part of the reason he was signed by Andretti, that 21st (or even 14th) wouldn't be good enough.
Like other drivers on this list Ericsson has had some real misfortune, but he's made some mistakes, too.
Somehow, he and the team around him need to figure out a way to execute at the level of his team-mates Kyle Kirkwood and Colton Herta, although Herta wouldn't be much further ahead (only 26 points) if Ericsson had kept his Indy 500 result.
In the second half of this season, Ericsson can still salvage a good championship result and most importantly, get things set for a better start to 2026, too.
Pato O'Ward
The only complaint you can really have for Pato O'Ward this year is that there have been a few uncharacteristic qualifying disappointments which have set up difficult races. Not all his fault.
He doesn't need to have a strong second half of the season for any other reason than to prove a few people wrong.
In terms of his actual driving performances, O'Ward has had a much better blend of risk versus reward in his racecraft if you compare to last season, and the results have shown it.
There are a few nice races coming up for him and McLaren in the second half of the season. Can he still put Alex Palou under pressure in the championship?
He was excellent in the second half of last season before mostly reliability issues pulled the wheels off his title challenge, and another step on from that would really cement his status as one of the elite in the series (if you don't already believe he's in that category in the first place).
But he needs a big second half to realise the potential most people know he has.
Callum Ilott
However you cut the misfortune and tireless development work Ilott has been doing this year, finishing behind his rookie Prema team-mate Robert Shwartzman in the championship would be a big defeat.
Like in Ericsson's case, a single result can change a lot. Ilott almost won the Gateway race before he ran short of fuel in the closing stages. He had to pit and finished 18th, whereas Shwartzman, on a more conservative strategy, took the team's first top 10.
Ilott was also 12th on the road in the Indy 500 before being pinged post-race for an incorrectly sized front wing endplate.
That's just two examples of the kind of thing that's happened to Ilott this year.
Sadly, if he did finish behind Shwartzman that's all people will remember in two or three years' time. Not the nuance.
His sparkling performance in qualifying at Road America, where he started ninth, was much more like what you'd expect from Ilott, and across the last four or so races he's consistently run somewhere around the top 12, which is very impressive for a driver in a new team.
A good Iowa test was well received, and the whole team is motivated to improve its results as well as its performance.
Bonus entry: Chevrolet
OK, it's not a driver, but we're nine races in and Chevrolet hasn't won a race, which is an incredible feat from rival Honda.
It means Chevrolet could win the rest of the races and it still won't top Honda's tally.
Of course, the engine manufacturers are at the liberty of their teams' performances too, and Penske has had a poor season while McLaren has come within a hair's width of winning two or maybe even three races.
It's also a key time for both manufacturers as their IndyCar deals run out at the end of next year. But surely an announcement of them continuing will be made soon?
Given IndyCar has announced the new car and the engine formula it will use, changing to 2.4-litre twin-turbo unit, I deduce that the series has had significant buy-in from the manufacturers to be able to confirm that. But it’s hard to tell which way each manufacturer is leaning.
