Roses are red.
Quick is our pace.
Look who it is!
Once again, second place.
Alex Palou and his dynamic pit wall duo of race strategist Barry Wanser and race engineer Julian Robertson have set a new standard of execution in the NTT IndyCar Series over the last few seasons.
For another team to beat this Troika at Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR), it requires either perfection, a maximum of one small mistake, or the CGR machine to somehow trip over itself, which is an extreme rarity.
Don’t believe me? In the 55 IndyCar races that have taken place since the beginning of Palou’s reign of domination in 2023, the No. 10 CGR Honda has only finished outside the top 10 on seven occasions.
A collision at Detroit that wasn’t Palou’s fault, a spin at Iowa that was, a battery failure before the green flag at Milwaukee and just turning laps at the season finale in Nashville once the championship was mathematically clinched were the low points of 2024. Last year through the start of this year, another collision at Detroit that wasn’t Palou’s fault, a strategic gamble that didn’t work at Toronto and an early crash at Phoenix were the only things that kept Palou from having 55 top 10s in the last 55 races.
Let’s make this analysis a bit more frightening to the competition.
The Spaniard has 43 top-five finishes in his last 55 IndyCar starts. That’s a 78% top-five rate. For comparison, Alex Zanardi‘s top-five rate during his two CART championship seasons of 1997-98 was 27 out of 35 races, or 77.14%. To somewhat compare with another legend, Rick Mears‘ top-10 rate in CART competition from 1979 through 1992 was 135 out of 179 races, or 75.42%.
To beat Palou requires no weaknesses. Christian Lundgaard and the Arrow McLaren team found that out the hard way (again) during Sunday’s (March 29) Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix at Barber Motorsports Park.
Lundgaard was leading the 90-lap race around the 17-turn, 2.3-mile road course just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, when the Dane had to make his final pit stop with 22 laps remaining.
The gap between Lundgaard and Palou was such that if the No. 7 Arrow McLaren crew had a perfect pit stop, their driver would blend back onto the race track with very little, if any, margin at all to Palou in the fight for the race lead.
Instead, disaster struck when Lundgaard’s new right-rear tire was slow in being secured onto the car, causing a loss of over 10 seconds on pit road.
Unless something completely unhinged happened late in the race, Lundgaard’s chances of winning the race were finished. Despite getting by Graham Rahal for second place with only a few laps to go, Lundgaard finished over 13 seconds behind Palou, his race having already been compromised.
Earlier in the week, Will Power participated in the pre-event Zoom media conference call and was asked about beating Palou and his preparation to do so.
“You can’t have a weakness ultimately ’cause [Palou] will get you,” Power said. “If you have a weakness, if you’re not good in [qualifying], he’s going to get you. In particular, if you’re not good in the race. There’s race pace, strategy, pit stops. You can’t have a weakness simply. That’s the only way you’re going to beat that machine, that 10 Ganassi machine, man.
“The driver, the crew, the strategy, the whole thing. I cannot pick a weakness of theirs. They’re even really good on ovals. To beat them, you definitely are going to have to be putting it together every weekend. You cannot make a mistake. It’s funny, he just keeps racking it up. Stumble a little bit here, he’s got you. He’s finishing ahead of you again. There’s another chunk of points.”
That’s IndyCar’s all-time pole winner, two-time IndyCar champion and 2018 Indianapolis 500 winner giving props to someone who’s won 21 races in 102 IndyCar starts, tying him on the all-time winners list with 1949 Indianapolis 500 winner Bill Holland and two-time national champion Tony Bettenhausen.
And that racer turns 29 on Wednesday.
Kyle Kirkwood is the only driver to finish in the top five in every IndyCar race so far in 2026. That consistency still has the Florida native holding on to a two-point advantage as IndyCar heads to Long Beach in April. It will take maintaining that kind of consistency to beat Palou in the championship.
Good luck.
Christopher DeHarde has covered IndyCar racing and the Road to Indy for various outlets since 2014. In addition to open wheel racing, DeHarde has also covered IMSA and various short track racing events around Indiana. Originally from New Orleans, DeHarde moved to the Indianapolis area in 2017 to further pursue a career as a motorsports writer.
Definitely felt bad for Lundgaard. It was setting up to be an epic duel with Indycar’s resident dominating team. I do wonder whether Palou had a bit more in reserve, as the only reason Lundgaard had a window to the lead was unusually questionable strategy by Ganassi, dropping Palou in the middle of a hornets nest of back markers.
Then again, maybe Ganassi felt they could overtake Lundgaard on track if necessary, so the risk of getting caught out by a caution wasn’t worth waiting on a better pit window to open up.
Once McLaren epic failed on pit road, Palou had no reason to show whether he had pace in hand, so I guess we’ll never know.
In other news, I think I saw Sting Ray Robb overtake another car at one point. I immediately began prepping for the end of days, and also bought a lottery ticket, just in case.