Tuned To Perfection: Alex Palou’s Latest INDYCAR Title One For History Books

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Bob Pockrass

FOX Motorsports Insider

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Dario Franchitti freely admits he loves watching Alex Palou race.

Sure, he loves to watch Palou win. But how Palou gets it done truly impresses the four-time INDYCAR champion who has remained at Chip Ganassi Racing to coach drivers. Not that Palou needs much coaching.

“He has a beautiful driving style, which I really appreciate,” Franchitti said. “I love watching.

“He’s like playing an instrument when he drives a car.”

Palou has orchestrated a symphony that some would consider unprecedented by clinching the 2025 title Sunday at Portland International Raceway. And that’s with two more races left in the season.

He doesn’t just emulate one instrument when he’s in his ride. 

At times, he drives as smooth as a saxophone in perfect swing. When he needs to stomp, he crushes like a professional drummer. From the opening lap of the opening practice, he has played Reveille on a bugle while the competition stumbles in, waking up around him.

“It’s unprecedented in modern times, obviously,” said his team owner Chip Ganassi. “We’re really, really pleased and excited and happy watching him be a part of history.”

Ganassi has seen his drivers dominate, but not like this. While Franchitti compiled 31 victories in his INDYCAR career, he never won more than five races in a season. He once combined with Scott Dixon to win 10 races in a year for Chip Ganassi Racing.

Palou? The 28-year-old won five of the first six races of 2025 and eight of the 14 prior to Portland. A record-tying 10-win season remains a possibility for him to match A.J. Foyt and Al Unser. Palou joined the list of drivers with four championships: Foyt (seven), Dixon (six), Mario Andretti (four), Sebastien Bourdais (four) and Franchitti (four).

“It’s amazing,” Palou said. “I’m enjoying it a lot. I’m enjoying every single moment.

“It’s not that I’m not conscious about what’s going on. It’s just that I cannot really believe it, and I’m just riding the wave and enjoying every single second of it and having fun.”

It’s not just those who work within the walls of Ganassi who’ve watched this historic season in awe. Several drivers who know first-hand the feeling of dominating an open-wheel season look at what Palou has done and can’t believe what they see.

Don’t forget — all the cars come from Dallara. The engines either come from Chevrolet or Honda. He hasn’t acquired or built a car to out-engineer the competition. And Palou has, at times, outrun the field by seconds.

“I can only compare that to when someone has a big advantage car-wise in Formula 1,” said Will Power, who won six races in 2011 and has 45 career INDYCAR victories. “You don’t see that dominance in a one-make series like INDYCAR. That’s what’s so exceptional about it.

“Exceptional. You can’t deny that guy … he probably should be in Formula 1. It is just so incredible.”

Palou’s teammate Dixon, the winner of six titles with a career-best six-win season in 2008, knows he might not witness such a historic season again. 

“You just have years like that, and it just flows,” Dixon said about what he’s seen out of Palou this year. “It’s not even a confidence thing. It’s just kind of you turn up, and you expect everything to go right.”

Of course, it goes right with the strength of the team, led by longtime strategist Barry Wanser, engineer Julian Robertson and crew chief Ricky Davis. They matched setups to Palou’s ability so they could find the sweet spot of exactly how hard to push the current INDYCAR tires (both the hards and the softs). They’ve strategized to figure out how smooth to drive it to get the best fuel mileage. 

“You can’t say enough good things about what that whole group is doing,” Dixon said. “They’re just doing a better job than everybody else.”

When Palou won four of the first five races of 2025, it appeared he could have a career year. After all, he had “only” won 11 races in his first five seasons, despite earning three Astor Cup trophies as the champion.

And up until the Indianapolis 500, he had never won on an oval. So questions lingered.

When he won the 500, it answered the question about any hurdles remaining. It unleashed a driver who has now also won at Iowa.

Street course, permanent road course, superspeedway or short oval — it hasn’t mattered this season. Palou has won at them.

“I thought, to be honest, up to the Indy 500 like ‘All right, the momentum is great, everything’s falling into place,’” said Helio Castroneves, winner of four Indy 500s and 31 INDYCAR races.

