Before we get into the nitty gritty of Part 3 of our 2025 IndyCar season review, the 2026 Calendar finally dropped on September 16th, and here it is:
St Petersberg – March 1st
Phoenix – March 7th
Arlington – March 15th
Barber – March 29th
Long Beach – April 19th
Indy GP – May 9th
110th Indy 500 – May 24th
Detroit – May 31st
Gateway – June 7th
Road America – June 21st
Mid-Ohio – July 5th
Nashville – July 19th
Portland – August 9th
Markham – August 16th
Milwaukee – August 29th and 30th
Monterey – September 6th
Some thoughts from me:
- Good move to frontload March. I wouldn’t normally say “open the season with a Triple Header”, but they had to do something to counter the lull after the opening round in early March, it was a complete momentum killer for the series. April now only has one race with Long Beach on the 19th, but better that than taking a month out for the sodding Thermal Club.
- Phoenix Back? Phoenix is back for Round 2 on March 7th, and it’s going to be a Saturday Night race as they’re doubling up with NASCAR’s Cup Series over the weekend. I’ve never been sure what twinning with NASCAR does for IndyCar itself specifically besides giving fans a better deal? It always feels like NASCAR throwing IndyCar a bone than vice versa. And did anyone really ask for Phoenix back? From what I remember of its last time out, it was a bit of a damp squib for actual action.
- Some movement: Was there any good reason to swap Nashville and Laguna Seca to make the latter the finale again? Iowa has also been scrapped, which was no real surprise; it never recovered from HyVee moving to partner NASCAR instead alongside the horrible lack of regional promotion work. On the contrary, Milwaukee’s done pretty well since coming back, so it made sense for them to go back to doubling up. Toronto’s also moving their race over to Markham permanently after the Exhibition Centre is busy hosting the 2026 World Cup. A real shame such a staple part of the calendar and the only race outside of the US right now is moving. Also, the GP of Arlington makes its debut in March. IndyCar street tracks don’t do much for me but I hope to be proven wrong.
- 17 is the magic number? Surprised given the FOX purchase and the trends that every other major series is making, they’ve not pushed for more than 17 races yet. Still surprised there’s only six oval races, and only two of those in primetime slots. Feels like there is room for more, but then it gets tight if you still want to host it all between March and NFL season starting in early September. But as my old co-host Ryan Erik King said on our Discord: “Even if they wanted to, are there any takers?”
Anyway, enough of that, on with the show… Oh, Michael…
Andretti Global
Season Highlight: Kyle Kirkwood’s development / Season Lowlight: Two Indy 500 Disqualifications
Part 2 ended talking about the end of an era as Will Power left Penske. Part 3 begins with the first year of a new one with Dan Towriss taking over for a new rebranded Andretti Global name. Unfortunately, a chunk of their season can be summed up as another round of the same old shit.
On one hand, this was a slightly better season all round. Three wins on the season, all via a breakout season from Kyle Kirkwood, the perfect driver for the team to take advantage of something they’ve always been great at – street tracks. A short oval win at Gateway was a nice bonus prize too. And the way the midfield shook out, they definitely leapfrogged Team Penske with getting two of their cars 4th and 7th in points, ahead of all three of Roger’s men. Welcome back to Part 3!
But it’s still a season where you feel a little frustration for leaving more on the table. Kirkwood’s season definitely wobbled towards the end. They had a horror show weekend in Iowa when multiple tire blowouts left them in no man’s land. Colton Herta went winless on the season and his year never really got going. They had an excellent 500 with two cars in the Top 6, only for them to be disqualified post-race for modifying their battery casing, and well… Marcus Ericsson’s still here and even worse than he was last year.
It very much feels like a classic Andretti season where even with some improvements, they’re still metaphorically spinning their wheels. Will Power is joining from Penske after Colton Herta heads to Europe to chase his F1 dream. Will is still a superb driver and an easy floor raiser for this team, something I think they need. But is Kirkwood now their new ace, and if he is, can he string together an all-fronts type season to take on Alex Palou?
Marcus Ericsson – 20th in Points (234), 2 Fast 6’s, 2 Top 10’s / Average Start: 12.1 / Average Finish: 17.7
Road/Street Ranking: 17th / Oval Ranking: 21st
I tried really hard with Marcus to exonerate his pretty poor 2024 season. He started well this year with that 6th place in St Pete and I thought he might be back. But sadly, that was pretty much the peak of the year.
