How Alex Palou became IndyCar’s most successful driver — and why he rejected F1

Alex Palou‘s 2025 season was one of the best for an IndyCar driver in almost 20 years.

He received a career-high eight races, including the Indianapolis 500. He received his third straight collection title and his fourth championship overall. He made the rostrum 13 instances in 17 races.

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Yet for those who ask Palou, he’ll inform you he’s going into Saturday’s qualifying for Sunday’s Grand Prix of Long Beach needing to show himself another time.

“Who cares about what we did last year?” he stated. “It’s cool to have four championships, but the only important year is 2026. Everybody started with zero points on the board and we need to do it all over again.”

That’s far simpler stated than completed, though Palou is off to a quick begin in his quest for a fifth championship having received two of the primary 4 races on the IndyAutomotive schedule to face second within the driver standings, two factors behind defending Long Beach champion Kyle Kirkwood.

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“Last year was magical,” stated Palou, who has captured 10 of the final 21 checked flags, relationship to 2024. “As an athlete you always want to keep on improving, but I need to be realistic and understand that to win eight races in IndyCar in the same year, it’s pretty tough to beat.

“So although I want to achieve that, we just need to take 2026 separately and just try our best, try to win as many races as possible and then obviously fight for the [Indy] 500 and the championship.”

Winning Long Beach, one of many few prizes on the IndyAutomotive circuit that has eluded him, can be a giant step in that drive for 5. But that will not be straightforward since passing on the tight 1.968-mile avenue course, with its 11 turns, is tough. That makes monitor place essential, placing a premium on Saturday’s qualifying and on pit stops in Sunday’s race.

“It’s always super tough to be competitive there,” Palou stated of Long Beach, the place he completed second final April, giving him three straight podium finishes. “One of the only bad things about street racing [is] that it’s really tough for us to overtake with how tight the tracks are and all the bumps.

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“It just makes it super challenging.”

Not as difficult because the race Palou, the most successful Spanish driver in IndyAutomotive historical past, needed to run simply to get right into a race automobile.

As a boy rising up within the tiny Catalan village of Sant Antoni de Vilamajor, Palou began kart racing about the identical time he began grade college. He was 15 when he completed second within the 2012 European karting championship but he did not see a lot of a future past that.

Lewis Hamilton had completed in the identical spot 13 years earlier, then went on to turn into the most successful Formula One driver in historical past. But England has a long-established historical past with open-wheel racing and Spain didn’t.

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“He came from nothing, showing up at a carting track and then having these big dreams and aspirations. And here he is,” stated Barry Wanser, the senior supervisor of IndyAutomotive operations for Chip Ganassi Racing.

“I know he’s very proud he’s the first Spaniard to win the Indianapolis 500. That’s just absolutely incredible.”

But that was by no means the aim.

“Honestly,” Palou stated, “my goal was just to have fun. When we started, I never wanted to be a race car driver for a living. I never thought that it would be possible.”

Before Palou, Fernando Alonso, a two-time F1 champion, was Spain’s most successful open-wheel driver. After Alonso is Carlos Sainz Jr., who has received 4 F1 races; Pedro de la Rosa, who made greater than 100 F1 begins however climbed the rostrum simply as soon as; and Oriol Servià, who ran 79 IndyAutomotive races in 9 years however by no means positioned larger than fourth earlier than retiring in 2019, one yr earlier than Palou made his debut within the collection.

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Aside from Alonso, these drivers had been good however not nice, leaving the highway from Spain to success in open-wheel racing a slim one. That’s a path Palou is now widening.

“I would say that for sure it’s helping future generations that I’m here and that I had success,” he stated, “just because they can know that with a normal European background you can come to the US and fight for wins and championships.”

Wanser stated what makes Palou so good is his really feel for each the automobile and the monitor and his potential to speak along with his crew.

“He has a very unique ability to understand what he needs the car to do to maximize performance on the tires,” stated Wanser, the race strategist for Ganassi’s No. 10 automobile who has typically been referred to as Palou’s indispensable companion. “You’re talking about road courses, street courses, for the primary [tires] — the hards and the softs — and understanding what he needs for qualifying and also what the car needs for reducing tire deg[redation] during the race.”

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For now Palou, who turned 29 earlier this month, seems content material with mastering these abilities in IndyAutomotive reasonably than following the pure development into an F1 experience.

He stated he went “all in” to win an F1 seat following his first IndyAutomotive title in 2021, however doubts about whether or not he’d be given a aggressive automobile led him to again out. Rumors linking him to Red Bull’s F1 crew surfaced after final yr’s Indy 500, however Palou shot these down too, saying he was staying with Ganassi.

Wanser, clearly, is proud of that call and hopes it’ll repay Sunday in Long Beach.

“Alex is very young, right?” he stated. “IndyAutomotive is so aggressive that we might by no means, ever take into consideration being complacent. If we begin heading down that highway, we’ll get beat and get beat typically.

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“It’s nonstop trying to constantly improve, knowing every weekend we show up to the racetrack it’s going to be difficult to win.”

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This story initially appeared in Los Angeles Times.