OK, Alex Palou has dominated the 2025 IndyCar championship to the point of suffocation this year. Like, chill mate, this is just cruel…
But, he wasn’t always a million points in the lead of the championship and there were critical turning points in the season that helped establish his lead as much as cost his rivals.
Let’s take a look where the season unravelled for his competitors.
Pato O'Ward
Given the "unacceptable" performance of the team at Portland last year, leading the race before his electronic issue was a phenomenal turnaround for Pato O'Ward that looked like it might extend his admittedly remote chances of a title. But the Portland problem wasn't really the deciding factor in the McLaren driver losing out to Palou.
What stands out as the biggest setback for O’Ward for me was Thermal, only the second race of the season, where O’Ward had the pace to win but couldn’t quite get it over the line.
Palou was also strong and took victory, but he’d also saved a fresh set of soft tyres until the final stint which was crucial as O’Ward had not.
With this tactical success there was no way for O’Ward to hold off Palou as he had done at Mid-Ohio the year before. With fresh softs, O’Ward might have had a fighting chance.
A win at Thermal would have broken up Palou’s early dominance and eased O’Ward’s slightly disappointing start to the season with 11th in St Petersburg and 13th in Long Beach either side of Thermal.
Since Long Beach in April, he has only been out of the top seven twice for the remainder of the season, showing how strong his year has been.
McLaren has taken a step up in the second half of the year especially. It’s just not enough to overcome Palou.
O’Ward is well ahead of Palou’s team-mate Scott Dixon, which shows you a) the high level McLaren is operating at and b) the edge Palou and his Ganassi crew has within that team.
McLaren has also been Ganassi’s closest challenger in a season where its partner Chevrolet only has three wins to Honda’s 12. While some of that has been driven by fortune, a score that one-sided shows Honda has been the better package this year and McLaren has fought valiantly against that.
O'Ward was Palou's closest challenger and had six fewer wins! That certainly didn't help.
Kyle Kirkwood
It might be easy to forget now: Kyle Kirkwood felt like Palou’s closest challenger for most of the season, but could easily end up miles off with how the latter part of his season has gone.
The Indianapolis 500 would be an easy choice for where it went wrong for Kirkwood in that a sixth became a classification of 32nd when his team was found guilty of tampering with a spec piece of bodywork and sentenced accordingly.
At that stage, his gap to Palou went from 126 to 150. But after his wins at Detroit and Gateway, the deficit of 75 points would have been a mere 51, two race wins, with nine races to go. Game on.
Sadly, that, combined with an absolute disaster at Iowa where he finished 26th after a puncture and 18th in race two, plus a 16th at Laguna Seca after punting Rinus VeeKay off, means his title ‘challenge’ is now almost a footnote in the story of the season.
But would things have worked out differently with a 51-point deficit into the second half of the season? We’ll never know.
The moral of the story is, people need to stop letting Palou get big, early-season leads. But that’s also a bit like when you're angry, and someone says to you, "stop being angry". Absolutely pointless advice!
Team Penske
I do think it’s worth pointing out that I don’t think Dixon has been a serious contender this year and he’d be even further behind Palou if it wasn’t for the latter gifting Dixon a win at Mid-Ohio with an unfathomable error.
But I did want to examine a sort of ‘alternative universe’ case for what happened to Team Penske and why it wasn’t in contention - all three drivers will finish behind current third-place man Dixon and were out of title contention even before Portland started.
Because you might point to Chevy’s apparent deficit to Honda - and Palou's otherworldly performance - and suggest it never had a chance. And you might well be right.
But as is the case for so many Palou rivals, it feels like so much has gone wrong this year for Penske in comparison to him.
To me it feels like the point of no return for Penske was the Indy 500. More on that in a minute, but even the first race of the season is a good example of where things could have played out differently.
At St Pete, almost every person who was in contention for the win there apart from Palou had an issue. Including Penske's Josef Newgarden, who won on the road the year before until he was disqualified for using push to pass on the restarts.
This year he was in contention until a fuel issue in his final pitstop condemned him to third.
Had he won that race, how might things have shaken out? Perhaps Newgarden’s qualifying struggle would have commenced and the season would have unravelled in the same way. But giving Palou the first win of the year is like asking him to twist your unmentionables in a vice from the get-go.
Long Beach likely would have undone that challenge for Newgarden as he finished 27th there with a seatbelt failure. Typical of Penske’s season.
The Indy 500 then? The scandal which led to Newgarden and Will Power being thrown to the back of the grid for having a modified rear crash structure not only cost them for the race - although I’m convinced Newgarden would have won anyway if not for a fuel issue - but also shrouded the team in negative press for the weeks and months following.
Firing your senior leadership team will inevitably have a big impact on your year and that, in conjunction with Palou winning the 500, just made sure this team would struggle.
Power has been its most consistent driver again - what on earth is the delay with giving him a new contract, then?! - but being taken out on the first lap at St Pete, a tyre failure at Gateway, a fire in his car at Mid-Ohio and engine failure at Iowa, meant he never stood a chance.
None of those were his fault. Why aren't more people advocating for him to remain in place at least another season? Any other decision would be absurd.
He hasn’t been error-free this year, but look at the sheer number of things that have happened outside his control. He’s easily been Penske’s most consistent driver this year. And consistency is a minimum requirement in trying to compete with Palou.
