Palou’s 2025 Wasn’t Dominant. It Was Inevitable
It’s so easy to get bored with the expected.
Expectations like any given NTT INDYCAR race weekend in 2025 and Alex Palou’s probability of walking away Sunday night with another win. Week after week, the Chip Ganassi Racing driver turned the series into something that felt almost inevitable. Not because INDYCAR got boring, but because Palou made excellence look routine. In a sport where momentum is supposed to swing and parity is supposed to bite, he just kept showing up, executing, and leaving everyone else to fight for second.
The numbers back it up in a way that almost feels unfair.
Palou steamrolled his way to eight wins, six poles, and 15 top-10s in a 17-race season, locking up his fourth INDYCAR championship and third in a row. The points gap to second was historically lopsided for most of the year, at one point ballooning to 129 points over Pato O’Ward, which is the kind of cushion you normally only see when a series is broken or the grid is thin. Except INDYCAR is neither. Dixon, Kirkwood, and O’Ward all took their turns being “the closest challenger” at different moments of the season, but Palou was the constant. He set the standard early, then spent the rest of the year daring the field to match it.
If Palou hadn’t won you over before 2025, he probably did somewhere between Thermal and Iowa.
His performance this year belongs in the same conversation as some of the most dominant seasons in open-wheel history, alongside names like Mario Andretti, Michael Andretti, Al Unser Jr., and Sébastien Bourdais. And the part that’s most frustrating for everyone who lined up against him is that it never looked like smoke and mirrors. The man simply drives. Take Thermal, where he chased down a nine-second gap in the closing laps with an offset strategy, then finished it off with a decisive dive into Turn 7 to steal the win. Or the Indianapolis 500, where Marcus Ericsson went a touch wide into Turn 1 late while slicing through traffic, and Palou pounced for the kind of pass that changes legacies. That wasn’t just a race win. That was the moment Palou went from “championship guy” to “this era’s headline.”
What makes him so brutal is how clean it all is.
Palou’s racecraft is surgical. He works his rivals like a safecracker, poking and prodding until the advantage shows itself. Sometimes it’s tire life, sometimes it’s fuel number, sometimes it’s Push to Pass timing, and sometimes it’s just the simplest form of violence in motorsport: braking later and rotating the car better. The No. 10 team rarely looks panicked, rarely looks surprised, and almost never looks like it guessed wrong. Even after stacking four titles, Palou has made it clear he’s not operating with a “we’ve arrived” mindset. His attitude has been closer to “do it again,” which should probably terrify the rest of the paddock. The trophies might be enough to satisfy the rest of us mere mortals, but Palou says the real motivation is still the same: “it’s the love for the sport.” And with INDYCAR’s popularity continuing to grow, it’s no surprise he keeps getting asked about Formula 1. He’s been consistent about where his head is at, and he seems genuinely happy building something special in the States with Ganassi. Now the calendar flips to 2026, and the whole field gets a fresh start. Every other driver is going to show up believing this is the year they put together the best season of their career. The question is simple, and it’s the one Palou has been forcing everyone to answer since 2021: can you beat one of the modern greats?