Alex Palou has sealed the Palou fifth IndyCar title at The Milwaukee Mile, and in doing so has rewritten the record books of American open-wheel racing. The 29-year-old Spaniard clinched a fourth consecutive championship — and a fifth in six seasons — with a race still to run, becoming both the fastest and the youngest driver in the series’ history to reach five crowns.
It came at the end of one of the strangest weekends of the 2026 season: a rain-scrambled doubleheader in which the two 250-lap races were completed out of order, and in which Pato O’Ward produced a piece of history of his own that had waited 45 years for a repeat.
How the Palou fifth IndyCar title was sealed
Palou arrived in Wisconsin 91 points clear with three races left and, on paper, needed only a routine weekend. Race 1, the Snap-On Makers and Fixers 250, was suspended after 90 laps on Saturday when rain arrived, and was pushed back to Sunday evening. That left Race 2 to run first, at 1pm ET on Sunday, with the unfinished opener resuming at 6pm ET.
From pole in Race 2, Palou looked set to be crowned by mid-afternoon. He led a race-high 115 of the 250 laps in the #10 Chip Ganassi Racing 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 told Motorsport.com. “I felt good at the beginning but kind of fell off at the end. These races are tough. I think there were a lot of fast drivers out there that struggled in traffic, and I just couldn’t do it as good as some others.”
The delay was the work of Kyle Kirkwood, who dragged the #27 Andretti Global Honda from 24th on the grid — a position owed in part to his heavy practice crash on Friday — to sixth, denying Palou an immediate coronation. Even so, the Spaniard left the afternoon race with his advantage grown from 91 points to 97, needing only to exit Milwaukee 54 clear.
He duly did. Tenth place in the resumed Race 1 that evening was enough, and the 2026 IndyCar Series championship was decided with one round, next weekend’s finale at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, still to come.
Fastest to five, youngest to five
The bare numbers are remarkable enough. The context is what elevates them. Since joining Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021, Palou has won five championships in six attempts, and the milestones that came with the fifth are the sort that usually take a career to accumulate:
- Fastest to five titles. Six seasons from first championship to fifth — comfortably the shortest span in history, ahead of A.J. Foyt (eight seasons) and his own team-mate Scott Dixon (16).
- Youngest five-time champion. At 29, Palou beats Foyt, who was 32, and Dixon, who was 38.
- First four-in-a-row since reunification. No driver has won four consecutive titles in the unified series since 2008; the last four-peat of any kind belonged to Sébastien Bourdais in Champ Car between 2004 and 2007.
- Third on the all-time list. Five crowns leave Palou behind only Foyt’s seven and Dixon’s six.
Palou, characteristically, sounded more bemused than triumphant. “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, as reported by Motorsport.com. “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. We’re just getting closer and closer. We’re having more fun and more fun each day. It’s been an absolute joy of a year.”
Told that he would soon turn 30, he added simply: “It’s going to be a big number.”
The season that delivered it was built on breadth rather than a single purple patch. Palou won at St Petersburg, Long Beach, Detroit, Barber and Nashville — the last of those a race we covered when it stretched his championship lead towards the point of no return. Five wins, and a title sealed with a round in hand: RACER neatly summarised the shift by noting that Palou arrived at Milwaukee as “Quattro” and left as “Cinco”.
O’Ward’s day for the ages
If Palou owned the championship story, the racing belonged to O’Ward. The 27-year-old Mexican won both Milwaukee races on the same day, becoming the first IndyCar driver since Rick Mears at Atlanta in 1981 to take two victories in a single day — and only the seventh in the sport’s history, on a list that also carries Mario Andretti, Al Unser, Bobby Unser, Dan Gurney and Johnny Rutherford.
Race 2 came first. O’Ward recovered from a slow early pit stop before a rapid final stop launched the #5 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet into the lead with 54 laps left, and he held on to beat Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin by 0.7916s. Team-mate Christian Lundgaard completed a Chevrolet lockout of the podium.
Then, hours later, came the resumed opener. O’Ward led a race-high 119 laps and passed David Malukas on a late restart with 19 laps to go, winning by 1.7535s for the 12th victory of his career, his third of 2026 and his third at the 1.015-mile oval. Rinus VeeKay took third for Juncos Hollinger Racing — his best result of the season — after passing McLaughlin with three laps remaining.
“Those are heavy names. Then you hear mine, you’re like, ‘What?’” O’Ward said of the company he now keeps, speaking to Motorsport.com. “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 equally quick to credit the man he beat in the second of the two wins. “David did a phenomenal job. No one was going to catch him,” O’Ward said of Malukas. “I told him, man, this story is just about beginning for him.”
The best-of-the-rest fight goes to Laguna Seca
With the championship settled, the finale becomes a scrap over the remaining places — and it is unusually tight. Palou heads to Laguna Seca on 607 points, but second through fifth are separated by 23:
- Alex Palou — 607
- Christian Lundgaard — 507
- Kyle Kirkwood — 505
- Pato O’Ward — 503
- David Malukas — 484
Lundgaard’s Milwaukee weekend lifted him into the runner-up spot, two points clear of Kirkwood and four ahead of O’Ward. The Rookie of the Year contest is live too, with Dennis Hauger holding an 18-point buffer over Mick Schumacher and 30 over Caio Collet.
Honda’s quieter coronation
Palou’s title was not the only one decided over the weekend. Honda and Honda Racing Corporation USA wrapped up the 2026 Manufacturers’ Championship, an eighth IndyCar Series crown and a 12th American open-wheel title overall — arriving exactly 30 years after the marque’s first, in 1996.
It was a thorough campaign: 10 wins, 13 poles and five podium sweeps, with 13 of the 15 Honda-powered cars scoring points towards the tally. Street circuits were the foundation, Honda sweeping all six and leading more than 90 per cent of the laps run on them. The high point came at the 110th Indianapolis 500, where Felix Rosenqvist won for Meyer Shank Racing in the closest finish in the race’s history — Honda’s 17th victory in the event.
One race remains, and for the first time since the spring the championship is not the reason to watch it. That, in itself, is the measure of what Palou has done.
