1,000 Greatest Drivers: Álex Palou

LOOK OUT PALOU!

While I certainly acknowledge Palou’s greatness at this point, I am definitely less impressed than I would be by most drivers with a similar level of success. While he has impeccable racecraft, especially for a driver who is still very young, I can’t help feeling that a large portion of his dominance comes down to the fact that Ganassi seems to be the only team that knows how to do race strategy in IndyCar. I can’t even count how many races in the last 20 years some Penske driver has dominated (usually Hélio Castroneves, Will Power, or Josef Newgarden) and some Ganassi driver who ran worse (usually Scott Dixon, Dario Franchitti, or Palou) more due to Ganassi routinely having superior strategists, which seems to be a constant over the entire period since the IndyCar split ended in 2008. Dixon has 58 wins and 40 TNL. Franchitti has 31 wins and 26 TNL. Palou has 11 wins and 7 TNL. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Power dominated the entire first half of the 2010s and only got one title out of it, and while you can easily also blame him crashing out of the points lead three straight years from 2010-12, it’s worth noting that the 2010 and 2011 titles wouldn’t have come down to that if Franchitti hadn’t consistently had better strategy than Power, and the same thing seems to be going on with Palou right now.

I admit Palou’s dominance is one of the things that has caused me to lose interest in IndyCar compared to the 2010s, especially because few drivers with his level of success have seemed to have less of an aura as the kids say. He gets blandly competent results with clocklike regularity but apart from his 30-second win at Laguna Seca (which is obviously a big exception), he just never knocks my socks off while Newgarden, Pato O’Ward, and Colton Herta have all done so multiple times. I also really didn’t like how he first tried to break his Ganassi contract, then tried to break his McLaren contract. It was getting really frustrating in 2023 when it seemed like Palou was winning every road course race on autopilot while Newgarden, who has become much harder to like over the past half decade (although I wouldn’t go so far as to call him the “villain of IndyCar” like some would) was winning every oval race on autopilot. But now I’m feeling more positive as that entire run of ovals to finish the season ruled, start to finish. The competition seemed to be getting much better as the year progressed (even if the social media discourse and Mark Miles’s comments were consistently horrible) and now at least the on-track product is starting to feel like the 2010s again.

I had a Twitter poll yesterday asking people to vote for who they thought the best IndyCar driver of this year was. I’m not surprised Palou won because most people are results fundamentalists who just look at either the race results or the standings, but upon realizing that Palou led none of my statistical categories this year (not a single one), making him the only champion in 24 years to fail to do so, I don’t think he was the best driver this year and I decided to downgrade his season grade to an E-, which is the same grade I gave Power’s 2022 championship, which felt similarly shallow. Nobody drastically outperformed Palou this year to the extent that Newgarden outperformed Power in 2022, but I still don’t think Palou was the best driver. Colton Herta clearly was, and with this performance this year I am now ready to declare Herta a lock for my book, while I did have some hesitancy prior to this year.