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McLaren IndyCar team fired backup driver Theo Pourchaire, even though he had signed a multi-year deal with the Woking-based team.

In 2018, Pourchaire switched to driving single-seaters and went on to win the Junior French F4 Championship. The following year, he moved up and won the 2019 ADAC Formula 4 Championship, fighting with Dennis Hauger to the title.

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The French driver joined ART Grand Prix for the 2020 FIA Formula 3 Championship. He finished second in the championship, three points behind Oscar Piastri. In 2021, the team moved him up to the FIA Formula 2 Championship. That year, he finished fifth in the points.

Pourchaire came in second place in 2022 and won the title the next year. In 2024, he serves as reserve driver for the Kick Sauber team, and has been handed the chance to race in IndyCar with Arrow McLaren, substituting for the injured David Malukas.

However, Pourchaire was removed from Arrow McLaren just after five rounds, and was replaced by Nolan Siegel. Another interesting turn in the story happened when McLaren let Pourchaire drive in place of a hurt Alexander Rossi in the Grand Prix of Toronto.

“To be 100 per cent transparent, McLaren had signed me to a multi-year contract to drive with them in IndyCar,” Pourchaire revealed in an interview with Auto-Hebdo.

“Then, on the Tuesday morning before Laguna Seca, I found out from my manager that I would not be driving at Laguna Seca or for the rest of the season.”

“At first, I was very surprised, I didn’t understand, I thought it was fake. We had only signed a few weeks before. I was disgusted.”

“The team ended up calling me for a minute, around 11am that same day, the day before my planned departure for Laguna Seca, to tell me that I was removed from the program They didn’t give me the exact reasons,” said Pourchaire.

Speaking of the Woking-based outfit’s decision to swap Pourchaire for Siegel, Arrow McLaren sporting director Tony Kanaan noted: “It started back last year with that driver [Palou] that decided not to come over and breach his contract.

“Then we decided on continuity, and it’s been quite a few six months for me. I did not sign up to have to choose four drivers. And then every choice we had, because we had to make a decision quick, a lot of them had schedules already.

“I just told the guys out there, ‘You change race cars all the time. You come in, you make a change.’ Not that we want to do that with drivers, but we’re here. I’m in this to win races. That’s all I care [about]. And then I think eventually we look for continuity.”

“He [Pourchaire] didn’t do anything wrong, it was just a situation,” Kanaan added.

“It was a call that we had to make. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t because of his performance. He’s done whatever he could do. He wasn’t happy, but he understood,” Kanaan said, quoted by Motorsport.com.

In the meantime, Pourchaire ended in P14 in last weekend’s Toronto round.