With Alex Palou adding to his already impressive IndyCar resumé with his Indianapolis 500 win last weekend, some have thrown around the conversation as to whether he is the best open-wheel racer on the planet right now.
On face value, this might not be a tough question.
However, it’s worth mentioning that IndyCar is quite literally the fastest thing on a track with turns that the planet earth has to offer and Palou is at the top of that game. Point being, the conversation is worth having, and two of our writers at Frontstretch found themselves on two different sides of the aisle.
Verstappen Is Great, But Did He Win The Indy 500?
Formula 1 is undoubtedly the pinnacle of racing, but IndyCar is truly an equal playing field. It should be noted that while Max Verstappen is indeed carrying a slower Red Bull to wins and keeping it in the fight for the championship, Alex Palou has essentially embarrassed the field at every race so far this season.
While Verstappen has his four titles and has amassed 65 wins in his Formula 1 career, there are a few notable things. First, Red Bull was far better than the rest of the field for a two-and-a-half-year span from 2022 to the first half of 2024. In 54 starts from 2022 to the Spanish Grand Prix of 2024, Verstappen won 41 races while having practically the best car everywhere except Singapore.
That’s a blistering win rate of 75.9% for Verstappen.
No doubt is that incredible, but he had a significant advantage over the entire field. Palou is doing this in equal machinery.
Looking past Palou’s win at the 109th running of the Indy 500, Palou only has a third of the starts in IndyCar that Verstappen has in Formula 1. Both are half a year separated in age, but Verstappen got his first ride in 2015 with Toro Rosso at age 17. Palou entered IndyCar in 2020 with Dale Coyne Racing. Neither won in their first season.
What’s very interesting is that once both Palou joined Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021 and Verstappen was promoted to Red Bull in 2016, both drivers won in their debuts for their teams.
This is where Palou starts to pull away from Verstappen’s progress.
Palou won the 2021 IndyCar championship for CGR in his maiden year with the team. He only won three times, but he podiumed in eight of the 16 races.
Verstappen only won the one race his first year, but podiumed in seven of the 18 races ran in the Red Bull and 21 races for the season.
Following an off 2022, Palou hasn’t slowed down. He dominated 2023 with five wins and 10 podiums, holding a healthy 78-point lead over teammate Scott Dixon.
Despite just two wins the next year, Palou still put up an average finish of 6.5 last season on his way to his third title. Now, he has put up the greatest start to a season in almost five decades, in an era of IndyCar that’s meant to have closer racing than ever.
Palou is being championed with the greatest of all-time in the sport of IndyCar, with his five of six wins to start the season. The only other drivers to accomplish the feat are Al Unser Sr. and AJ Foyt, who are nothing but legendary.
By the way, Palou just won the Indy 500, knocking out two birds with one stone.
The biggest criticism of Palou is that he couldn’t win on an oval. He almost came close last year at the second race at Iowa Speedway, if it wasn’t for a well-timed pit stop by championship rival Will Power that gave him the lead after a timely caution. That criticism no longer exists.
Palou’s Indy 500 win can be used in this debate, and I don’t see Verstappen trying his hand at the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing” anytime soon.
Palou has the chance to extend his streak to seven wins in eight races this weekend on the streets of Detroit, a track he won at in 2023. With a 115-point lead, Palou has a vice grip on his potential fourth title … in May.
Meanwhile, Verstappen has to hope the new regulations being implemented at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya are going to bring the Red Bull team much closer to McLaren, so he can battle for his fifth world championship. More than likely, Palou will tie with Verstappen in championships in his sixth IndyCar season, while the Dutchman completes his 11th F1 season.
With Palou committed to IndyCar for the foreseeable future, get ready to watch “The Surgeon” dominate America’s premier open-wheel series for years to come and dust the rest of the field. – Wyatt Watson
Let’s Not Kid Ourselves, Verstappen Is On Another Level
Look, this has all been really cute, and congratulations to Alex Palou for dominating an entire field thus far into the 2025 season.
He is a great IndyCar driver with a great team, and he’s doing exactly what great drivers with great teams should do in their sport.
But let’s not kid ourselves. This is Max Verstappen we’re talking about. This man dethroned Lewis Hamilton for the top spot in the Formula 1 driver rankings, even if it took a bit of what we would call a bump-and-run to do so. Aside from the sheer difference in pedigree of the two racing series in question here, there are some other differences that warrant discussion.
IndyCar is not a spec car series, and F1 is, meaning that in F1, each manufacturer brings a car that provides their own take on the rule book for that given season, while in IndyCar, everyone is supposed to be running the same car. Ideally, it’s to put all the drivers on a level playing field. However, we all know that’s not the case. After all, would Palou do the same thing in Callum Ilott’s car?
Now, I’ll relent that I personally find IndyCar much more enjoyable on an oval, just because of the pure speed. However, F1 cars might be the hardest thing to drive competitively on the planet. These things are massive and it takes a true athlete to sit behind the wheel of one of these cars in 2025. The exact same thing can be said of IndyCar drivers, so there are some similarities there.
In that case, I think it warrants looking at whether drivers who have made the switch between the two series had success or not, and the most recent example we have of this is none other than Romain Grosjean.
Now, Grosjean was, by all accounts, a lackluster F1 driver who raced for a lackluster team. During his last four-year stint with Haas, which also happens to be one of the worst in the team’s history, he didn’t even manage one podium finish. Would you like to guess how many he had during his first season behind the wheel of an IndyCar?
He had three, and finished 15th in points standings. Is that dominant by any stretch of the word? Absolutely not. But it is quite impressive considering he was racing in F1 just one season earlier, and he was coming off a scary crash. He continued to rack up a few podiums without ever actually winning a race before swapping to IMSA in 2023.
My point is this: Verstappen is a four-time F1 driver’s champion. In fact, the best thing about this season has been the fact that we’re not being forced to watch him trounce the field, and even then, he’s still a strong contender at just +310 odds at this very moment.
Palou is the odds-on favorite for the IndyCar championship as of right now to no surprise, and that’s fine and dandy. But until he steps up to the same level of competition as Verstappen, this isn’t a real conversation. Congrats on the Indy 500 win and I hope to see him driving for Cadillac F1 in the future. – Tanner Marlar
Tanner Marlar is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated’s OnSI Network, a contributor for TopSpeed.com, an AP Wire reporter, an award-winning sports columnist and talk show host and master's student at Mississippi State University. Soon, Tanner will be pursuing a PhD. in Mass Media Studies. Tanner began working with Frontstretch as an Xfinity Series columnist in 2022.
Wyatt Watson has followed motorsports closely since 2007. He joined Frontstretch as a journalist in February 2023 after serving in the United States Navy for five years as an Electronic Technician Navigation working on submarines. Wyatt is one of Frontstretch's primary IndyCar correspondents, providing exclusive video content on site. He hosts Frontstretch's Through the Gears podcast and occasionally The Pit Straight.You can find Wyatt's written work in columns such as Friday Faceoff and 2-Headed Monsteras well as exclusive IndyCar features. Wyatt also contributes to Frontstretch's social media team, posting unique and engaging content for Frontstretch.
Wyatt Watson can be found on X @WyattWRacing