Palou’s third IndyCar crown places him among series’ greats
Credit to Author: Marshall Pruett| Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2024 16:23:19 EST
He arrived from Spain by way of Japan and rocked American open-wheel racing.
In five fast years, Álex Palou has created an IndyCar legacy to match some of the sport’s greatest athletes, his latest triumph produced on Sunday in Music City. Like Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs with Super Bowls in 2019, 2022 and 2023; and Steph Curry with the Golden State Warriors and NBA Finals in 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022; Palou has joined an exclusive club of modern athletes to stack the box with major championships in impossibly short timespans.
Having captured four of the past five IndyCar crowns, his Chip Ganassi Racing team is also sitting on what would be described as a dynasty in any other sport. Starting with Scott Dixon in 2020, then Palou in 2021, Palou again in 2023, and thanks to a flawless drive on Sunday at Nashville Speedway, Palou once more in 2024, something dynastic is indeed taking place within IndyCar. Other than the 2022 championship that went to Team Penske’s Will Power, Ganassi has owned this decade.
More like Curry than Mahomes, Palou landed in the big leagues of IndyCar with minimal fanfare. He impressed on occasion while chasing dreams of reaching Formula 1, but there were no serious takers among the Ferraris, Red Bulls or tail-end teams. A chance to race in Japan was next — albeit nowhere near the heart of grand prix racing — and he shone in the Super Formula series, enough so that his team owner Kazumichi Goh decided to help fund a foray into the U.S. in IndyCar with the modest Dale Coyne Racing team. Goh’s benevolence is the only thing that kept Palou’s budding career afloat.
His rookie season with Dale Coyne gave Ganassi a chance to watch from afar as Palou placed a respectable 16th out of 23 full-time IndyCar entries in the 2020 championship. With a complete lack of familiarity with every track he competed upon, and no knowledge of the unique artform of American oval racing, the Spaniard showed glimmers of promise amid the steep learning curves. In a similar vein to Curry playing mid-major college basketball at Davidson, Palou caught the eye of insiders who saw the potential in Japan and in his maiden IndyCar season, but it didn’t build a lot of fanfare or incite bidding wars for his services.
With the surprise departure of beloved Ganassi driver Felix Rosenqvist after the 2020 season and slim pickings among proven, veteran IndyCar drivers to backfill the position, Ganassi took a flyer on Palou. At 23, and with one midfield year of IndyCar experience to draw from, Palou was an inexpensive experiment to try alongside Dixon, who’d just delivered his sixth championship.
If he evolved into a useful No. 2 behind the six-timer, great, a no-risk roll of the dice will have paid off. And if he failed to level up behind the best IndyCar driver of the modern era — as was the case for most of Dixon’s recent teammates — Ganassi would continue his search for a different driver to complement his team leader.
After Curry’s rookie NBA season, nobody was proclaiming he’d become the best shooter in the history of basketball. Palou, despite doing enough to pique Ganassi’s interest as a rookie, was never projected to become a future title contender, much less an IndyCar champion in his first season in the team.
Hindsight, as it so often does, reminds us of how badly we missed the signs of greatness contained within the unheralded and dismissed.
“At this beginning stage in his IndyCar career, he has the intelligence of a much more mature driver, much more experienced drivers,” IndyCar legend Dario Franchitti, a four-time champion and three-time Indianapolis 500 winner, told ESPN. “That was the biggest surprise to me.”
Before Palou, the last IndyCar driver to clinch three titles in four seasons or less was Franchitti for Ganassi between 2009 and 2011, all while piloting the same No. 10 Honda entry Palou drives today.
After retiring in 2013, Franchitti stayed on with the team as an advisor, coach and mentor, and once Palou entered the frame, Franchitti recognized a need to recalibrate expectations for the sophomore in his presence.
“Before his first race, we had this whole chat about, ‘You know, you’re driving for a big team now. You don’t have to do anything heroic, just do your best. You don’t have to go above 100%.’ All this stuff you’d tell a kid coming into a team like Chip Ganassi Racing,” Franchitti said. “And then he went out and won that first race! And he was just cool as a cucumber on the radio. And we all went, ‘OK, this guy’s impressive.'”
Franchitti was an unstoppable force in his prime. After winning the Indy 500 and IndyCar championship in 2007 with Michael Andretti’s team, he tried NASCAR for a year with Ganassi and returned to IndyCar with Ganassi in 2009 as Dixon’s teammate. The partnership was instantly devastating and propelled the Scot — using his blend of killer instincts and smarts as a master tactician — to outrun Dixon, Penske’s Power, and all other rivals to sweep three straight titles.
With Palou’s three championships in four years for Ganassi, he’s surpassed a few of his fiercest adversaries like Power and Penske’s Josef Newgarden, both two-time champs, and some of the best the sport has seen in Bobby Unser, Al Unser Jr., Alex Zanardi and more who took two IndyCar crowns. The scary part is what Palou and Ganassi can accomplish in rewriting most of IndyCar’s records if they stick together for another five or ten years.