Ericsson might have been the most anonymous man in IndyCar this season. Just one other Top 10 in Toronto where he finished 5th, but a lot of frustratingly poor form in races that ruined an actually not too bad qualifying start average of 12. Again, had another runner-up finish at the Indy 500 only for it to be cruelly taken away after the fact (Could you have IMAGINED if he won?), and not much else to report. The other real highlight of his season might have been having his car beached at the Rahal Straight at Laguna Seca for a good 90 seconds before the caution finally dropped. If that’s a highlight for you, what are we doing here?
It’s gotten to a point where I’d have understood it if Andretti cut bait a year early and they promoted Dennis Hauger, this year’s Indy NXT Champion. But they’re going to stay the course and let Ericsson see off the last year of his contract. I sincerely hope he can turn it around because I don’t want the cynics to say he was a Chip Ganassi merchant because he doesn’t deserve that tag – But he’s proving them right. 3.5/10
Colton Herta – 7th in Points (372), 2 Poles, 2 Podiums, 8 Fast 6’s, 8 Top 10’s / Average Start: 10.3 / Average Finish: 10.9
Road/Street Ranking: 7th / Oval Ranking: 17th
Colton, Colton, Colton. What are we gonna do with you? After an explosive debut in the series, it’s felt like he’s been trying to find that sweet spot for half a decade now. Hard not to think what could have been after stealing the runner-up spot when he took his first oval win in 2024.
His 2025? Disappointing. The speed was still there. Eight out of the 11 Fast 6’s on Road and Street tracks and 5th highest average start in general. But we’ve known the speed with Colton has been there for six years now. The issue has always been converting that in races, and this year it just didn’t work. Did it ever feel at any point this season like Herta was the favourite to win? You were either waiting for the bad pit stop like in St Pete, or he’d get crossed up on strategy, or he’d simply fade in terms of raw speed in the back of a race. The amount of times Alex Palou just outgunned him on raw speed was startling. Given 2025, there’s no real shame in that, but we rate Colton predominantly in that attribute and it wasn’t quite there this year.
The ovals are an unfortunate regression to the mean too. Another crash before the Indy 500 killed any chance of a win this year, and he didn’t get a single Top 10 finish on an oval this season. After finally getting that monkey off his back in 2024, this was a step back.
But none of that really matters now. After being just short of an F1 Superlicense, Colton’s going big, heading to F2, likely with Rodin to take Alex Dunne’s seat and go all-in for a chance to make the F1 grid in 2027. You have to applaud the man for having the cojones for trying it, but he’s got a mountain to climb to do so. I suspect we’ll see him back in IndyCar in a couple of years time as he enters his prime years, but he’ll be a presence missed on this grid. 7.5/10
Kyle Kirkwood – 4th in Points (433), 3 Wins, 1 Pole, 4 Fast 6’s, 10 Top 10’s / Average Start: 11.9 / Average Finish: 11.1
Road/Street Ranking: 3rd / Oval Ranking: 12th
Welcome to IndyCar’s King of the Streets. Andretti finally has a driver who can consistently extract the full performance out of its ace in the hole. For half the season, Kyle Kirkwood was one of about maybe three men in Alex Palou’s postcode, and the only man who could beat him in a straight up dogfight.
Three wins on the season, and two of them came early on after holding off Palou on an overcut in Long Beach, and then taking advantage of strategy and raw speed at the end of Detroit to get to the front with authority. He even got a bonus prize when those same cautions shook out in his favour to take his first oval win at Gateway, holding off two of the best oval racers of the year in Pato and Rasmussen. At that point, Kirkwood was 75 points behind Palou in the standings. By the end of the year, he was 278 points behind.
I had to mention that because it describes how pear-shaped the back half of Kirkwood’s season went. He never quite hit the high notes he did in the first half. Not all on him, he was spun out in Toronto, I mentioned Iowa and the blowouts, but he never looked like quite the same driver down the stretch and he just kept falling further and further back, slipping to 4th by years end, and only just beating Christian Lundgaard for that place, a man who had a very similar season, if not quite as “peaky” as the F1 crowd say.
