Ranking just four title wins might seem like too few, but if we don’t start now, it’s going to be a much bigger and harder job without this reference point when Alex Palou has won 15 titles in 16 seasons…
Of course, 2025 has been a year out of the ordinary for Palou and for IndyCar itself.
Some will argue Palou single-handedly put the series and any intrigue over its title to bed as early as May - perhaps even before - and that made it boring, but I come down on the side of: what is sport if we don’t enjoy the feats of someone doing the absolutely extraordinary right in front of our eyes?
What we've seen this year is truly special stuff, maybe even the best season of IndyCar by a driver in its history.
Has it made the competition boring? Undoubtedly. Is it boring to watch perhaps the most complete driver this championship has ever produced absolutely destroying the opposition? I don’t think so.
This sets the standard. We’ve witnessed greatness, now the rest of the field needs to rise to that challenge.
With four titles in six years in the series - one spent in an uncompetitive car at Dale Coyne - we should start getting used to this.
Here’s our ranking of Palou's titles so far.
4 - 2024
This was Palou’s narrowest championship win in terms of points (by just a 31-point margin, in a series where a win is worth 50 points) and I feel people will look back on this one in the future as having been such a huge opportunity for Colton Herta and Will Power to take the title.
An unforced crash at the Indy 500 from third when he had arguably the best car of the whole month, a wild and messy Detroit 19th in a race he started from pole and a loose left front tyre at Milwaukee which caused a penalty. Having any one of those go the way they probably should have done might have given Herta the title.
Power will long be forgotten in this battle but it was only really a faulty seatbelt at the season finale that dropped him behind Herta.
Unlike other Palou titles, this one feels like the biggest missed opportunity for his opposition rather than it all being down to his and his Ganassi team’s skill.
He still played his part and had his own attrition, taken out in Detroit by Josef Newgarden, but his two wins and the proximity of his rivals just make this the least impressive, which says a lot about how impressive his titles are.
Even if Herta and Power were close, they never really felt in reach when push came to shove in the final stretch.
3 - 2021
I had designs on putting this season first, but couldn’t quite make my justification stick.
But basically, the thinking was: it was such a shock!
I’m not just saying this because it’s turned out to be right, but I think I was one of the few people who thought signing Palou was a really good move - although I never could have predicted the level of success next - with some on the opposite end of the spectrum wondering what Ganassi had seen in this Dale Coyne midfielder.
There were murmurs at a pre-season Laguna Seca test that Palou was faster than Scott Dixon and very impressive, but winning the first race at Barber was incredible.
From there, he established his now-famous consistency. With only a mechanical issue in St Pete, 15th in Detroit after a grid penalty, an engine failure at the Indy road course and being taken out at Gateway, he was rarely out of the top seven.
But the really impressive thing was, leading a championship for most of the season for the first time in his car-racing career, he never looked or acted distressed.
Grid penalties for using too many engines through the season put him under pressure just as Josef Newgarden was building momentum in the closing stages, and yet, taken out with engine failure at Indy, he shocked everyone by smiling into the camera, accepting his bad fortune and that he would return the following race to have another go.
Sounds simple, but given the weight of the championship run-in, it was incredibly relaxed and mature for a driver never in that situation before. It showed his team it had a driver ready to take on the challenge and rigours of a title push and it renewed the confidence and energy of the #10 crew.
It wasn’t Palou’s best season in terms of peak performance, but it was one of the most impressive in terms of what he overcame to achieve it given a lack of experience or a resume that pointed to this being possible.
2 - 2023
In a tough 2022 season partly spent in litigation with his own Ganassi team (which Palou later admitted likely affected his performances), he only finished fifth in the standings and felt like he had a point to prove. So how did he react in 2023?
How’s this for an exclamation point? He finished every single race in the 2023 season in the top eight, an absolutely staggering statistic, as he won five wins and scored another five podiums. He spent 13 of the 17 races inside the top five.
By the time a new lawsuit broke out in August - which is still going as McLaren looks to get back money it accuses Palou of causing it to lose when he backed out of a contract with it - he was two races away from wrapping up the title.
Thanks to his lack of DNFs, he bagged a staggering 656 points, the highest since 2018 from Dixon, who was boosted by the Indy 500 being worth double points back then, which was no longer the case for Palou in 2023.
Because of his consistency there wasn’t much of a title fight and he wrapped it up with a win at Portland, with one race still to go.
Dixon was his closest challenger, and was in the top seven at every race but one, showing Ganassi’s consistency. The 27th in Long Beach when Pato O’Ward smashed him into the wall was certainly decisive in any sort of title fight.
1 - 2025
This was the year that Palou put his foot down and made a mockery of all those drivers that parrot how competitive IndyCar is as a championship. Not this year, pal!
Eight wins at the point he sealed the title - should have had a ninth that he gave to Dixon with an error at Mid-Ohio - shows how strong he’s been and the mid-season Indy 500 victory just rammed home the leap he’s taken. That was his first Indy 500 win - first oval win! - and what a time to achieve it. We could spew numbers at you about 2025 all day.
I was desperate not to automatically rank this first because of the significance of the 2021 breakout or the 2023 glory amid the agony of his off-track issues, but 2025 is just too good for even the most inflammatory troll to spurn.
Five wins in the first six races sealed this. He would have been in the top seven in Detroit but was taken out, and a poor race dictated partly by the incorrect strategy in Toronto yielded 12th, but every other result has been in the top 10. Just four results outside of the podium in 15 races - or 11 races on the podium if you prefer it that way around.
He follows only Ted Horn (1946-48), Sebastien Bourdais (2004-07) and Dario Franchitti (2009-11) to win three titles in a row and Horn and Franchitti to have done so and also achieved a career Indy 500 win.
Total dominance in almost every measurable statistic and with two races to go he could pad the stat sheet even further.
