While Townsend Bell exclaimed that "THIS IS JOSEF NEWGARDEN'S HOUSE!" in the closing laps of Monday's rain-delayed Borchetta Bourbon Music City Grand Prix at Nashville Superspeedway, Spain reigned supreme on U.S. soil for the second time in as many days with another Alex Palou victory.
Palou, whose three-race losing streak was actually tied for his longest in two years, took advantage of a timely caution and the vastly improved handling of the No. 10 Honda to take the lead of the race. He led the final 95 of its 225 laps around the four-turn, 1.333-mile (2.145-kilometer) Lebanon, Tennessee oval en route to claiming his series-best fifth win of the 2026 NTT IndyCar Series season.
The win continues Palou's recent run of oval success, even though such success had eluded him to start the 2026 campaign. His only true oval result this year had been seventh in the Indy 500, as he crashed out early at Phoenix Raceway and was knocked out of contention at Gateway when he ran out of fuel before a pit stop.
But his victory, specifically his ability to hold off the Team Penske trio in second, third, and fourth at the very kind of track they have dominated in recent years, highlighted the fact that the title of "oval king" might very well have changed hands over the past year and a half.
It's a pretty good achievement for a driver who, up until Memorial Day Weekend 2025, supposedly couldn't win on ovals.
Former Alex Palou criticism now directed at another IndyCar driver
Another driver whose lack of oval success has been in the spotlight lately is Christian Lundgaard. Despite sitting third in the championship standings, tops on the team, with two victories this season, Arrow McLaren decided to drop him from their lineup for 2027 simply because he "isn't there yet" on tracks with exclusively left turns.
It's no secret that Lundgaard hasn't been spectacular on ovals. But imagine if Chip Ganassi Racing had ruled out signing Palou because he crashed out of the Indy 500 as a rookie with Dale Coyne Racing in 2020, or because his top oval finish that year was outside the top 10.
Imagine if they had cut ties with him because, even though he was a championship contender from the start, he crashed in Indy 500 qualifying in 2021. Imagine if they had dropped him because didn't win an oval race that year, and in his one-win 2022 season, he finished fifth in points without a single top five oval result.
Imagine if they had dropped him in 2023 or even 2024, because at that point he still hadn't won on an oval, now a half-decade into his IndyCar career.
Who knows? Had McLaren signed him like they wanted to, maybe they actually would have dropped him.
But since then?
Palou's three oval wins over the past two years are tied for the series lead. He won the 2025 Indy 500. He won at Iowa Speedway, where Chip Ganassi Racing hadn't won since 2009. He won the 2025 oval championship. And if not for a few seconds of drizzle shaking up the pit strategy at the Milwaukee Mile, he would have won at more than half the ovals on the 2025 schedule.
And now he's won at Nashville, where he placed second in 2025.
It's exactly why his latest oval win highlights the risk McLaren have taken by dropping Lundgaard simply because he supposedly "can't win on ovals".
McLaren have already given up on Christian Lundgaard
First of all, there are far fewer oval races than there are road and street course races on the schedule, and Josef Newgarden has basically monopolized the ovals this decade. So any time the only criticism of a driver is "he can't win on ovals", just as it was for Palou, you simply can't take that at face value.
Over the past six seasons, Newgarden is the only driver with more than four oval wins, and he has 13. That's despite enduring a win drought of over a full year during that stretch.
Also, bear in mind that Lundgaard spent the first three years of his career driving for Team Moving Chicane (which was on full display yet again at Nashville), also known as Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. He still gained double-digit positions in all three of his Indy 500s with the team, including in 2024 when he led several laps.
In his first Indy 500 with Arrow McLaren, he qualified on the third row and finished in a respectable seventh. He was eighth in the oval standings when he qualified third for the Nashville race to conclude the 2025 season, and he was within a stone's throw of the top five, but he was knocked out of the race with a mechanical issue.
Teammate Pato O'Ward hasn't exactly lit the world on fire on ovals this year either, finishing behind Lundgaard at Gateway and having a largely, as the Fox Sports team put it, "anonymous" day at Nashville before making up a few positions late to finish seventh.
For what it's worth, Lundgaard's second McLaren season, from top to bottom, has actually better than Palou's second season with Chip Ganassi Racing in 2022. Ironically, we can probably blame Zak Brown for that, but that's water under the bridge at this point (unless your name is literally Zak Brown).
The bizarre part about it is the whole "win now" idea that McLaren supposedly have when it comes to the Indy 500, and the fact that Tony Kanaan used that logic to explain why they believe having Scott Dixon and Felix Rosenqvist makes more sense than retaining their top title contender.
Dixon, whose 46th birthday is Wednesday, has just one oval win since 2021. It came in a fuel mileage race at Gateway three years ago, and Rosenqvist has zero oval podium finishes in eight seasons aside from his Indy 500 win.
Dixon is a legend, one of the greatest the sport will ever see. But so is Peyton Manning, and everyone can objectively look at his 2015 season and admit he was a shell of himself from even two or three years prior.
O'Ward can call that kind of chatter about Dixon "disrespectful" all he wants to, but until he admits his current teammate, who continues to outperform him this season in the form of five podium finishes to one, got a completely raw deal, it's nothing but lip service.
Likewise, Rosenqvist's last lap of the Indy 500 was the single-best lap you will ever see in any form of motorsport. But from an overall oval performance perspective, there is nothing about his oval performance that stands out as a telltale sign that he's a markedly better pick than a rising star nearly 10 years his junior.
Lundgaard is 24 years old. He's finally tapping into the potential that has been obvious since he arrived in the series in 2022. He could be a series frontrunner for the next decade or even longer. And that still didn't stop McLaren from dropping him.
Why? Because of what Palou continues to show is one of the laziest criticisms of this era.
It's a dangerous game. Every driver, not just Palou, who has recently notched his first oval win was, at one point, criticized for not being able to win on ovals. And it's exactly why Chip Ganassi should make McLaren pay for what might well have been their biggest mistake yet.
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