What should have been a dominant afternoon at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course for three-time reigning Sonsio Grand Prix winner Alex Palou took an unexpected turn when the No. 10 team misread a local yellow as a full course yellow for Alexander Rossi's stalled No. 20 Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet and didn't take the opportunity to pit.
Of course, that opportunity never should have happened anyway, but we saved our bi-annual tirade regarding the incompetence of IndyCar Race Control for a whole other article. Fortunately, they have since made a rule change (finally) to lessen the chances of such a scenario happening again, although this feels more like a "see it to believe it" scenario.
It was arguably the No. 10 team's worst strategy blunder since they jumped off of what would have been the winning strategy at Barber Motorsports Park in 2024, effectively handing the win to Team Penske's Scott McLaughlin before settling for fifth. Palou is unbeaten at Barber since.
Running second behind Palou on Saturday was Andretti Global's Kyle Kirkwood, the most recent points leader not named Palou and the only other driver who entered the road course race with a mathematical chance to enter the upcoming Indy 500 as the points leader.
Then the No. 27 team, which is probably just as renowned for their strategy prowess as the No. 10 team, inexplicably made the same decision.
Maybe they simply made an error too. But in that moment, it's not hard to imagine that the simple desire to beat Palou trumped logic, leading to a misjudgment that ultimately cost Kirkwood both a race win and the points lead. Nobody else made the same mistake.
Given the ongoing narrative of "can anybody actually beat Palou?", there are probably those who would rather finish 14th ahead of Palou in 15th, rather than finish second behind Palou in first. This decision might have been Exhibit A.
Of course, this single decision didn't actually cost Kirkwood a win; Kirkwood's No. 27 pit crew took care of that, as they would have messed up his race anyway, as usual, with their obligatory late 15.2-second pit stop. That is seemingly the Andretti Global standard, and it has been that way for years. But that's a subject for another day.
And while Kirkwood's move to win the race on the streets of Arlington, Texas was bold, let's keep it real. If Palou doesn't move completely out of the way, they both end up with DNFs.
Yet at the same time, if Kirkwood's pit crew hadn't totally botched his service earlier in that race also, it wouldn't have even been close to begin with.
Bottom line, the Palou pressure is real.
But getting back to Saturday, everybody else who possibly could take advantage of the questionable timing of the yellow did so, led by Team Penske's David Malukas, before the full course caution finally came out.
It was Malukas who assumed the race lead from Arrow McLaren's Christian Lundgaard on the restart, after Palou and Kirkwood dropped to the back.
Kirkwood initially got around Palou as Palou had to take evasive action to avoid another incident, but after making his next (extended) pit stop (naturally, to cover Palou's pit stop and minimize the threat of an undercut), he was never a factor. Palou finished fifth, with Kirkwood in a season-worst ninth.
Then there's the whole push-to-pass nothingburger, in which 12 drivers pressed the button in Long Beach when it was supposed to be inactive, as the rule stated, but benefited from the fact that IndyCar screwed up and left it on.
Nobody actually benefited, though, hence IndyCar's decision not to alter the race results before changing the rule entirely moving forward, but everybody seems to be zeroing in on only one of the 12 drivers who used it: Palou, of course.
The other 11 were totally okay. But only because they're not living rent free in the heads of their competitors.
Nobody has fanned the flames more so than Pato O'Ward, and while the Arrow McLaren driver admitted that he doesn't disagree with the fact that the rule did not strictly prohibit drivers from hitting the button when it was supposed to do nothing, he accused Palou of breaching a "gentleman's agreement" and taking advantage of a "gray area".
None of the other 11 drivers faced such accusations, despite doing the same thing – and this occurred after several drivers quite literally admitted in 2024, amid the fallout of the actual push-to-pass scandal surrounding Team Penske, that they hit the button when it's supposed to be off, just in case of the exact foul-up that occurred in Long Beach.
O'Ward's fanbase, easily the biggest in the sport, has been largely anti-Palou for years, and from a sporting standpoint, it stands to reason. Palou has more wins in the past 12 months than O'Ward has over his eight-year career, yet every year is supposed to be O'Ward's year.
It's the same "little brother" complex we see between fanbases in every sport, even for as much respect as the actual competitors have for one another.
And quite frankly, that kind of rivalry is probably good for IndyCar as a whole.
So while O'Ward didn't explicitly crucify Palou, he knew exactly what he was doing. It felt like your stereotypical, political Formula 1 press conference.
But let's not forget that Long Beach runner-up Rosenqvist used the push-to-pass button more than Palou did.
Has his name been seriously mentioned by anybody, even once, throughout this whole process?
No, it hasn't.
Because there's an agenda that the mainstream media and IndyCar fans aren't even trying to hide, and mentioning the guy who literally could have beaten Palou by doing exactly what Palou is being criticized for doesn't fit that narrative.
The only driver anybody cares about is Palou, and Palou quite possibly saved himself from losing a win due to Rosenqvist's own – and more egregious – breach of whatever "gentleman's agreement" O'Ward dreamed up.
Yet had Rosenqvist won the race because of it, everybody would have moved on, satisfied simply because the answer to "can anybody beat Palou?" would have been "yes".
Perhaps it was poetic, then, that Rosenqvist slammed into the back of O'Ward at the start of the Sonsio Grand Prix, only to be taken out later in the race while O'Ward brought his No. 5 Chevrolet in 18th place, eight positions below traditional McLaren backmarker Nolan Siegel.
All while, of course, Lundgaard went up 3-0, in terms of podium finishes, on both of his teammates so far in 2026.
For Lundgaard, it was actually a rare exception to the "can't beat Palou" rule, as he earned his first win as an Arrow McLaren driver following an epic late outside pass on Malukas.
In seven of his first eight podium finishes behind the wheel of the No. 7 Chevrolet, he had finished behind Palou, and Palou was also on the podium for the other one, so it was a relief for him to finally not only get out of the shadow of the No. 10 DHL Honda, but to share the podium with two other drivers.
But even Lundgaard's team had a slow pit stop in this year's Barber race that cost him a shot at Palou for the win, adding to the litany of self-inflicted wounds by Palou's rivals that have allowed him to continue his historic run by racking up win after win, championship after championship.
Let's also not forget why Palou took the lead over Rosenqvist in Long Beach in the first place: pit stops. Rosenqvist maintained the lead from pole after the first cycle, but under the caution, with the race win on the line, the No. 10 team delivered exactly what the No. 60 team could not.
Perhaps the real focus of these teams and drivers needs to shift from "beating Palou" to "actually winning".
If half of these teams truly started to control what they could control, we wouldn't be listening to half-baked theories about Palou's dominance "killing the sport" (even as ratings continue to rise).
The series has seen six different winners in its nine most recent races as it is, including four in six to start 2026. This isn't Formula 1, and it's still true that there are probably close to a dozen drivers, maybe more, capable of winning on any given weekend. Eight have won since July alone.
Yet on what was easily the most dramatic weekend of Palou's career since the McLaren contract saga began in the summer of 2022, he still managed to extend his championship lead by double digits.
Because again, the Palou pressure is real.
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