Overall, this was still a great season. Kirkwood’s qualifying improved, and he became a better driver at the top of his range, something I asked of him at the end of 2024 when he was uber-consistent but hovering around the lower end of the Top 10… which is what he did in the back half. This year, I think he went a little too far the other way. If he can find a happy medium, and a little more on ovals, he’s in the window of outright contention. I might sound pushy, but only because he has the ability to be a genuine three-tool weapon and arguably best street racer in the series. Still, another step forward for the Road to Indy’s greatest prospect, and is now knocking on the door of elite status. 8.5/10
Arrow McLaren
Season Highlight: Pato’s evolution, Lundgaard’s addition / Season Lowlight: Nolan Siegel’s not it
I remember last year being the year I said I was running out of patience with McLaren. 2024 was the antithesis of their nonsense. Pato was still very good but not great, they came ridiculously close to the 500 yet again, David Malukas broke his wrist in pre-season and was then dumped when he couldn’t take part in the 500. So as a result, Callum Illot and Theo Pourchaire were fed into a blender so they could eventually bring in Nolan Siegel fresh out of college and with fat stacks. Safe to say, I wasn’t a fan.
To their credit, for the most part – 2025 was a big improvement. McLaren for the first time looks like a serious IndyCar outlet. Just two prolific mechanical retirements on the year, two wins via the most complete Pato O’Ward we’ve ever seen as a team leader, but now he was backed up by Christian Lundgaard, who was everything they were hoping he would be in the #7 car in his first season with one of the big teams after leaving Rahal Letterman Lanigan.
There’s still a problem – Nolan Siegel is three steps behind these two and there was a case against him even getting a third season with the team, but he’s getting one more chance to prove himself or else Tony Kanaan’s “walking the plank”. A reminder from Ask Dre – Pato O’Ward was seriously pushing the team to replace him with Will Power on the open market and Zak didn’t budge. Could you imagine a team of Pato, Power and CL7? It’s the best in IndyCar, and it’s not particularly close.
It’s not perfect, but McLaren are finally on the right track and now might be the most balanced team in IndyCar, with speed, depth, and still room for further improvement. This is what I knew this team was capable of. Now it needs to be thinking about a major honour in 2026. Either that, or bleeding Alex Palou for all of his cash now NT&T Data quit the team…
Nolan Siegel – 22nd in Points (213), 2 Fast 6’s, 2 Top 10’s / Average Start: 14.1 / Average Finish: 17.9
Road/Street Ranking: 18th / Oval Ranking: 25th
Nolan, you’re making me look real stupid here mate. I got into some annoyingly defensive conversations about Nolan on social media when McLaren put him in the car, fresh off a bumping at the Indy 500 after crashing a Dale Coyne twice in prep week. I fought his solid trajectory in Indy NXT and class win at Le Mans were signs Siegel getting the “paying driver” tag was unfair. No-one ever uses that term as an endorsement.
It turns out via court documents released in the ongoing McLaren/Palou lawsuit that Siegel was paying $1.25m for the 10 races he took part in last season, with an undisclosed amount for this year. If it was at the same rate, it’d be another $2.1m. Three million or so isn’t anything to scoff at for an IndyCar team budget, but is it worth it when you’re McLaren and you have a car that’s barely in the Leader’s Circle?
As I’ve said with others in this series, I don’t want to call Nolan a complete write-off. There is some speed here. On a good day, he was a genuine Fast 6 level driver. The problem was, he just didn’t have very many days on Sunday, and hitting the Top 10 just twice across the year is just flat-out ungood. The ovals were grim too, including a crash on the Final Lap of the Indy 500, and another at Iowa Race 1 where a concussion put him out of the second race of the double header. But crashing out on Lap 1 at Milwaukee by going way too low? That’s a rookie mistake, something Nolan can’t really call himself anymore.
TK was adamant this was the move. The court documents now kinda prove he was grandstanding to protect his bosses’ decision, but he was prepared to put his job on the line to say that they “had” to sign Nolan. But the water is now neck deep, and he’s going into more or less a third full-time season, with Scott McLaughlin’s old crew chief Kyle Moyer in his wing. No excuses now. This has to be a significant improvement to avoid a colossal amount of egg on the face. 3/10
Christian Lundgaard – 5th in Points (431), 1 Pole, 6 Fast 6’s, 6 Podiums, 11 Top 10’s, Average Start: 10.4 / Average Finish: 8.6
Oval/Street Ranking: 2nd / Oval Ranking: 13th
Christian can count himself a little unlucky he’s not sitting on a Top 3 finish for the season. That technical DNF from a second row start in Nashville was a cruel bit of luck, but remember, he was in a fight for that spot with Kyle Kirkwood, one of only three men who won multiple races in 2025, and Scott Dixon, the generally considered greatest of all-time. And this was just his fourth full season and first with a true elite team. I warned you this man was a stud.
