Alex Palou has sealed his fifth IndyCar title with a race to spare, clinching the 2026 championship at The Milwaukee Mile on a chaotic Sunday that also delivered one of the most remarkable single-day performances in the series’ modern history. The Chip Ganassi Racing driver becomes the youngest five-time champion in American open-wheel racing and the fastest to reach the mark, and he did it while Pato O’Ward was busy rewriting a record that had stood untouched since 1981.
Alex Palou fifth IndyCar title clinched at Milwaukee
The coronation took the long way round. Milwaukee’s doubleheader had been scrambled by weather — Race 1 was suspended after 90 laps and pushed to Sunday evening, meaning Race 2 was completed first. Starting from pole in that second race, Palou looked set to wrap the title up in the afternoon: he led a race-high 115 of the 250 laps in the #10 Ganassi Honda before late handling trouble and heavy traffic dropped him to fifth at the flag.
“We were going for the win today and didn’t really have enough pace,” Palou said afterwards. “I felt good at the beginning but kind of fell off at the end. These races are tough.”
Kyle Kirkwood delayed the celebration with a drive of real quality, hauling the #27 Andretti Global Honda from 24th on the grid to sixth. It bought the Floridian a few hours, no more. Palou’s advantage still grew from 91 points to 97, leaving him needing only a modest result in the resumed opener. He took 10th when Race 1 finally ran to its conclusion under the lights, and the 2026 championship was his.
It is worth remembering how tight this looked only days earlier, when a heavy Kirkwood crash at Milwaukee threatened to reshape the run-in. In the end the maths never really wobbled.
The records: youngest and fastest to five titles
Strip away the circumstances and the numbers are startling. Palou is 29. He arrived at Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021 and has now won five championships in six seasons, four of them consecutively.
- Fastest to five: six seasons from first title to fifth, beating A.J. Foyt’s eight and team-mate Scott Dixon’s 16.
- Youngest to five: at 29, ahead of Foyt (32) and Dixon (38).
- Four in a row: the first driver to manage it since reunification in 2008, matching Sébastien Bourdais’s 2004–07 run.
- Third on the all-time list: only Foyt (seven) and Dixon (six) have more.
Palou, characteristically, seemed less impressed by all this than everyone around him. “I can’t. It’s very tough, man. It’s tough to put into words,” he said when asked to place the fifth title in context. “Everything that I owe to this team, to these two men sitting next to me — that they give me the opportunity to be not only a race winner, then a champion, now a five-time champion. It’s been incredible. It just feels like we started yesterday.”
Asked about being the youngest to the milestone, he deadpanned: “I’m going to turn 30, so yeah. It’s going to be a big number.”
O’Ward’s double: the first since Rick Mears in 1981
The other headline belonged to Arrow McLaren. By winning both Milwaukee races on the same day, Pato O’Ward became the first IndyCar driver since Rick Mears at Atlanta in 1981 to take two victories inside 24 hours — and only the seventh in series history, joining Mario Andretti, Al Unser, Bobby Unser, Dan Gurney, Johnny Rutherford and Mears.
The second of those wins, in the resumed Race 1, was the better of the two. O’Ward led a race-high 119 laps and made the decisive move on a restart with 19 to go, diving down the inside of Team Penske’s David Malukas before pulling clear to win by 1.7535s in the #5 Chevrolet. It was his 12th career victory, his third of the season and his third at the 1.015-mile oval.
“Those are heavy names. Then you hear mine, you’re like, ‘What?'” O’Ward said of the company he now keeps. “Honestly, man, I’m just writing my own story. I really don’t know what’s in store for my IndyCar career. So far I’ve dedicated my whole life to this.”
He was generous about the man he beat, too. “David did a phenomenal job. No one was going to catch him. He was doing such a great job through traffic. He was on fire.”
Behind them, Juncos Hollinger Racing’s Rinus VeeKay produced the drive of his season, passing Scott McLaughlin with three laps left for third — his best result of 2026 and a first podium since Toronto last year. McLaughlin took fourth, with Ed Carpenter Racing’s Christian Rasmussen fifth.
Honda’s manufacturers’ crown completes the sweep
Palou’s title was not the only piece of silverware settled over the weekend. Honda and HRC US confirmed the 2026 IndyCar Manufacturers’ Championship, an eighth series crown and a 12th American open-wheel title overall — landing exactly 30 years after Honda’s first, in 1996.
The campaign was built on breadth. Honda-powered cars took 10 wins, 13 poles and five podium sweeps across road courses, short ovals, superspeedways and street circuits, with 13 of the 15 Honda entries on the grid contributing points. The street-circuit numbers border on absurd: all six street races won, 15 of the 18 available podium places, and more than 90 per cent of all street-circuit laps led.
Palou drove much of that, winning at St Petersburg, Long Beach and Detroit as well as Barber and Nashville. Kirkwood added Arlington and Washington D.C., while Marcus Ericsson won in Markham. The centrepiece, though, was the 110th Indianapolis 500, where Felix Rosenqvist took the #60 Meyer Shank Racing Honda to victory in the closest finish in the race’s history — Honda’s 17th Indy 500 win.
What is still on the table at Laguna Seca
With the drivers’ and manufacturers’ titles gone, the WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca finale is a scrap over the places that decide reputations and contracts. Christian Lundgaard has climbed to second on 507 points, two clear of Kirkwood on 505 and four ahead of O’Ward on 503 after the Milwaukee sweep. Malukas sits fifth on 484.
The Rookie of the Year fight is arguably the better watch. Dale Coyne Racing’s Dennis Hauger leads on 223 points, 18 ahead of Mick Schumacher and 30 clear of Caio Collet — a genuinely open three-way contest heading into the last round.
2026 IndyCar standings after Milwaukee (Race 17 of 18)
- Alex Palou — 607
- Christian Lundgaard — 507
- Kyle Kirkwood — 505
- Pato O’Ward — 503
- David Malukas — 484
- Scott McLaughlin — 428
- Josef Newgarden — 408
- Marcus Ericsson — 407
- Felix Rosenqvist — 379
- Rinus VeeKay — 364
A dynasty that no longer feels like a run of form
Four straight championships is the sort of statistic that changes the conversation. Bourdais’s four-peat came in a fractured era of American open-wheel racing; Palou’s has come in a unified, deep and unusually competitive IndyCar, against Penske, Andretti and Arrow McLaren at full strength. He has now taken this one in a season where his own team is in transition — Dixon is bound for Arrow McLaren in 2027, as we covered when Dixon’s move was confirmed in July.
Foyt’s seven now looks less like a monument and more like a target. Dixon’s six is one good season away. Palou will turn 30 before he defends this one, which is the genuinely alarming part for everybody else on the grid: on any reasonable reading, he is not yet at his peak.
Laguna Seca next weekend is a lap of honour for the champion. For everyone chasing him, it is the start of working out how to stop a fourth consecutive year of this becoming a fifth.
