For the third time in the 2025 NTT IndyCar Series season, Alex Palou earned maximum points from a race weekend, after his dominating win from pole at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca on Sunday (July 27).
Leaving with a 121-point lead over Pato O’Ward, the championship is all but decided. While a white flag shouldn’t be waved now, it’s best to have it handy for Portland in two weeks or Milwaukee after that.
Palou has earned eight wins this year, and in IndyCar, that type of performance is insurmountable. So far in his 6-year history, Palou has barely thrown a race away — as long as Scott Dixon isn’t chasing him — and he is unlikely he will do that and give his competition a shot to put up a fight.
All eyes will be on whether he can win the last three races, setting a new historic benchmark with wins in a season. Two more will tie him with A. J. Foyt, Al Unser, and Mario Andretti. Three more will put him on a step unto himself.
O’Ward’s streak of top fives continues his great finish to the year. By finishing one spot in front of the new third-place driver in the standings, Dixon, he added three points to his buffer. O’Ward’s recent runs at tracks where he previously struggled, like a win at Toronto and earning a best of fourth on Sunday at Laguna, are helping him lock down runner-up in the points.
Dixon’s fifth-place finish moved him back to third after losing that spot to Kyle Kirkwood at Toronto. He has a slim margin of 15 points over the Andretti Global driver now, which is easy to lose with one bad day. Take, for example, Kirkwood’s luck at Laguna, where he was penalized twice, with the most significant action being for unavoidable contact on Rinus VeeKay.
O’Ward’s teammate Christian Lundgaard returned to form on his best type of tracks and is only 20 points out of fourth behind Kirkwood. With one more permanent road course left, maximizing that result, perhaps with a win, will help him as he finishes the year on the two ovals.
The battle between third and fifth in the standings is only 35 points, so shakeups there the rest of the year are possible. However, the driver in sixth will have some work cut out for them to climb higher. Felix Rosenqvist‘s first-lap wreck put him behind, and earning just five points for 24th is a punch to the gut.
Colton Herta’s podium helped him overtake Marcus Armstrong for seventh in the standings, sitting two points out of sixth, behind Rosenqvist. This battle will pick back up at Portland, where Rosenqvist has to regain his consistency. After his second at Road America, he has two top 10s but three finishes of 17th or worse, with one DNF at Toronto.
Armstrong lost the spot even though he has put together a great stretch since Detroit. In those eight races, he finished outside the top 10 once, at Toronto, and steadily worked from 15th to as high as seventh in the championship. Even after dropping one spot this weekend, he is still on pace for a career result at the end of the year.
Team Penske had an average day at Laguna, but that is a win considering the bad luck they’ve endured. Will Power led the way, with a seventh-place result, keeping him ninth in the standings. He closed ever so slightly with Armstrong. Stopping his streak of DNFs at two, Scott McLaughlin gained one spot in the standings, as did Josef Newgarden.
If Newgarden wants to prevent his first finish outside the top 10 in the championship with Team Penske, he has to chisel at a gap of 44 points. That’s not insurmountable, if he can win on one of the last two ovals, also preventing his first winless season since 2014.
McLaughlin is in a better spot, and he is above the cutline of his worst championship finish, which was 14th in his 2021 rookie season. Only 17 back of David Malukas in 10th, if McLaughlin just finishes in the top 10 the rest of the way, perhaps defends a win at Milwaukee, he can get back into the top 10.
After a podium at Toronto, VeeKay finished 23rd after contact with Kirkwood, falling further from the top 10 by losing seven points and bringing the gap to 14 from 10th-placed Malukas.
PREMA Racing’s Callum Ilott gave the team their career-best finish with his sixth. But he only closed ground on the man ahead of him in the points, teammate Robert Shwartzman. He is five from 23rd, but just 18 from 21st.
Only three races remain in 2025, and the paddock is almost in the ‘good game’ territory on the season, as Palou’s legacy-building run continues. All that’s up in the air is how does the standings shape up third through the rest of the field.
Tom is an IndyCar writer at Frontstretch, joining in March 2023. Besides writing the IndyCar Previews and frequent editions of Inside IndyCar, he will hop on as a fill-in guest on the Open Wheel podcast The Pit Straight. A native Hoosier, he calls Fort Wayne home. Follow Tom on Twitter @TomBlackburn42.