Mahomes has three Super Bowl rings in six seasons as a starting quarterback. Curry has four NBA titles in 15 seasons. Dixon, who launched his IndyCar career in 2001, has the six championships produced across 24 seasons. Palou has delivered three in five and is the favorite to repeat when the 2025 season gets underway. At 27, there’s a long runway ahead for the kind and ever-smiling ace to make a greater mark in a series that has become his home.
If there’s a confusing part about Palou’s rise to become IndyCar’s best, it’s his outward demeanor. Inside the car, there are no heroics on display with wild demonstrations of car control our shouty outbursts on the radio. In person, he speaks softly and is disarmingly warm and accommodating. For a sport that demands aggression and a combative nature, Palou fits none of the testosterone-fueled stereotypes built around bloody knuckles and machismo.
It’s here where Palou and Curry share yet another trait. Franchitti as well.
“[Juan Pablo Montoya] used to say to me, ‘You’re just as big a p—k as I was,” Franchitti recalled. “‘But you were better at hiding it.’ He does that thing as well of hiding it. He hides his competitive instincts. Some guys like [Power] wear it on their sleeves; you know what they’re thinking at any point. With Álex, he does that thing that [Dixon] also does of hiding it, keeping under wraps at all times.
“Álex’s calmness at Milwaukee (two weeks prior to Nashville when massive electrical issues struck the No. 10 car) was the perfect example. No yelling on the radio, no meltdown, no slamming doors in the in the driver’s lounge afterwards. He never lets anybody see him sweat, so there’s nothing to use against him.”
Palou’s driving skills mirror those of Franchitti in so many ways. As others make their speed with constant flurries of hand movements to manage the slides they induce in the corners, Franchitti was capable of doing the same, but more often pushed his cars right up to the edge of losing adhesion and held it there, preserving tire life and setting better average lap times. Palou has mastered the same game plan; the back of his No. 10 Honda is rarely found drifting around IndyCar’s circuits while wearing out the tires at an accelerated rate.
He rushes up to 99% adhesion and holds it there corner after corner. It’s a vision of tidy driving that might not win every race, but Palou scores more points on average at every event to help him capture championship after championship.
“I look across the table and I see myself a wee bit,” Franchitti admits.
The Ganassi lineage is a huge part in how Palou has scaled the heights of the IndyCar series. Dixon was a two-time champion when Franchitti arrived, and after spending a few years being beaten by his new teammate, the New Zealander deconstructed the ways Franchitti was beating him and added those habits, tricks and skills to his own. Regarded as IndyCar’s great chameleon, Dixon applied what he learned from the late Dan Wheldon, and Franchitti, to go on a title run that brought four more crowns between 2013 and 2020.
Hear from the Champ, @AlexPalou 🏆#PoweredByHonda // #HondaRacing // #INDYCAR pic.twitter.com/0BlfCNiqW2
And in Palou, Franchitti sees the same chameleon-esque ways. His intelligence and rapid processing power while dealing with infinitely complex scenarios at 200 mph, is Palou’s unrivaled strength, and also something he has in common with Wheldon, Franchitti and Dixon. Their superpowers, all distilled into and elevating the natural skills Palou arrived with at Ganassi in 2021.
“He’s got that, and it’s really interesting,” Franchitti said. “I watched it [Saturday night after final practice ahead of Sunday’s championship decider in Nashville]. I watched [Palou] and [Dixon] bounce ideas off each other, and I’ve noticed that more and more this year that it’s happening. Wow. They’re doing that thing that any great teammates will do. That’s impressive, and they are both just soaking information up from each other too, and helping each other.
“That’s really important. He’s not afraid to ask a question, especially in those early years, just asking, straight up questions, whether it’s to the drivers, whether it’s me, the engineers. I think he’s also learned that in order to get, you’ve got to give, and he’s become a really big contributor to what’s going on.”
For Palou, all of the intra-team assistance has been vital in his journey from being a disposable experiment to Ganassi’s most unstoppable force.
“Having Scott in the team has helped me a ton,” Palou told ESPN a few hours after becoming the sport’s newest three-timer. “The way he thinks, it’s something I admired before. Having him as a reference, it’s been huge, and I’m just trying to copy as much as possible. It’s not me, honestly. It’s not me that I got this way of working. Obviously I’m very lucky that I have him that I can copy and get inspiration from. I wouldn’t have these three championships without Scott.”
Only five drivers sit ahead of Palou among title winners. Franchitti, Sébastien Bourdais and Mario Andretti are the next club to join at four apiece; Dixon’s next at six; and at the top of the mountain, A.J. Foyt has seven. The quest to win four in six seasons for IndyCar’s cerebral champion starts next March.