PORTLAND, Ore. — Alex Palou put to bed what can only be deemed one of the most dominant championship performances the IndyCar Series has ever seen, capturing his fourth career season championship with two races still left to contest before the 2025 season is complete.
Will Power, the 44-year-old veteran whose future with Team Penske is uncertain, won the Bitnile.com Grand Prix of Portland by 1.6 seconds over Christian Lundgaard. Power earned his 45th career win and first since last year’s Portland race.
By virtue of his third-place finish at Portland International Raceway on Sunday, Aug. 10, Palou increased his cushion over Pato O’Ward to 151 points.
O’Ward entered the weekend as Palou’s only mathematical challenger started on the pole but had a power failure after the restart on Lap 21 causing him to go eight laps down. With only a maximum of 108 points to be earned over the final two race weekends at the Milwaukee Mile (Aug. 23-24) and Nashville Superspeedway (Aug. 30-31), O’Ward no longer holds any chance to pull off what for weeks would’ve been maybe the most miraculous championship comeback the sport had seen.
A title fight the 26-year-old Mexican driver has frequently deemed ‘over’recently, always accompanied with a chuckle, is now formally so, with Palou going wire to wire for his fourth IndyCar title in five seasons, all since joining Chip Ganassi Racing for the start of the 2021 IndyCar campaign off the back of a 2020 rookie season that even days ahead of signing with CGR had left him uncertain if his career in IndyCar would last beyond a single season.
The 28-year-old Spaniard won that 2021 season opener and was off to the races, like he was this season.
Unlike that debut campaign with Ganassi, or any major American open-wheel season of any kind since A.J. Foyt’s in 1979, Palou would go on to win five of the first six races of the season, a feat matched only three times in the sport’s history (Foyt in 1964 and ’79, and Al Unser Sr. in 1971). And in only one of those spectacular seasons, Foyt’s 1964 campaign, did one of those drivers ride their early hot streak to not only an Indianapolis 500 victory as well as a championship, as Palou has now done. It’s the first time in 15 years (Dario Franchitti, 2010) that a driver has paired a championship with a chance to kiss the bricks in the same calendar year.
Still with two races left, it’s unclear whether Palou may match Foyt’s all-time series mark of 10 wins in a single season (a record matched, but not beaten, by Unser Sr. in 1970). But already with eight victories, it makes Palou’s 2025 season, and his six-year resume, already one of the best the sport has ever seen.
Palou is now just the third driver to win three consecutive championships in series history, joining Ted Horn (1946 to 1948), Sebastien Bourdais (four straight in 2004 to 2007) and Dario Franchitti (2009-11). Along with Franchitti (2007 to 2011), who won four consecutive IndyCar championships in which he competed after taking 2008 off to race in NASCAR, Bourdais and Foyt (1960 to 1964), the Ganassi driver is also one of only four to win four titles in five consecutive seasons.
The speed at which he amassed his four Astor Cups (six seasons) can only be matched by Bourdais, who captured four Champ Car championships in his first five years in the sport, albeit during the waning years of the split when his competition was a bit watered down and fragmented with drivers from Ganassi, Penske and Andretti all competing in the Indy Racing League full-time.
To boot, Palou is only the sixth driver to even hit the four titles mark, and with just one more, he’d break ties with Franchitti, Bourdais and Mario Andretti and join just Foyt and Scott Dixon as the only drivers to reach five championships in major American open-wheel racing.
Palou’s title was the 17th for Chip Ganassi Racing in 30 years. The 17 IndyCar championships tie Penske Racing for most in series history.