“And now, it’s still there. And even then, understand seasons like this, it’s very, very, rare that it happens where you might capitalize on everything you can.”

Sure, Palou had some luck along the way. 

Some of the top competitors for the Indy 500 had mechanical issues or crashes. The caution came out at the right time for him to win at Iowa when Josef Newgarden led lap after lap after lap. For the most part, Palou and Wanser chose a strategy and it worked.

Palou has not had a mechanical failure all season. The only race he didn’t finish came at Detroit, thanks to a hit by David Malukas.

As other drivers see it, Palou shouldn’t feel guilty that he has capitalized on some breaks.

“You’ve just got to bank and take it and don’t look back,” Castroneves said.

Even if he hadn’t gotten a break here and there, Palou would still have controlled his championship destiny. Seasons like this just don’t happen. The last driver to earn eight wins in a season was Sebastien Bourdais in 2007. Before then, it was eight wins in 1994 by Al Unser Jr.

“I can’t compare it,” Ganassi said. “This guy is in a league of his own.”

For 17 consecutive seasons from 2006-2022, no driver clinched before the final race. Now Palou has done it twice and both came at Portland, with one race to go in 2023 and now two races remaining in 2025.

“What Palou is doing is so impressive in this day and age … to be that dominant” Power said. “It’s not like they’ve been lucky wins. They’ve been dominant wins.

“I like seeing that. It lifts everyone’s game. You have to study someone and understand why they are fast and what it is about their execution on race day that is allowing it to work out for them.”

Some have compared his level of dominance this year to Alex Zanardi in winning 12 races in 1997-98. Palou won his title in his sixth season, one more than it took Bourdais to earn his fourth but quicker than Foyt (seven seasons), Franchitti (14), Dixon (15) and Andretti (21).

“Certainly, all four of mine came down to the last race, and in some cases, the last lap,” Franchitti said about comparing their championship runs. “The last one I remember with that level [of dominance] was Zanardi. It’s quite something.”

Graham Rahal, a 19-year veteran of the series, saw his father, Bobby Rahal, win six races in 1986.

“It’s impressive,” Rahal said. “It’s more impressive now than it was even in my dad’s era because there was a bigger separation between teams and competitiveness back then.”

Rahal indicated there is some separation between the Ganassi cars and the entire grid this year. He points to Dixon amid the top five in the standings and the stark improvement of young driver Kyffin Simpson.

“Those cars are clearly a step ahead of everybody else, too,” Rahal said. “That’s a reality. But Alex maximizes it in every phase.”

In some racing series, when a driver or team displays such dominations, the whispers get louder and louder of whether they have some unfair advantage. But no one seems to think that.

“I can promise you there’s not some blatant cheating thing going on,” Power said. “That group is just executing so well. The driver is executing well. He’s just doing an incredibly good job.”

Few drivers know that feeling. AJ Allmendinger won five Champ Car races in 2006 during the time when there were two competing open-wheel series. 

He said not getting complacent, and for Palou, the ability to not race conservatively just to win a title has helped him crush the competition.

“It’s honestly phenomenal watching what he’s doing because I feel like, just like the Cup Series, you could argue INDYCAR is the most competitive series in the world right now, and he’s just destroying everybody,” Allmendinger said.

“I just remember winning those races, you just walk into the racetrack with so much confidence, knowing that everybody, as you walk in, is looking at you, saying ‘How do we beat this guy?’”

They probably look with some annoyance, Allmendinger said. 

“You just don’t see dominance in INDYCAR by one specific driver usually” Allmendinger said. “It’s pretty special to watch.

“I know for all of them, it’s probably a little bit of annoying. But to be able to watch greatness as it’s happening is something that I really enjoy.”

That’s especially the view from those on the inside at Ganassi, even for those whose records Palou could eventually break.

As Franchitti said, Palou drives as if he plays a musical instrument. But he plays it still seeking ways to make the sound ever more smooth, even more crisp. 

“From a team point of view and from a driver point of view, it’s bloody impressive,” Franchitti said. “Alex continues to perform at his incredibly high level, but he keeps looking for more.

“He’s constantly questioning, he’s constantly asking, he’s constantly looking to improve himself. He’s a hell of a package.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.

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