If Alex Palou is to win his second NTT INDYCAR SERIES championship in the past three years, he would do well to take strategy advice from someone who has been in his shoes.
Like, say, himself.
The driver of Chip Ganassi Racing’s No. 10 The American Legion Honda, who reaches the season’s halfway point this weekend with a whopping 74-point lead, said it will serve him well to follow his script from his title-winning 2021 season. That was his first year with Chip Ganassi’s Indianapolis-based team, and he purposefully stayed within himself and raced accordingly until the title fight reached a fevered pitch.
Which means, Palou did not focus on his position in the standings until after he won the late-season race at Portland International Raceway, the 14th of 16 races. Clutching a 25-point lead, Palou raced the 15th event, at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, with the championship in mind and then he ran even more conservatively at the finale, a street race in Long Beach. He finished 38 points ahead of Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden.
Staying focused yet patient allowed Palou to close that season with three consecutive top-four finishes, consistency that has become his hallmark. This year, he has top-10 finishes in all eight races, a streak that has him more than a race ahead of second-place Marcus Ericsson, one of his CGR teammates.
Palou has won three of the past four races, but he said he has no plans to change what he’s doing as The Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio Presented by the 2023 Accord Hybrid is on tap this weekend.
“If it was another series, maybe, yeah, you could try and just finish where you need to finish,” the 26-year-old Spaniard said. “In INDYCAR, you really can’t do that.
“Obviously, when you’re leading the championship, you think about the championship, right? In all the (media) interviews, (you’re) asked about it. But I would say only on the last race in the ’21 year where we (driving) a little bit under the limit to try and secure points.
“So, yeah, I don’t expect to think about securing points until the last race or the last couple of races. I think we should keep it that way. We should try and score more points, get an even bigger gap. The best way to do that is by winning races.”
Palou has yet to win a series race at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, but he has finished second and third in the past two years. Last year, he dogged Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin all the way to the finish, settling for a .5512-of-a-second deficit at the checkered flag.
This year, Palou has been on full send, qualifying in one of the top four positions for each of past six races with a pair of NTT P1 Awards for being the fastest qualifier, one of those being at the Indianapolis 500 presented by Gainbridge. Over the past four races, Palou has combined to lead 172 laps – the field has only led 267 – and that doesn’t factor in how well he raced in the “500” after his car was struck on pit road by Rinus VeeKay’s machine on Lap 94. Palou fell to 28th at Indy but charged back to finish fourth, arguably his best drive of the season.
Bottom line, Palou is on a roll, and he wants to continue it while being concerned about the title pursuit later in the year.
“Yeah, I feel like we have momentum, and momentum in motorsports matters a lot for driver confidence, team confidence, mechanic confidence,” he said. “Everybody wants to get the win, just like you are asking for more and more. It just gets better and better.
“Hopefully we can keep the wave big or even bigger. Hopefully, we can continue having some success.”
If Palou’s optimism for this weekend’s Mid-Ohio race wasn’t enough, he remembers how he drove from the 22nd starting position to finish sixth in the season’s next race, the Honda Indy Toronto at Exhibition Place. His opponents better hope this title chase doesn’t get out of hand so that the series’ 17-year streak of having the Astor Challenge Cup still up for grabs at the last race is alive. The last driver to clinch early was Dan Wheldon in 2005, but Palou looks like a driver capable of being the latest to do so.
Wheldon’s average finish that year was 5.0. Palou’s stands at 3.5, and that includes races such as the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach where he got caught up in an incident, dropped to 15th and still worked his way to fifth. Like at Indy, that’s how big leads are built and championships are won.
“Our performance is there,” Palou said. “We’re able to get the results and get clean weekends, which is not real easy to do very often in INDYCAR.”
Palou said he hasn’t had this level of confidence since a karting season in 2012, when he routinely battled with current INDYCAR SERIES rival Callum Ilott of Juncos Hollinger Racing and Formula One’s George Russell for the championship he won. Even then the blueprint was right: Race hard, try to win each race, and adjust the championship strategy late in the year as necessary.
Ahead are nine races over the next 11 weekends. A 74-point lead is large, but it’s nothing to rest on. So, it’s onward and hopefully upward for Palou. There’s another championship to win.