Lundgaard did everything BUT win in 2025. From the moment he debuted in Orange, he was fast as hell. He finished in the Top 10 in all but one of the races from March to June in Detroit, and it wasn’t the 500 that was the outlier, with a 7th there too, and making the Fast 12 in qualifying. A personal highlight? A dogged refusal to give up position at The Thermal Club despite Palou being on better rubber in a fight for second. At times this season, Lundgaard was the best road course driver in IndyCar not named Alex. Three times, he finished on the podium of a race the Spaniard won. No surprise he had the second best average finish of anyone on tracks that turned right this season, one point more than Kirkwood and seven more than his teammate.
If it wasn’t for Alex, he’d be a legit title contender and have multiple wins this season in my opinion. A little more oval polish and again, he’s right there. The only argument you could have against Christian Lundgaard being the Breakout Star of 2025, was if you knew he was one already. 9/10
Pato O’Ward – 2nd in Points (515), 2 Wins, 2 Poles, 6 Podiums, 12 Top 10’s / Average Start: 8 / Average Finish: 6.8
Road/Course Ranking: 4th / Oval Ranking: 2nd
Yes. Yes. Yes. Finally, Pato O’Ward cooks with some gas. For a little while I’d been saying that Pato was pounding his fist against a glass ceiling after three straight years of trying to run up a downwards escalator:
2022 – 7th (480 Points) / 2023 – 4th (484 Points) / 2024 – 5th (460 Points)
Now, some might say going from 480-ish to 515 isn’t all that great. But you’ve got to consider that one – A tire blowout that wasn’t his fault in the final round in Nashville was from the lead and his effective total should have been roughly 550. And, Alex Palou took the lion’s share of points in general because he was Alex Palou.
This was the most complete season that Pato O’Ward has put together in IndyCar, at least since 2021 and probably in his entire six-season career. His qualifying was a little down compared to his outright best, but he still had a couple of pole positions at The Thermal Club and Nashville. But it was his race pace, and racing intelligence that stood out for me. Nothing stood out for that more than his win in Toronto. He managed his tires well in traffic, dumped the softs at the first opportunity, knew when to push to get past traffic and passed them effectively, and then held his nerve when he got to the front. So many times this season when you thought Pato was dead in the water, he found a way to get a result. It reminded me a lot… of Scott Dixon.
The oval brilliance was still there too. Another podium finish at the 500, arguably now the best in the field at it year-to-year. A brilliant overcut to beat Josef Newgarden in his backyard in Iowa Race 1, and he was robbed of at least a shot at another in Nashville when he led the first half before a Firestone blowout ended his day. He had Top 5 finishes in every oval race in 2025 until then.
515 points in this climate, with 10 Top 5 finishes and an Average Finish of sub-seven, is under most circumstances, a Championship season. And yet he lost out by nearly 200 points because he ran into his nemesis at the peak of his powers. If he can find a way of converting a few of those 5th places into 4-5 wins across a season… IndyCar’s modern-day rivalry could be here. Palou, the humble and quiet Spaniard against the boisterous, mouthy Pato with the Mexican fans on his side? Could be fun. In any case, this is the Pato IndyCar needs. 9.5/10
Chip Ganassi Racing
Season Highlight: Oh, I wonder… / Season Lowlight: Kyffin… I guess?!
Well… that went well. Championship Number 17 for Chip Ganassi Racing to tie him with Roger Penske in the next chapter of their classic rivalry. And it’s a heck of a recovery from a CGR outfit that was criticised in 2024 for arguably spreading itself too thin with five cars. I said that the charter system coming in and forcing the team to cut back down to three could be the best thing to happen to them. And guess what? They won over half the races across the season and picked up the Indy 500 too. Bang.
There’s the obvious thing to talk about later, but it’s worth pointing out too that Scott Dixon was still an effective gatekeeper at worst, and Kyffin Simpson genuinely improved this season too. They’re a better all-round team than they’ve been before. But I do wonder how this team tackles the next couple of years. Dixon turns 46 in July and who does Chip target for the #9 car in the future? Dixon’s showing no signs of retiring and is still hungry and his results are fine, but… do you want to be there when the wheels inevitably fall off? And as I mentioned before in Part 2, Kyffin Simpson was better this season, but is Chip prepared to wait long enough to see what his peak is as a driver, or is he just content to take his cheque?
