Alex Palou's entering a new chapter, and it's going to be incredibly interesting to see how he handles it.
His whole career he's been an underdog. On the junior single-seater ladder he didn't look like a future Formula 1 driver and identified IndyCar as his path, but getting there still meant impressing via Super Formula, and even in doing that in a really impressive way given how tight that championship is, a 2020 IndyCar seat at Dale Coyne while welcome was hardly a seat at the top table.
You know the story since. After Chip Ganassi liked what he saw from Palou at the Indianapolis 500 in 2020, he installed him in the #10 car and he's been winning since.
He won his first race for Ganassi in 2021 and consistency was his weapon on the way to that championship. The following season was admittedly a struggle and imploded halfway through the year when Ganassi threatened to sue its star when he said he was leaving for McLaren.
But in 2023, he wrapped up the title early and then committed to Ganassi for the long term - earning another lawsuit this time with the McLaren team he turned down, which is still ongoing - and then in 2024 it went down to the last race but even then it never felt like he'd get beaten.
But this year, he's found new standards. He's won five of the first six races including his first ever oval win which happened to come in the biggest race in IndyCar at the Indy 500. He takes home the biggest prize money win in the event's history at $3.8million, although some of that is likely to go to the team with IndyCar contracts usually defining a percentage of the prize money to the squad that put the driver there.
Pato O'Ward is second in the championship but by his current points per race total, Palou could miss definitely the next three and likely the next four races and still be in the lead of the championship, and we're heading to a Detroit race which he dominated in 2023 and was taken out of last year as his team-mate Scott Dixon went on to win.
His rivals have been reduced to (admittedly amusing) jokes about far-fetched ways to catch him. Dixon offered to send Palou and his family on a five-week holiday, then conceded he might still be leading the championship when he came back. Marcus Armstrong from the Ganassi-affiliated Meyer Shank team said if he'd studied at school as hard as he was now studying Palou's data, he'd probably be Alex Palou. Graham Rahal hopes his daughter might return from playing with Palou's daughter with some of Palou's set-up sheets…
The second half of the calendar is littered with races Palou's performed well at and fewer of the short ovals which have been more of a struggle for driver and team, but even then you're clutching at straws when you look at how a crash in the first Iowa race was offset with a second place in the second race last season.
The ‘he hasn't won/isn't good on ovals' drivel is frankly offensive and just a lazy observation. Yes, he hadn't won on one until Indy, but Penske has been really tough to beat on ovals and Palou's performances haven't been bad.
So, we've mounted quite the case for a Palou whitewash over the rest of the season. Even if O'Ward is perfect - which he hasn't been this year and neither has his McLaren team - from here on, Palou just needs to keep churning out decent top 10 results and a few top fives to keep O'Ward at arm's length.
It begs the question, how long can Palou remain motivated enough to stay at the top of his game when he is performing at this seemingly unreachable level for any of his peers?
Speaking to The Race IndyCar Podcast this week he was adamant that he's only going to use this 500 win to get better.
"It just pushes me," he said.
"It fuels me more instead of being more relaxed. Obviously, I feel amazing that now I achieve this, and that we were able to take the Indy 500, but this is just a lot of fuel now that it's going to be burning for a long time and it's going to be pushing us a lot.
"Obviously now the goal is to celebrate, is to enjoy every single moment of this Indy 500 celebration. But then it's Detroit man, like it's coming up super quick, and then hopefully we have some time after that to rest and to enjoy the 500 a bit more.
"But the championship is still going on, and we cannot get more relaxed. We want that third in a row. And hopefully we can make it happen."
He's looking at becoming only the third driver in IndyCar history to win three titles in a row - alongside Ted Horne in the 1940s and his current Ganassi driver advisor Dario Franchitti more recently.
(As a sidenote, revisiting that stat just made me feel that Franchitti's career has been massively undervalued or at least not discussed anywhere near as much as he should, which I intend to do something about later this year.)
But regardless, Palou is looking at achieving things even some of the other absolute greats of IndyCar have never done if he can wrap up this year's title.
Perhaps the one piece of hope his competitors can have is that we've not seen Palou in this unassailable position before. He's usually been the underdog, and even in his title-winning seasons there's been an element of, 'he could be caught' and he was never as untouchable as he is now.
When you take an underdog's 'underdogness' away, do they have it in them to dig deep and find new ways to stay motivated to beat the opposition?
Honestly, knowing Palou, I'm clutching at straws by saying that and with every passing win, title and achievement he's just going to keep on getting stronger.
His #10 team has barely changed in his time there so there's longevity in the people around him, and even when he's tried to basically force his way out of Ganassi his team boss has just seemingly dug his heels in and backed Palou even harder.
"The guy continues to just change the record book, it's that simple," noted Chip Ganassi, who when asked about how the #10 team was being so dominant, said he was "riding the wave just like everyone else and I want to keep riding it, that's all I can say, I wish I had an answer for you".
"It's like, 'what are you guys doing?'," adds Palou, addressing people asking what his team is doing to be so dominant.
"Well, we don't know, like, we're just working as hard as we can, but for some reason, everything is clicking.
"Everybody is doing the best they can, and when we go out on track, we're able to execute. So yeah, I guess the championship's got to be a big goal."
I'm not sure if it should give people hope that a lot of Ganassi's key people don't really know how this run has come about because it will mean replicating it in the future will be tougher, or that they know how they have put themselves in a position to do it and are just not saying. Or perhaps that everyone should be worried because this is happening seemingly organically and that unless something massive changes, the steamroller is going to keep on churning.
It's hard to tell.
What we do know is that everyone (apart from team Palou) should think themselves lucky the Indy 500 is no longer double points, and he's not 160+ points clear instead of 112!
It also looks like Palou has moved on from his dream of racing in F1 - there is a release clause in his contract with what is understood to be a hefty buy-out - but with the trending age of rookie F1 drivers seemingly getting lower each year and with his failed attempt last year and in 2023, it feels like 28-year-old Palou might now have missed his shot.
So, now, all he really has to aim for is becoming as dominant as possible in IndyCar. He has nowhere else to place his goals and motivation if that assessment of his F1 chances are correct.
So his full focus now is going to be on destroying IndyCar records. And likely doing so without off-track 'noise' as has been the case for almost his whole Ganassi IndyCar career.
His wife and family have embraced moving to the US and he has a daughter now - who adorably drank milk during the 500 victory celebrations last weekend - so he seems well settled and gearing up for a long-term future here.
For all the reasons above, it's going to be fascinating to chart Palou's performance. Others in the past have struggled with motivation once the obvious big goals have been achieved.
My feeling knowing Palou is that he's just going to get stronger and it will take something outside of his control to end this party.
