- Alex Palou, IndyCar’s youngest five-time champion at 29, spends Monday at Sebring test driving the IR-28, the car that will replace the one he just mastered.
- He clinched his fifth title at Milwaukee in August with a race still left on the calendar, reaching the mark faster than A.J. Foyt or Scott Dixon ever did.
- Teammate rival Alexander Rossi takes his own turn in the IR-28 the following day, with both drivers feeding data into a car that will not race until 2028.
The champion who keeps showing up early
Alex Palou spent his August clinching a championship that put him ahead of every active IndyCar driver and most of the retired ones. He spends this Monday at Sebring International Raceway, running laps in a car that will not compete in a points race for two more years. That is the strange rhythm of being IndyCar’s best driver in 2026: the season that just ended still has one race left on the calendar, and the sport’s leadership has already handed Palou the keys to the next decade.
The car is called the IR-28, Dallara’s successor to the DW12 chassis that has carried IndyCar for fourteen seasons. It will not enter competition until the start of the 2028 season, and before it does, it needs drivers who can tell engineers the truth about how it behaves on an oval, a road course, and now a bumpy mixed-surface track built on a decommissioned airfield in central Florida. Palou drove it first on the IMS road course in August. He drove it again on the oval in September, finishing his session fifteen minutes early after the team had already worked through its entire checklist. On Monday he takes it to Sebring, a circuit chosen for its patchwork of asphalt and concrete, which mimics the street courses where IndyCar spends roughly half its season.
Fun, said plainly, more than once
Ask Palou about the new car and the answer is almost disarmingly simple. “Very fun,” he said after his oval test in September, and when asked to expand on it later, he didn’t reach for anything more complicated: “It’s still super fun.” For a driver who speaks in measured, careful sentences about his own championship odds, the plainness of his reaction to the IR-28 is hard to miss. He has talked about what it felt like to be back at Indianapolis in a brand new chassis, admitting the early laps carried a charge: it is a new car, and he was back at the Speedway, the kind of sentence that could have come from a rookie rather than a five-time champion with 25 career wins.
IndyCar’s engineers have been just as direct about what they are hearing back. Mike O’Gara, overseeing the program, said Dallara took everything they knew from the DW12 and built it into the IR-28, a car expected to push track records downward once it replaces the chassis Palou has spent six seasons turning into the winningest tool in the paddock. Palou himself predicted exactly that after his first laps in August, telling reporters he expected records to fall once the new car arrived. It is a confident thing to say about a car not yet built for competition, and coming from Palou, it reads less like bravado and more like a status report.
Five titles, six years, a record nobody is close to touching
The numbers behind Palou’s fifth championship are the kind that usually take a driver a full career to assemble. He clinched it at the Milwaukee Mile on August 30, with the season finale at Monterey still a week away, a 100-point cushion over Christian Lundgaard making the outcome a formality before it was even official. He led the series in wins with six, poles with eight, top-fives with twelve, and laps led with 673. It was Chip Ganassi Racing’s fourth consecutive title and fifth in six seasons, and it made Palou just the second driver in series history, after Sebastien Bourdais, to win four championships in a row.
What separates Palou from the rest of the five-time club is speed, not of his cars but of his career. A.J. Foyt needed 32 years of age and roughly eight seasons of racing to reach five championships. Scott Dixon, Palou’s own teammate and the only other active driver with more than one title, needed sixteen years and didn’t arrive at five until he was 38. Palou got there at 29, across six years from his first championship to his fifth, less than half the time Dixon required. He trails only Foyt’s seven titles and Dixon’s six on the sport’s all-time list, and at his current pace, both records are a matter of when, not whether.
Chip Ganassi Racing described his reaction to the fifth title as already pointed forward. “Let’s do it again,” Palou said, according to the team, a response that skips past celebration and lands directly on the next target. It is consistent with everything else about how he talks about this season: the championship is treated as settled business, and the interesting conversation is always the one about what comes next, whether that is a sixth title or, this week, a chassis that will not matter competitively until long after this year’s trophies are handed out.
Why the sport hands its future to its present champion
There is a reason IndyCar put Palou in the IR-28 before almost anyone else, and it is not sentimental. A development driver needs to produce a baseline other teams and other chassis variants can be measured against, and nobody in the field currently has a more reliable sense of where a car’s limits sit than the man who just won six of 2026’s races by finding those limits faster than his rivals. Alexander Rossi, his partner in this test program and a Sebring regular himself from his sports car background, takes his turn in the IR-28 on Tuesday, a day after Palou. A separate tire test for Firestone, running alongside the chassis work with Kyle Kirkwood and Scott McLaughlin behind the wheel, adds another layer of data collection to the same two days at the same facility.
None of this changes anything about the 2027 standings or the silly season still working through its final unresolved seats elsewhere in the paddock. It changes something slower and less visible: whether the car IndyCar’s grid races in 2028 behaves the way engineers intend it to, or whether it needs another round of fixes before its debut. Palou’s fingerprints are already on that outcome, three test sessions deep before the car has ever seen a green flag. He won five championships by the time he was 29. He could end up remembered just as much for the car he helped shape before anyone else got to drive it in anger.
There is also a quieter story in who IndyCar did not send to Sebring. A field full of drivers spent this same week fighting over a handful of unconfirmed 2027 seats, writing texts to team owners and waiting on phone calls that might not come. Palou has none of that uncertainty. His contract with Chip Ganassi Racing is settled, his seat is not in question, and the biggest decision in front of him this month involves tire pressures on a car that will not matter to the standings for two more seasons. That gap between his situation and almost everyone else’s in the paddock is its own kind of statement about where he sits in the sport right now.
Scott Dixon, still Palou’s teammate and the only driver standing between him and the top of the all-time list, has said in the past that Palou’s rise reminds him of his own early seasons, minus the years it took him to find his footing. Palou skipped that part. He won a championship in his second full season with Ganassi and has not finished a year outside the top two in points. The IR-28 test at Sebring will not appear in any record book. It is simply the next item on a checklist for a driver who has rarely left one unfinished.
Sources:
- https://www.indycar.com/news/2026/10/10-08-notebook
- https://www.indycar.com/news/2026/09/09-10-ir28-oval-test-palou
- https://racer.com/2026/08/02/palou-expects-track-records-to-fall-with-ir28-after-second-day-of-testing
- https://motorsportweek.com/2026/08/31/alex-palou-clinches-fifth-indycar-title
- https://www.chipganassiracing.com/news/lets-do-it-again-palou-already-eyeing-more-titles-after-historic-fifth-championship