But these are problems to be solved later, for now, Chip’s team is looking a hell of a lot more stable than Roger’s across the paddock. Amazingly, the threat might come from the team in Papaya going forward… I didn’t think I’d be writing that a year ago.
Kyffin Simpson – 17th in Points (282), 1 Fast 6, 1 Podium, 5 Top 10’s / Average Start: 16.7 / Average Finish: 15
Road/Street Ranking: 14th / Oval Ranking: 18th
I was rather critical of SImpson last season, saying he looked a little bit like a deer in the headlights. He wasn’t great in Indy NXT in 2023, and it felt like he’d come up a year too early, especially given he looked better in LMP2 trim. I wanted to see an improvement in Year 2, and to his credit, there was.
Simpson definitely drove like a man who had a bit of extra confidence via the seat time he’d gotten. His ceiling was sporadic for sure, but when he hit it, it landed big. His first podium finish via an alternate strategy in Toronto. Same again to crack the Top 5 in Detroit. Running side by side for a potential oval podium in Nashville with Scott McLaughlin, with it being his highest ever oval finish and qualifying. Reminds me a lot of the late Justin Wilson at Dale Coyne, who was always in play when a race went awry.
So there’s definitely something here with Kyffin, but he needs to find it a little more often. I feel bad for mentioning it so many times, but Armstrong was in the same camp and came from Europe (Which is becoming the way in IndyCar now), and he was in the Top 10 in points comfortably this season. So that says to me that for Simpson to justify his place, he needs to take a similar step next season. Top 12 would be ideal. Because there’s no getting around the fact that a CGR car shouldn’t be 17th in points, unless Chip really likes money even more than he likes winners. Remember, he didn’t want to pay Marcus Ericsson actual money for his seat despite three years in the Top 6 and a 500 win. On any level, this is worse. But it is a step in the right direction and that deserves praise. 5/10
Scott Dixon – 3rd in Points (452), 1 Win, 3 Podiums, 12 Top 10’s / Average Start: 13.2 / Average Finish: 8.1
Road, Street and Oval Ranking: 5th
Okay, now it’s just us here reader, and I kinda teased it a little bit in the team section, but between you and me… I’m a little worried about Scott Dixon. I get it, this was his Age 45 season and a bit of drop-off is inevitable, but I think now we’re getting to the point where 3rd overall this season might have been a little flattering to where Dixon’s at as a driver in his career.
Dixon did what he does best in IndyCar – Scoring via accumulation. 12 Top 10’s is a very high number, only one man had more in the field. But there was a lot more results in the bottom half of that ranking – Half of those 12 were between 6th and 10th. His seasonal winning streak only survived the year because Palou gave him an absolute gift in Mid-Ohio. The other time Dixon looked like he was going to win a race was at Road America, and he was beaten on a fuel save, something we never normally associate with him. This may sound harsh, but given Dixon is the arguable greatest of all-time, we evaluate him in the context of major Championships, and it’s hard for me to get too excited about this when his teammate beat him by 260 points to win the matchup as teammates for the fourth time in five seasons.
Look, I won’t deny the consistency. It’s typical Dixon, exceptional. He only finished below 12th once all season, and that was at the Indy 500 when his car’s rear brake caught fire before the race had even started. His qualifying is still ropey, averaging a P13 start but Dixon still finding ways to climb back up the board as the race goes on. But if Dixon wants to tie Foyt for a 7th title, he has to start racking up podiums and Top 5’s rather than Top 10’s – the modern IndyCar is too good now for Dixon’s usual game to exploit.
Or maybe not. Maybe this is the first sign that Dixon’s truly slipping a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no shame in that given he’s in the twilight of his career, but I do wonder just how longer Dixon wants to keep this up. He’s still one of the best in the series, but I don’t think he’s at his maximum anymore. And that’s okay. 8/10
And that’s IndyCar for me for 2025. I think this marks my 10th season covering the series as a hardcore fan/content creator. And I’m not going to lie, this might have been the most difficult one I’ve had to cover so far.
