HMD’s O’Gara wins Clint Brawner Award

An award is given every year in the name of legendary Indianapolis 500-winning chief mechanic Clint Brawner, and the recipient in 2026 is Andy O’Gara, the crew chief for Katherine Legge on the No. 11 HMD Motorsports/AJ Foyt Racing Chevy.

Compared to the other 32 Indy 500 entries, Legge’s effort was assembled at the last minute in a special effort conceived by IndyCar’s parent company Penske Entertainment to fill the vacant 33rd grid position. In a matter of weeks, the HMD Indy NXT team took receipt of a Foyt road racing chassis and began its conversion to Speedway specification under the guidance of O’Gara.

Leading the HMD team for its first Indy 500 is just a small part of O’Gara’s duties while running the car for Legge in each session; despite all of the shortcoming with the lack of time and newness of the HMD IndyCar operation, she qualified 26th in the No. 11 Chevy and starts directly behind Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden.

“Andy took the whole group mechanic group by the scruff of the neck and basically put everybody in the right positions to do their job,” HMD president Mike Maurini told RACER.

“I do know the $5,000 prize, as soon as he got it, he immediately texted the entire team and said he's splitting that across all the mechanics, because everybody worked their balls off to make sure that this program was put together. So he's not taking the money at all, he's giving it to everybody else, and that’s who Andy O’Gara happens to be.”

For O’Gara, the veteran chief mechanic whose wife Sarah Fisher owns a special place in history at the the Indy 500, excellence runs in the family.

“I'm just insanely proud of the group,” O’Gara said. “Everybody really busted their ass over the last four weeks to put this thing together. I don't know that you could ask for a better group in that amount of time, and we've maximized on-track with the car and had very little mechanical issues. I’m just grateful for the opportunity, and want to give Katherine absolutely everything we can. The HMD guys, and the combination with the Foyt guys, it's been fun.”