Álex Palou clinched his fourth IndyCar championship last weekend on the series’ visit to Portland. Penske Entertainment: Chris Owens
There’s an agreement that takes place when lions are preparing to fight. The feral connection between predators comes into play. It’s the sizing up of an opponent’s arsenal; length of the fangs, sharpness of the claws, the hulking muscles to drive those weapons into flesh. A killer recognizes its kind.
And then there’s IndyCar’s new four-time champion Álex Palou. He confuses the daylights out of his rivals. They fit classic race car driver stereotypes: ice-cold hunters or ego-charged aggressors alike. They’ll rip through the field, and each other, to reach victory lane.
And then there’s Palou, all smiles and innocence and childlike curiosities. When the green flag waves, the passive character outside the car doesn’t reconcile with the tormenter-in-chief, the guy who seemingly delights in dismantling their sporting dreams.
It’s here where the 28-year-old Spaniard has become a maddening, unsolvable puzzle within IndyCar’s driver ranks. They don’t recognize themselves within him. There’s no feral connection. No snarls, no scowls. It’s unsettling. He presents like harmless prey, all while feasting on their ambitions. This isn’t a roaring lion defeating cubs and runts. It’s a lamb laying waste to IndyCar’s baddest beasts.
The Palou Code. It didn’t exist when he arrived in 2020 as an IndyCar rookie with underdogs Dale Coyne Racing, or as a sophomore with the move to reigning champions Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021. He was a question mark, an unproven oddity who finished 16th in the drivers’ standings on debut with Coyne. He was far from Ganassi’s first choice to pair with his defending champion, living legend and six-time title winner Scott Dixon.
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If IndyCar held a draft, Palou was its Tom Brady, a deep sixth-rounder with minimal fanfare and limited prospects to stand out behind the established superstar. Armed with his quarterback, Ganassi saw Palou as an inexpensive experiment to place alongside Dixon.
“We got to that first test session at Barber [Motorsports Park] and my god, he was just flying,” Jimmie Johnson, seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion and Palou’s Ganassi IndyCar teammate in 2021-22, tells ESPN. “Then we come back to that first race (at Barber), and damn if he doesn’t win it. You know, it’s just incredible to watch how fast he was at the season opener. Just rocked.”
Two more wins would follow and eight total visits to the podium from 16 races — a 50% clip of top-three finishes — made Palou a first-time IndyCar champion for Ganassi as the team went back-to-back with Dixon and its newcomer. This was never in the script.
Palou’s path to the IndyCar crown made use of an old and proven formula: Pursue victory whenever possible, minimize risks at all times, avoid mistakes, and be sure to score plenty of points when the top step of the podium is beyond reach. Kill the competition with safe, front-running consistency. He was privately derided by some of the faster and flashier drivers who painted the shocking championship achievement as a fluke.
It wasn’t the most exciting approach; this was winning IndyCar’s season-long Super Bowl in the trenches, capturing first down after first down on short-yardage gains instead of throwing 80-yard bombs and raining down terror on the opposition. Palou’s outright speed didn’t scare IndyCar’s fiercest animals, but the championship-securing process, a calculated affair, worked in his favor.
He lost touch with the formula in 2022, when Ganassi refused to renegotiate Palou’s team-friendly contract. In a series where the best drivers earn millions a year, the new champ was unimpressed with the low-six-figure salary he’d accepted the year before. Ganassi shared in the disenchantment; a contract with a signature is a contract to honor, but the boss’s old-school sensibilities didn’t resonate with Palou, who announced he was leaving at the end of the season to drive for Arrow McLaren, the IndyCar team now owned by Formula 1 monolith McLaren Racing.
Ganassi sued Palou. Palou, with McLaren’s backing, sued Ganassi. Legal distractions knocked the reigning champion off his game as Team Penske’s Will Power secured the IndyCar crown. Palou and Ganassi eventually reconciled and reworked the contract — he’d get a raise, drive for the team in 2023, and was free to leave for McLaren in 2024 with the hope of reaching F1.
McLaren also signed Formula 2 champion Oscar Piastri during this period, and it became apparent Palou was no longer Plan A to partner with Lando Norris. F1 was off the table, and stepping down to an Arrow McLaren team he just torched was of no interest; he was staying with Ganassi after inking a new long-term deal.
An alleged signed contract between Palou and McLaren at some point in 2023, along with the receipt of an advance on his future salary, produced the inverse of the first legal dramas; McLaren sued Palou and Ganassi backed his defense. The matter is ongoing.
Having learned how to handle the stresses from the 2022 lawsuit, Palou was unflinching in his demonstrative run to the 2023 IndyCar championship. Together, as the court battles intensified, Ganassi, Palou, and the No. 10 Honda car dominated the series with five victories and 10 podiums from 17 races, clinching the title with one race left to run.
And still, as some quietly decreed, he’d become a two-time title winner by working the cautious points-first formula better than the rest. In football parlance, he was panned as an great game manager, one with two of IndyCar’s Super Bowls to his credit, but far from a generational talent.
The dismissive argument was only emboldened in 2024 as Palou fell well short of the five wins that propelled his second championship victory. A modest tally of two victories and six podiums were enough to make Palou a three-timer; the well-proven safety-first formula continued to wear out the rest of the field.
He wasn’t a hunter-killer. He wasn’t an ice-in-my-veins assassin. Álex Palou, the King of Best Average Finishes, a boring math problem to solve.
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That’s where something fresh was unveiled in 2025. A new wrinkle. Three championships in hand, and it was time to apply a new formula. Palou unleashed. Boredom be damned. The Palou Code.
It started with a win to open the year at St. Petersburg, continued at Thermal, dipped slightly with a second at Long Beach, returned to form with a win at Barber, then at the Indianapolis GP, and closed with the mother of all victories at the Indy 500. Five wins from the six opening races. Risks were taken. Relentless attacks were mounted. Banging wheels and leaving tire marks was embraced. Fangs and claws were bared.
The sixth win of the season arrived late in June at Road America. The seventh was snared mid-July on the whirling Iowa Speedway oval. The eighth win — from 14 races — was delivered at the end of the month in Monterey, and to open August, Palou charged to third in Portland to seal his fourth championship, all with Ganassi over a five-year span. Six seasons in IndyCar, four crowns, and more wins in a single year than many of his closest rivals have earned throughout their entire careers. Five pole positions as well, more than anybody in the series this season.
Fastest in qualifying. Fastest in the races. Eleven podiums from the 15 contests held so far. The definition of “Not like us.” And there’s two races left on the calendar, making it possible for a ninth and tenth victory to fall.
The Palou Code: Destroy, demoralize, and do it with a smile. IndyCar’s peaceful warrior, an ongoing mystery to his adrenaline-fueled challengers. In fact, they’re “Not like him.”
“Álex is odd because he’s so quick, but the man’s without malice,” says Dixon’s 2020 championship-winning race engineer Michael Cannon. “There’s no malice in that guy. That’s the weird thing. That’s what makes him a unicorn. He’s like, ‘Wow, I’m so lucky to win that race’ … after he s—s all over everybody.
“To have as many championships in as many years speaks volumes. End of story. The people that race in the series better get used to it, because he’s just gotten started. How do you stop perfection? We talk about generational talent. How about talent of the century? And we’re only a quarter of the way in.”
