Scott McLaughlin with the FGX Falcon with which he won the 2018 Supercars Championship. Picture: Scott McLaughlin Facebook
Scott McLaughlin has been reunited with the Ford Falcon with which he won the 2018 Supercars Championship.
The title was the first of three on the bounce for McLaughlin, who piloted Mustang machinery in 2019 and 2020 with DJR Team Penske.
He has since made the move to the United States, where he is now a two-time IndyCar race winner for ‘The Captain’.
So it was that he came across the FGX Falcon he drove in 2017 and 2018, while on its way to the Penske Racing Museum in Phoenix.
“Paths crossed with an old friend, on its way to the Penske Museum,” wrote the New Zealander on social media, where he shared a photograph of himself with the car.
McLaughlin won nine races in the 2018 Supercars season, the last of which came on the final weekend of the season in Newcastle, where the title battle was still live.
The Ford driver took a 14-point lead over Shane van Gisbergen to the streets of the Hunter, but looked to have lost most of that when he ran out of fuel on the final lap of the Saturday encounter and was passed for victory by the 2016 champion.
Van Gisbergen was then penalized for a pit stop breach which dropped him to fifth, and McLaughlin was able to cruise to the crown on the Sunday, even letting David Reynolds pass him for the lead in the final laps.
Earlier, Car #17 had also won races at Albert Park, Phillip Island (two), Wanneroo (two), Hidden Valley, Queensland Raceway, and Pukekohe.
He and Alexandre Premat finished third in that year’s Bathurst 1000, his first podium in the Great Race.
However, the car was, of course, part of an even more remarkable moment in McLaughlin’s career given the circumstances which transpired in Newcastle on the final day of the 2017 season.
He had just come back from two penalties to move into the live championship lead, on a countback, when he slipped wide at the start of the second-last lap and ended up making contact which put Craig Lowndes into a wall.
Car #17 would be issued the equivalent of a drive-through penalty as it took the checkered flag, dumping it from 11th to 18th, with race winner Jamie Whincup instead being crowned champion.
It was after his triumphant 2018 Newcastle weekend that the car initially went on display at Dick Johnson Racing’s Stapylton workshop, before its move Stateside.
McLaughlin is currently sixth in the IndyCar Series after finishing second in the most recent event on a chaotic Sunday in downtown Nashville.