Alex Palou holds the 2026 NTT INDYCAR SERIES championship trophy alongside Chip Ganassi at the Milwaukee Mile. Photo: INDYCAR.com
Alex Palou did not win Sunday’s second race at the Milwaukee Mile in West Allis, Wisconsin. He spent most of it fighting a car that wouldn’t turn the way he wanted, giving up ground politely every time a rival got alongside, and crossing the line 10th. None of that mattered. By the time the Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 was over, Palou had collected his fifth NTT INDYCAR SERIES championship, and he did it by protecting a lead rather than chasing a result.
The arithmetic explains the approach. Palou arrived at that race with a 97-point championship lead and only needed to leave with 54 of it intact to clinch outright. A cushion built over five months of racing meant no single afternoon, however messy, could put the title back in doubt. Palou said as much afterward: “Today was a really bad race for us. We were suffering all the time. But just keep focused, keep on going.” Nobody remembers a title clinched from 10th place, but that was the entire point. The season had already been decided. Sunday just filed the paperwork.
The bigger on-track headline at Milwaukee belonged to somebody else. Pato O’Ward swept both ends of the rain-delayed doubleheader in his Arrow McLaren Chevrolet, the first INDYCAR driver to win two races in one day since Rick Mears did it at Atlanta in 1981. David Malukas spent the second race glued to O’Ward’s rear wing before fading over the final ten laps — his sixth career runner-up finish without a win, and the fourth of those in his first season at Team Penske. Malukas pointed to power hesitations exiting corners and on restarts as the culprit all weekend. “We’re just cursed,” he said, and after watching it happen twice in two days, it’s hard to blame him for feeling that way.
The Record Book Catches Up
Palou’s fifth title, at 29, makes him the youngest driver in series history to reach that number; A.J. Foyt was 32 when he won his fifth in 1967. It’s also Palou’s fourth consecutive championship, tying the streak Sebastien Bourdais built from 2004 through 2007, and it leaves him behind only Foyt, with seven, and Scott Dixon, with six, on INDYCAR’s all-time list. For car owner Chip Ganassi, it was championship No. 18 as an owner — an INDYCAR record — and he made no effort to undersell what he’s watching: “We’re in the midst of a generational thing here, a generational driver.”
It Wasn’t Always This Easy
Palou’s Milwaukee coronation looked inevitable mostly because of how badly things had gone three weeks earlier at the series’ first race in Washington, D.C. He arrived with a 133-point cushion, then watched that cushion shrink to 91 points after contact in his own pit box drew a penalty and a broken suspension toe link put him into the wall. That was the moment a fourth straight title actually looked like work. Milwaukee is where he rebuilt the margin back into triple digits and turned the finale into a formality.
One Title Decided, Another Fight Still Running Hot
Palou’s wasn’t even the only championship wrapped up at Milwaukee. Honda clinched its 12th INDYCAR manufacturers’ title that same weekend on a margin built over an entire season, even though Chevrolet-powered cars took the top seven finishing spots in the very race that clinched it. That contradiction says everything about how differently the drivers’ and manufacturers’ championships get decided in a two-engine series.
What’s Actually Left to Watch at Laguna Seca
The drivers’ title is settled, but the finale still has stakes. Heading into the Mission Foods Grand Prix of Monterey on September 6, Christian Lundgaard, Kyle Kirkwood, and Pato O’Ward are separated by four points in the fight for second in the standings, a real position with a real check attached even with the top spot long gone. Palou will run a livery honoring the late Alex Zanardi, the two-time CART and INDYCAR champion who won three of his last four INDYCAR starts at that track. And Ganassi is already looking past 2026, needled about a run at Foyt’s record seven titles: “It can happen. It can absolutely happen.” Palou just turned 29. Nobody around Chip Ganassi Racing sounds like they’re in a hurry to find out if he’s wrong.
Source: INDYCAR.com, Chip Ganassi Racing
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