The broadcasting was… poor. FOX’s move had so much promise on paper, and it ended up being a very similar product to what we had before, just worse in key areas. Very reminiscent of The Grand Tour, where you felt more excitement over what something could be over what we actually got. James Hinchcliffe was as usual, excellent in the box, Townsend Bell was his usual hype and flash but with little substance and his obvious biases on full display. And on a personal note as a British fan, Tom Gaymor doesn’t work for me as a time filler on the Sky Sports F1 International broadcast. Often losing track of the action and adding little value to the show itself. So of course he gets an off-season podcast representing the series via IndyCar itself. Great.
Will Buxton was the big new addition to be lead anchor and commentator. I thought he struggled to get a word in early on, but as time went on across the season he genuinely got better and more at ease. Little strong on the Alex Jacques-esque monologging at times, but overall, I think he grew into the role and will only get better with time. He’s not Leigh Diffey, he’s different and that’s fine. Georgia Henneberry and Jack Harvey were also great additions to the paddock too. Harvey could easily be another potential man in the box, his Indy NXT commentary was very solid.
The biggest issue though, was with the production truck. I don’t know where the responsibility of FOX stops and where IMS Productions starts, but the truck was poor all season. New graphics that didn’t work, the Thermal Club power surge that made 10 laps of the race lost media, constant issues with the GPS, features missing from previous timing towers like push-to-pass counts. That automatically hampered the ability of the commentary team to be able to tell a story. Again, it got slightly better as time went on but for a series of this level, the amount of errors were unacceptable and a step back overall.
But who cares, the ratings were 23% up! I’ll give FOX this, it was nice to hear that they were way up in demographics for attracting women into the product. That’s always a good thing. They threw the house at the 500 with huge celebrity endorsements – Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Rob Gronkowski, Michael Strahan, Tom Brady, Danica Patrick, and many many more, and it worked – 7 million viewers was the most for a race since reunification in 2008, more viewers than NASCAR’s blue-ribbon Daytona 500 even. But I think that was the big reason the whole year ended up the way that it did. Classic IndyCar. But I still think this series has around 700,000 hardcore fans that will watch no matter what and I’m not fully convinced that’s grown much despite new ownership. And don’t get me started on how I feel about the Barstool collab, alongside what I had to say in Part 2.
Combine that with a lot of petty bullshit that Alex Palou had to take for winning, and it wasn’t a nice environment to talk about the series in 2025. I get it that America, like us Brits, don’t warm to a winner unless it’s Sir Lewis Hamilton, but it’s always irksome to see a man get boo’d for no good reason besides being good at their job.
There’s reason to be hopeful with Fox buying 33% of the series and track, but there’s still dark clouds looming overhead. Honda’s deal with IndyCar as an engine supplier runs out at the end of next season and there’s still no commitment from them beyond that, and any questions about it are getting batted away with “We love IndyCar, but we don’t talk about that!”
The hybrid, brought in to help appease Honda due to its road relevance, has added next to nothing to the series. All it’s done is made the cars 40 kilos heavier, the racing is no better for their presence, it’s opened up more avenues for reliability concerns (It nearly bumped Rinus Veekay from the 500), and it’s barely mentioned by the drivers or the series as a whole anymore. What’s the point?
The series still can’t agree on what their new car should look like and it was pushed back to 2028. Not to mention the fact it’s a little embarrassing that IndyCar will still be racing the Dallara DW12 as a 15-year old car, looking like a Sega CD 32X by the time it’s all said and done. I don’t think a racecar should be headlining a national series while also being old enough to count for historic racing.
I still enjoy IndyCar at its core. It’s floor for enjoyment is still the best of the three major series I cover, their ovals are great and their races generally are pretty good. But a lot of the drama and politics behind the scenes are starting to impede on that enjoyment. Not to mention, the series has many, many challenges in the short to medium term. Is Prema coming back? Is the door closed forever for new teams? Is Honda staying and what happens if they go? When’s the new car coming? And how are FOX going to grow this shit long term.
We’ll see what happens. But for now, I’d just like to say thank you once again for everyone who’s been reading here over 2025 as always. I love hearing from you on social media and seeing you pass this around really does mean a lot, even more so in what’s been one of the toughest years for me to cover the series, on and off the track. Thank you, and I’ll be back for another proper season preview in February 2026. Till then, Sayon-
…
Wait… I wasn’t forgetting someone was I?
