Alex Palou IndyCar Title: Stunning 110-Point Milwaukee Clinch
Aug
Filed under: IndyCar · Analysis
The Alex Palou IndyCar title is no longer a conventional championship fight. His 110-point lead is not a championship fight. It is a countdown, and it runs out sooner than IndyCar would like.
Palou won Sunday’s OnlyBulls Grand Prix of Portland by 4.1167 seconds over Felix Rosenqvist, led 60 of the 110 laps, and did it in a race with exactly one caution period lasting two laps. No attrition, no lottery, nothing for anyone behind him to inherit. It was his sixth win of the season and the 25th of his career, and it leaves five rounds on the calendar.
Here is the arithmetic behind Alex Palou’s IndyCar title path. The most a driver can take out of an IndyCar weekend is 54 points: 50 for the win, one for pole, two for leading the most laps, one for leading a lap. There are no double-points races on the 2026 schedule — the Indianapolis 500 lost that status in 2023 and the finale lost it at the same time. The final two rounds of the season are therefore worth a combined 108 points.
Palou’s advantage over Kyle Kirkwood is 110.
Follow the Alex Palou IndyCar title sequence. Markham on August 16, Washington on August 23, then the first of Milwaukee’s two races on August 29. If Palou leaves the Milwaukee Mile that Saturday afternoon with the margin he holds today, the title is mathematically his — before Sunday’s second Milwaukee race, and with the Laguna Seca finale still a week beyond that. He does not need to win again. He needs to give away almost nothing across two street circuits nobody has ever raced on.
Why the Alex Palou IndyCar title chase is nearly over
The official IndyCar standings behind Palou describe a queue, not a challenge. Kirkwood holds second by eight points over David Malukas. Christian Lundgaard sits 17 behind Malukas, and Pato O’Ward is a further 20 back in fifth. Four drivers separated by 45 points, all of them looking up at a gap of 110.
Portland was the pattern in miniature. Kirkwood was fifth, Lundgaard ninth, O’Ward 11th, Malukas 12th. On the day the championship leader won from the front row and led more than half the race, his four nearest rivals produced a single top-five finish between them.
None of them has been bad. That is precisely the problem. Kirkwood has one win, at Arlington in March. Lundgaard has two, at the IMS road course and Road America. O’Ward has one, at Mid-Ohio. Josef Newgarden has two, at Phoenix and World Wide Technology Raceway, and sits outside the top five in points. Thirteen races have produced six different winners, and Palou is responsible for six of the victories by himself. The rest of the field has been sharing. He has been hoarding.
Sunday underlined how little margin the rest have left. Will Power had the quicker alternate tires waiting in his pit box and a genuine shot at second, then never heard strategist Ron Ruzewski’s call to come in on Lap 86, got stuck behind Scott Dixon and Sting Ray Robb, and lost the window. Palou’s own stop, the Lap 32 overcut that Barry Wanser called, was the decisive move of the afternoon. One team executed. Another did not. That has been the season.
What Palou’s title lead means for the new races
The timing of the Alex Palou IndyCar title is what stings. IndyCar is about to run the two most ambitious new events it has put on a calendar in decades, back to back, and the championship they are meant to showcase may already be beyond reach.
Markham is the first Toronto-area round not held at Exhibition Place since IndyCar first raced there in 1986 — a new 12-turn, 3.52-kilometre temporary circuit through Markham Centre on a five-year deal, built because the old site had run out of room to grow.
Washington is stranger still: the first automobile race ever held on the streets of the American capital, a 1.7-mile, seven-turn lap around the National Mall with a four-tenths-of-a-mile front straight on Pennsylvania Avenue, 147 laps, free general admission, live on FOX, with an IROC revival featuring Jeff Gordon, Rusty Wallace, Bill Elliott, Tony Kanaan, Helio Castroneves and Dario Franchitti in period Pontiac Firebirds.
The event was formally created by executive order in January to mark the country’s 250th anniversary.
For the Alex Palou IndyCar title narrative, both will draw crowds and both will look extraordinary on television. Neither is likely to mean anything to the championship, and the season finale at Laguna Seca — the race the schedule was built to end on — may mean less.
The obvious response to the Alex Palou IndyCar title runaway is that IndyCar should manufacture some jeopardy: bring back double points, or borrow NASCAR’s playoff. That would be the wrong lesson. A 110-point lead assembled across 13 rounds is not a quirk of the scoring table. It is a competitive fact about one driver and one race team, and resetting the board late in the year would conceal it rather than address it.
The 2023 decision to strip double points from Indianapolis was correct precisely because it stopped the calendar from lying about what had happened over a season.
How Alex Palou can clinch the IndyCar title at Milwaukee
The last refuge for anyone hoping the Alex Palou IndyCar title stays alive is that two of the five remaining races are on the Milwaukee Mile, and ovals are supposed to scramble things. They have this year — Newgarden won at Phoenix and Gateway, Rosenqvist won the 110th Indianapolis 500 for Meyer Shank Racing — but none of that helps the drivers actually within range.
The Alex Palou IndyCar title campaign is not vulnerable on ovals any more. He won at Nashville Superspeedway on July 20, on a one-and-a-third-mile concrete oval, the round immediately before Portland. Whatever weakness a challenger might once have exploited over a Milwaukee doubleheader, he has already answered it.
The likely result of Alex Palou’s IndyCar title run, then, is a fifth title in six seasons and a fourth in succession. Nobody has won four consecutive championships at the top level of American open-wheel racing since Sébastien Bourdais took four straight Champ Car crowns from 2004 to 2007, and nobody has ever done it in the unified IndyCar Series. It is a genuinely historic run.
Alex Palou’s IndyCar title deserves better than being confirmed on a Saturday afternoon in West Allis, Wisconsin, after the sport’s two biggest new events have already been and gone. That it might be says nothing bad about Palou. It says how far he and Chip Ganassi Racing have moved away from everyone else.
Follow the complete season picture in the Mr DCT IndyCar championship hub and confirm dates on the official 2026 IndyCar schedule.
