A “very tight” IndyCar title fight in 2025? Palou still believes so
- Archie O’Reilly
- Jun 19
- 6 min read
Álex Palou may have won five of the first six races of the IndyCar season with a worst finish of second. His championship lead may have climaxed at 112 points - over two maximum-points race weekends - from six rounds after a career-affirming Indianapolis 500 win.
But two races on from the greatest day of his career to date, Palou’s advantage has been cut by 39 points, with Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward now 73 points behind. Three-time race winner this year, Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood, is within 75 points; without being sent to the rear of the classification for an illegality at the Indy 500, that margin would be 51 points.
Christian Lundgaard - teammate to O’Ward - is next-best and still 114 points adrift. But for those who believed the championship was done and dusted after six races, Palou urges you to think again.
“I knew we just had a perfect start of the season and obviously you could see a big points difference,” said the two-time defending and three-in-four-years series champion. “But I expect that it’s going to get very tight. It’s going to make it interesting.
“I just hope that we are there at the end to fight for it.”
Palou’s start to the season was nigh on unprecedented - the best in several decades. But throughout, he made sure to relish the highs with the knowledge that the run would inevitably come to an end. There was never a hint of complacency.
Now, he firmly believes he has a genuine challenge on his hands as IndyCar prepares to cross the midpoint of its season at Road America this weekend. But he remains calm and is not feeling any pressure.
“I said it before the 500 and after the 500 that the same way we won four or five races in a very short period of time, there could be somebody else could do the same,” he insisted. “Because it’s not impossible. We’ve done it so somebody else can do it as well. We’ve seen that with Kyle. Obviously without his penalty at the 500, he would be even a lot closer.
“It didn’t add any pressure at all because I didn’t ever think that it was done or it was ours or anything like that.”
Palou’s points loss in the last two races - notably seeing Kirkwood, winner of both Detroit and Gateway, half his 150-point disadvantage - has not elicited much concern on a performance front.
Despite a week of limited preparation amid media tours and events across the country following his Indy 500 win, Palou was still running on the brink of the podium in Detroit before being hit out of the race by AJ Foyt Racing’s David Malukas. A fortnight later, eighth place at Gateway was hardly headline-grabbing but respectable at a weaker track for Palou.
Even then, Palou felt good. It was ultimately just a race in which he was often in recovery mode due to a few too many setbacks; the first being getting stuck behind Lundgaard, who overshot his box in the pits, before a challenging later restart also lost him several positions.
“We had a lot of stuff happening to us,” Palou explained. “Sometimes you put yourself in those positions, but with Lundgaard in the pits, getting stuck there, not being able to release and losing like 10 places [and dropping to 20th], we couldn’t really do much.
“But then I did a couple of restarts where I put myself in a bad scenario and ended up losing a lot.”
Palou had found himself as the car at the tail-end of the lead lap and in front of race-leading Josef Newgarden when the Team Penske driver collided and vaulted with the spinning Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing machine of Louis Foster on Lap 130.
At this point, Palou was about to be put a lap down by Newgarden. He was ultimately fortunate to miss Foster’s car himself - again on the right side of a bad situation.
“I was fighting with the leader, not for the lead but for the lead lap,” Palou recalled. “That’s actually even tougher than fighting for the lead sometimes. I was lucky there. I had to take a decision of going up or going low and I went up because I saw that the car was potentially going to go down. Josef unfortunately didn’t have that option.
“Those moments sometimes you are lucky and you get it right and sometimes you don’t.”
In need of something of a rebound, it helps that Palou is returning to Road America next up, where he achieved his first career podium as a rookie with Dale Coyne Racing in 2020. He won the following year with Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR) and again in 2023.
But with his advantage in the championship still comfortably over a maximum 54-point race weekend, Palou travels to one of his favourite tracks still in a relaxed headspace.
“I’m not concerned,” he admitted. “I wasn’t happy about St. Louis obviously. It’s true we were lacking. We had a lot of issues that didn’t help us progress but we didn’t have performance. We’re excited to test in Iowa [at another short oval] next week with all other teams to see what we can improve.
“It’s not concerning but it’s obviously not good. There’s no urgency. There’s always urgency to win - nobody likes to see somebody else win - but at the same time, we got used to too much success. Not we as the team but everybody expects us to win every single weekend. It’s not possible unfortunately.
“I’m excited and I’m hungry to get back on the top but there’s no urgency yet.”
Naturally, Palou likes to keep tabs on the championship picture. But permutations of how he can seal the deal do not come into play until the climax of the season. For the time being, he is not ruling anybody out of the game.
“Focusing on the championship, that only goes on the last two races, whenever you already know that hopefully you’re in the fight or not,” he said. “Hopefully it’s only yourself and three other drivers and you know what you need to do or you know who you need to fight.
“Now, we’re fighting against everybody so it doesn’t really make much sense to count points. It’s good to have a look at them when you’re leading and see that hopefully we can extend a little bit more the gap, but the way we got here was by racing hard and going aggressive on strategies and trying to go for wins. That’s the way we need to continue racing.”
Should Palou maintain his lead, he would become only the sixth four-time champion - and in a year where Indy 500 success cemented his status among the IndyCar greats. And all of this would be achieved in only six years in the series and five with CGR.
Now with the legacy-defining Indy 500 accomplishment ticked off, there is not a defined goal in Palou’s mind. But he remains extremely motivated and it is becoming clearer and clearer that he intends to be in the series for the long haul.
“I’ve never had a goal of getting X amount of wins or championships or Indy 500s,” he explained. “My goal has always been to be able to race and be able to race at the highest level with a great team and then to win every single weekend.
“That’s the feeling that I like the most. It’s not when the season is over and you get the trophy and photos and all that stuff. What I like is going to every single weekend, fighting for the race, having fun, getting the car a little bit better, getting myself a little bit better.
“What else can I achieve? Win this weekend and then the following one. That’s what we can still achieve. Hopefully when we look back in a long time from now, we can maybe count those wins and those championships and Indy 500s.”
As team owner Chip Ganassi suggested earlier this season, Palou continues to only get better as he continues to rewrite the history books. And ominously for his competition, Palou himself still believes he can improve as a driver too.
Telling of his relentless drive and indicative of record-tumbling successes that may still be to come in his career, much of what Palou still feels he can develop is already a part of what has made him so prodigiously special.
“It’s the beauty of the sport that you can always get better at everything,” he said. “You can always get better at going a little bit faster, getting more speed, saving better the tyres, saving more fuel, managing better how you are aggressive in defending or overtaking.
“There’s so much stuff that you can always be a little bit better that I think there’s no limit. And you can see that in amazing drivers like [Scott] Dixon, [Will] Power - these guys that have been around for so long. Power said the past weekend that he’s been driving the best that he’s ever done [at 44 years old]. I believe in that.
“That it’s the beauty of motorsports, that you can always keep on pushing yourself to try and be a little bit better. Where do I think I can get better? Well, everything. A little bit faster, hopefully better on short ovals, better on qualifying up front and defending moves or overtaking. There’s always stuff that you can improve on.”
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