Alex Palou – 6 Poles, 8 Wins, 13 Podiums, 15 Top 10’s / Average Start: 3.3 / Average Finish: 4.2
Road/Street/Oval Ranking – 1st / Indy 500 Winner / 2025 Series Champion (Record – 711 Points)
Genuinely… where do we start here? How do you fathom such a ridiculous season? I’ll at least try. Remember Palou’s previously insane season? His 2023? This one down here:
Alex Palou’s 2023: Champion (656 Points), 5 Wins, 10 Podiums, Indy 500 Polesitter, 17 Top 10’s, Average Finish – 3.7
That was a season so strong, it actually got a small pulse from F1 teams who were half interested. It never materialised into anything, but it was enough to get people talking. Palou’s gone even better here.
Another way of looking at it. Of the 17 races in IndyCar this season, how many do you think Palou had ZERO chance of winning? I count three – Gateway, where he was lapped at times and had little pace. Typical CGR on a short oval. Detroit, where he was taken out by David Malukas half way through, and Iowa Race 1 where he had a quick car and finished fifth, but didn’t look like he had a car that could win. That’s it. Three out of 17. That’s the suffocating dominance that Palou possessed in 2025. He was in play virtually every race this season. 90% of the time, you had to be at your absolute best to beat him, and if you weren’t, he’d punish you.
His outright speed? Unfathomable. He’s the only driver who didn’t get eliminated in Round 1 all season. He made the Fast Six 10 out of 11 times on Road and Street courses, and was on pole six times. An average start of 3.3 is exactly what kept him out of so much trouble all season.
Five wins and a second place at Long Beach before we even got to the 500. Holding off Newgarden at St Pete. The rampant chargedown of Pato in Thermal. Winning in Barber by 18 seconds. Beating Pato off a late restart at the Indy GP. Then the 500. Using the tricks he’d learned as a runner-up to Helio Castroneves in 2021 to not attack Foster and DeFrancesco in front and use that traffic to send it and then hold off Marcus Ericsson, a former winner in his own right.
The fuel save beating of Scott Dixon at Road America. The shock short oval win in Iowa, the final tickbox on Palou’s transformation from pretty good oval racer into an elite one. And of course, Laguna Seca – A track he’s dominated for years, to take his average finish there to a nearly invincible 1.6. Not to get too entrenched in what cricket folks call #RootMaths, the idea of removing outliers to help an argument… but if he wasn’t taken out in Detroit – His Average Finish would be TWO POINT EIGHT. I’ve not even mentioned he led 814 laps this season. No-one else is within HALF of that number – Josef Newgarden’s the nearest with 393, and the ovals really padded his count. Josef only lead 4 laps on Road and Street tracks all season.
Even some of the non-wins were impressive. Mid-Ohio was about the only real mistake Palou made all season, losing concentration and running wide with five laps to go to give Dixon a gift. Milwaukee was an unholy clobbering – Qualifying on pole by 0.75 miles per hour on anyone else, leading 199 out of 250 laps, only for a 5 minute rain show leading to everyone coming in for fresh rubber. AP was 8 seconds clear when the sprinkle landed. He ripped out a 25 second lead on Pato O’Ward in Toronto on a longball strategy that could have paid off if it wasn’t for Rossi’s caution leaving him stranded. It doesn’t take a lot of goalposts to be moved for Palou to get to 10 wins, tying the great Al Unser Sr and AJ Foyt.
But here’s the difference – Palou is doing this in a spec car, against one of the strongest IndyCar fields we’ve ever seen. A field that has arguably the greatest ever in Dixon, all-time greats like Newgarden and Power, previous 500 winners like Ericsson, Rossi and Pagenaud not too long ago, and modern aces like Pato O’Ward, Christian Lundgaard and Colton Herta. He’s turned them all into pillars of salt.
And he’s still only 28 years old. He has 15 more years of this if he wants it. This is his fourth Astor Cup in five years, as well as a three-peat, and he’s silenced the one weakness in his resume – He now has a 500 too. He’s speedrunning his way to Scott Dixon’s career. The only recent comparison I can think of is Dario Franchitti – and he didn’t get to CGR until he was already 36.
And the best part? No-one can talk shit about him because he’s a disgustingly lovely guy, who gives so much back to the series, always smiling, always signing autographs, taking selfies and giving time to the fans. The press loves him too, sincere, modest, humble, asks after the media and gives genuine thought into his answers, despite speaking in his third language. Can’t stand him, he gives racing drivers a bad name.
This is officially the Alex Palou era. He might be the best race car driver on the planet today. And he’s just put together IndyCar’s greatest ever season. A year I will forever call – The Impossible Season. Goodnight. 12/10
