Álex Palou Just Did Something Only One Driver Has Ever Done in American Open-Wheel Racing

Álex Palou won the 2026 NTT IndyCar Series championship on the evening of August 30 at the Milwaukee Mile, and he did it in the least cinematic way imaginable: by finishing tenth in a race that had been sitting half-finished since the day before. Rain stopped the Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 after 90 laps on Saturday. IndyCar ran the weekend's other Milwaukee race first on Sunday, then came back and finished the suspended one in the evening. Palou was fifth in the completed race and tenth in the restarted one. That was enough, with a round still left on the calendar.

"It's been an absolute joy of a year. The last two years have been just magical for us." — Álex Palou, via FOX Sports

The final margin was 86 points — 631 to Kyle Kirkwood's 545 — over an 18-race season. Palou won six of them: St. Petersburg, Barber, Long Beach, Detroit, Nashville and Portland. He took eight pole positions, 12 top-five finishes and 15 top-tens. He also lost five points along the way for a front-wing height infringement at the Indianapolis 500, which tells you roughly how much the margin mattered. Portland was his 25th career IndyCar win, in his seventh season.

The part of the season that best explains the gap wasn't a race at all. Between the Indianapolis road course in May and Road America in June, Palou qualified on pole five consecutive times — the Grand Prix of Indianapolis, the Indy 500, Detroit, Gateway and Road America. Only four drivers in the history of the series had ever strung together five straight P1 starts before him. Three of those poles came on wildly different kinds of circuit: a flat road course, a 2.5-mile superspeedway, a concrete street circuit and a 1.25-mile oval. Christian Lundgaard finally ended it at Mid-Ohio.

What makes 2026 historically interesting is the fourth consecutive title, because almost nobody has got there. Ted Horn won three AAA national championships in a row in 1946, 1947 and 1948 — and died in a crash at DuQuoin during the finale of the third one. Dario Franchitti won three straight from 2009 to 2011. Sébastien Bourdais is the only driver in American open-wheel history to have won four in succession, from 2004 through 2007. Palou is now the second, and IndyCar's own record book counts him as the second driver in series history to do it.

That record book is worth poking at, because the lineage is messier than the headline suggests. IndyCar treats AAA, USAC, CART, Champ Car and its own modern championship as one continuous national title, which is how Horn's 1940s AAA crowns and Bourdais's Champ Car run end up in the same column as Palou's. Bourdais won his four while American open-wheel racing was split in half and the IRL was running a separate, rival IndyCar Series at the same time. That is not a knock on Bourdais, who was ferociously good — but it does mean Palou's four straight are the first won against the whole field, in one undivided championship, since the split ended in 2008.

Five titles overall puts Palou third on the all-time list, behind A.J. Foyt's seven and Scott Dixon's six. Dixon is the man in the other Chip Ganassi Racing car, which is its own kind of strange: the two drivers currently second and third in championship history have been teammates for the whole of Palou's run. At 29, Palou is the youngest five-time champion the series has had. He was already the youngest four-time champion, at 28 years, four months and nine days. He is also the only driver to win five in a six-year window.

He did not, however, win everything. Palou took pole for the 110th Indianapolis 500 and did not win it — Felix Rosenqvist did, giving Meyer Shank Racing the race in a photo finish over David Malukas, after Palou had arrived in May as the defending winner. He didn't win the inaugural Freedom 250 on the streets of Washington, D.C. either, despite putting the No. 10 on pole by more than half a second; Kirkwood led most of it. And he finished the season eighth at Laguna Seca while Scott McLaughlin led 87 of 95 laps for Penske's only win of the year. A champion who collects six of 18 is dominant, not untouchable.

That distinction matters for the argument that always follows a run like this, which is that one driver winning everything is bad for the series. The 2026 results don't really support it. Eight different drivers won races: Palou, Kirkwood, Lundgaard and Josef Newgarden took two apiece, Pato O'Ward took three including a Milwaukee sweep that made him the first driver since Rick Mears in 1981 to win two IndyCar races in a single day, and Rosenqvist, Marcus Ericsson and McLaughlin each won one. The championship was a procession. The races mostly weren't.

Kirkwood, who pushed Palou harder than anyone and sealed runner-up with a second place at Laguna Seca, was blunt about it when the title was gone: "They were better than us," he told FOX Sports. "I'm happy for them, to be honest." Palou's own summary was characteristically flat — "It's been an absolute joy of a year. The last two years have been just magical for us" — which undersells 14 wins across 2025 and 2026. Honda took its twelfth manufacturers' championship on the back of it, its second in a row.

Which leaves 2027 as the first season in which the four-in-a-row record is his to break rather than share. Bourdais's streak ended when Champ Car folded underneath him; Horn's ended at DuQuoin. Palou's would have to be ended by somebody on track, and the field has now had four years to work out how. Nobody has.