- Scott Dixon and Alex Palou shared a cockpit as Acura teammates at the Petit Le Mans, likely the last time IndyCar’s six-time and five-time champions will race side by side after six years together at Chip Ganassi Racing.
- Dixon, 45, leaves the only full-time IndyCar home he has known in 24 years to join Arrow McLaren in 2027, a move Chip Ganassi called his choice to take “a different path.”
- Palou kept racing through the weekend that should have been his victory lap, adding the Petit Le Mans to a schedule that already includes the Indianapolis 8 Hour, back-to-back sports car starts squeezed around his fifth IndyCar title.
Two Champions, One Acura, One Last Weekend
For six years, Scott Dixon and Alex Palou wore the same red and white of Chip Ganassi Racing, took turns winning IndyCar championships, and built one of the strangest teammate relationships in American motorsport: a six-time champion grooming the driver who would eventually beat him to most of his own records. At Road Atlanta for the Motul Petit Le Mans on October 1 through 3, they did something they will likely never do again. They climbed into the same car.
Dixon and Palou shared the No. 60 and No. 93 Acura ARX-06 prototypes for Meyer Shank Racing in the GTP class, Dixon alongside Tom Blomqvist and Colin Braun, Palou with Nick Yelloly and Renger van der Zande. They were not technically in the same car at the same moment, but they were teammates on the same manufacturer program, in the same category, for the first time outside an IndyCar paddock, closing out Acura’s prototype partnership with Meyer Shank Racing at the exact moment their own partnership at Ganassi is ending too.
Twenty Four Years Comes Down to One Decision
Dixon’s departure from Chip Ganassi Racing became official in July, closing out 24 consecutive full-time seasons with one team, a run that outlasts almost every driver-team pairing in North American racing. Only Jeff Gordon’s 24 years with Hendrick Motorsports in NASCAR offers a real comparison. In that time Dixon won six IndyCar championships, in 2003, 2008, 2013, 2015, 2018, and 2020, took the 2008 Indianapolis 500, and piled up 58 victories for the team, a number no active IndyCar driver is within reach of matching.
Chip Ganassi did not try to hide how much the split cost him personally. “Scott has meant so much to CGR over the past 24 years,” Ganassi said in a statement announcing the news. “Together, we’ve shared championships, many victories and countless moments” that shaped the organization. Ganassi revealed the team had offered Dixon a multiyear deal to finish his career at the only home he has known in IndyCar, and that Dixon turned it down. “We respect that he’s chosen a different path and wish him nothing but continued success,” Ganassi said. Dixon is expected to join Arrow McLaren for the 2027 season, beginning a new chapter at age 45, an age when most of his contemporaries have already moved on to broadcast booths or team ownership.
The Student Who Became the Teacher
Palou’s arrival at Ganassi in 2021 set up one of the odder dynamics in recent IndyCar history. He came in as a largely unproven import from Spain’s junior single-seater ranks, paired with a six-time champion who had nothing left to prove. Within four years, Palou had passed him, winning titles in 2023, 2024, and 2025, then clinching a fifth championship this October to become the youngest five-time champion in series history. Dixon, for his part, became something closer to a mentor than a rival, the elder statesman whose feel for traffic and tire management Palou has credited repeatedly for shortening his own learning curve.
That makes the Petit Le Mans pairing more than a scheduling coincidence. It put two drivers who spent half a decade on the same pit lane, one teaching, one absorbing, into identical equipment for a 10-hour endurance race with nothing on the line but bragging rights and a shared program they both plan to leave behind, Dixon for good, Palou only for the weekend. Thursday practice gave a hint of how competitive both lineups were going to be: Yelloly turned the fastest GTP lap of the session at 1 minute 11.506 seconds, with Braun, in Dixon’s car, barely half a second behind at 1:11.509.
Palou’s Strange Victory Lap
Most IndyCar champions spend the week after clinching a title fielding interview requests and planning an offseason. Palou spent his strapped into a sports car at Road Atlanta, then turned around and committed to the Indianapolis 8 Hour on October 10, a second straight weekend of GT and prototype racing squeezed into what should have been a celebration lap. It fits a pattern that took hold after his first title: more racing, not less, whenever the IndyCar calendar allows it. Where other champions protect their margin and coast into the offseason, Palou has used his growing trophy case as a passport into categories he grew up idolizing from Spain.
He was not the only IndyCar name using Road Atlanta as a bridge to something else. Colton Herta, back in the United States after a rough 2026 season in Formula 2, slotted into the No. 40 Cadillac for Wayne Taylor Racing alongside Jordan Taylor and Louis Deletraz, a reminder that the road between IndyCar and global sports car racing runs in both directions. Kyle Kirkwood, runner-up to Palou in the 2026 IndyCar standings, rejoined Vasser Sullivan Racing’s Lexus program in GTD Pro, and Nikita Johnson, freshly crowned INDY NXT champion, made his own Petit Le Mans start in an RLL-run McLaren. For a series whose season nominally ended with Palou’s championship, the paddock at Road Atlanta looked remarkably like IndyCar’s roster on a weekend off.
What Comes Next
None of it changes what January brings at Chip Ganassi Racing, a lineup for the first time in a quarter century without the driver who anchored it before Palou ever sat in a go-kart competitively. Christian Lundgaard’s move into that seat came out of a confusing chain of events of its own, a late axing from Arrow McLaren that initially looked like the end of his own 2027 plans before Ganassi turned it into an opportunity. He now inherits not just a car number but a standard: six championships, 58 wins, and a fan base that has watched one driver wear that livery for longer than many of his new teammates have been alive.
Lundgaard will not be racing Dixon’s ghost so much as his own expectations, built on a résumé that already includes wins on multiple continents. But the comparison will follow him into every season-opening press conference until he builds a record of his own at Ganassi, the same test every driver who follows a legend into a seat eventually faces. Palou went through a version of it himself in 2021, arriving as an unknown quantity next to Dixon and needing less than four years to erase any doubt about whether he belonged.
Dixon, for his part, downplayed any sentimentality about the move earlier this year, describing it as a business decision rather than a farewell tour, even as nearly everyone else in the paddock treated his final months at Ganassi as exactly that.
What the Petit Le Mans weekend offered, intentionally or not, was a proper send-off that avoided the sentimentality Dixon seems to want no part of: not a farewell lap in his familiar red Honda, but one more race, in a different car, in a different series, alongside the driver who will spend 2027 carrying the Ganassi banner Dixon is leaving behind. Six years after Palou arrived as Dixon’s understudy, they left Road Atlanta as something closer to equals, two champions who happened to share a garage for one more weekend before their paths finally diverge.
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