- Alex Palou wrapped up his fifth NTT IndyCar Series championship at the Milwaukee Mile, matching Sebastien Bourdais with four titles in a row, a feat last managed before the series reunified in 2008.
- At 29, Palou reached five championships faster than anyone in American open wheel history, breaking records held by A.J. Foyt and his own Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Scott Dixon.
- Chip Ganassi Racing passed Team Penske for the most championships in IndyCar history, and team owner Chip Ganassi says an eighth title for Palou is not out of reach.
“It Just Feels Like We Started Yesterday”
Alex Palou sat behind a folding table at the Milwaukee Mile with a trophy he hadn’t actually touched yet, flanked by race strategist Barry Wanser and team owner Chip Ganassi, and tried to explain what it means to win five championships before your 30th birthday. He couldn’t quite do it.
“It’s very tough, man. It’s tough to put into words,” Palou said. “Everything that I owe to this team, to these two men sitting next to me, that they give me the opportunity to be not only a race winner, then a champion, now a five-time champion. It’s been incredible. It just feels like we started yesterday. We’re just getting closer and closer. We’re having more fun and more fun each day. It’s been an absolute joy of a year.”
Palou clinched the title with a 10th-place finish in a rain-delayed race at Milwaukee, a result so far removed from victory lane that it almost undersold the moment. He didn’t need to win. He had already lapped the field on points, and the only person who seemed surprised by that was Palou himself.
A Kid Who Found a Go Kart on the Walk to School
None of this was supposed to happen, at least not by the usual math of motorsport bloodlines. Palou was born in Sant Antoni de Vilamajor, a small town outside Barcelona, in April 1997, into a family with no connection to racing at all. The sport found him on a sidewalk. Walking to school with his father, a young Palou spotted a go kart track and asked his parents if he could give it a try, just for fun. They handed him a secondhand kart and a hobby turned into a habit.
That habit produced six Spanish karting championships and a WSK Euro Series title in 2012, enough for his family to start wondering if there was something real here. At 14, Palou was accepted into Centre d’Alt Rendiment, a high performance training center in Barcelona that takes only three race car drivers a year. He moved into Euroformula Open in 2014 and finished third in the standings with three wins, the first real signal that the kid with the secondhand kart could run with anyone.
Six Seasons, Five Titles
Palou joined Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021, and what followed has no real precedent in American open wheel racing. He is now the fastest driver to five championships in series history, doing it across six seasons and shattering the previous marks of eight seasons for A.J. Foyt and 16 seasons for his own teammate, Scott Dixon. At 29, he is also the youngest five-time champion the series has ever produced, beating Foyt, who was 32, and Dixon, who was 38.
“I’m going to turn 30, so yeah. It’s going to be a big number,” Palou joked when a reporter pointed out his age relative to the achievement.
He becomes the first driver to win four consecutive titles in the reunification era that began in 2008, and the only driver to complete a four-peat; Sebastien Bourdais is the last to do it, from 2004 to 2007 in the old Champ Car era. He now sits third on IndyCar’s all-time championship list, trailing only Foyt’s seven and Dixon’s six, numbers that once looked untouchable and now look like a target with a clock attached. His 2026 season alone produced six wins, eight poles, seven podiums, 12 top-five finishes and 673 laps led across 17 races, the kind of stat line that usually takes a career to assemble rather than a single year.
The championship also carried team-wide meaning. Chip Ganassi Racing’s 18th series title broke a tie with Team Penske for the most in IndyCar history, meaning Ganassi has now won the championship in 13 of the 19 reunification-era seasons, a win rate above 68 percent.
The Men Beside Him
Ganassi, never shy about needling his longtime rival, couldn’t resist a dig at Roger Penske while still crediting him for raising the bar that his own team had just cleared.
“When I look at this guy next to me here, five championships in six years, the team has 18 now, I passed my pal Roger,” Ganassi said. “But the fact of the matter is, I wouldn’t be here without him. If it wasn’t for Roger setting the bar, there wouldn’t be a bar to exceed or to shoot for. I want to thank him for doing what he’s done for IndyCar racing for so many years. I know he’s not going to sit idly by being in second place now in championships.”
Ganassi pointed to organizational stability, not raw speed, as the real engine behind Palou’s run. “What has allowed him to do that? The people around him, the team, the partners we’ve had,” he said. “A lot of people still have fingerprints on this championship today. They’re still here. They’re still part of this.”
Wanser, who calls strategy on Palou’s No. 10 car, described a partnership with Ganassi that predates Palou’s arrival by over a decade. “Chip is for sure with us on the number 10 car. He might not be sitting there, but Chip and I did the strategy on the number 10 car for 16 years together,” Wanser said. “He mentored me to be able to be in the position I am now. He’s always with us.”
What an Eighth Title Would Mean
Palou isn’t even 30, and Ganassi was already asked in victory lane whether his driver could eventually catch Foyt’s record of seven championships, or pass it entirely.
“Absolutely. I mean, you’d be crazy not to believe that, yeah,” Ganassi said. “I wouldn’t want to bet against that, I know that. I don’t know what the odds are in Vegas of that, but I wouldn’t want to bet against it.”
The title came a full week before the season finale at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, which turned what should have been a tense title showdown into a coronation with one race left to run. Pato O’Ward swept both races at Milwaukee, a reminder that Palou’s dominance over the standings hasn’t stopped his rivals from winning on track, just from catching him on points. Scott McLaughlin fought to a runner-up finish in the second Milwaukee race and spent part of his post-race interview airing frustration with lapped traffic, a small but telling sign of how hard everyone else is racing for position behind a champion who has already locked up the trophy.
For a driver who left Spain as a teenager with no family history in the sport, Palou now owns a piece of IndyCar history that neither Foyt nor Dixon can claim: getting there first. What he does with the years he has left, at an age when most champions are still chasing their second title, is the question the rest of the paddock will be living with for a while.
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