IndyCar fans are already running out of nonsensical excuses

It took exactly one afternoon in 2026 for the usual contingent of NTT IndyCar Series fans to reach into to their shallow bag of excuses as to why they're tired of seeing Alex Palou win.

It's not "we want to see someone new win". It's automatically "Alex Palou is ruining the sport", just as it was all of last year.

As usual, Fox's television ratings immediately disproved that impractical narrative, just as they did last year when it was revealed that viewership was up by 27% from 2024, the biggest annual increase for any sport already averaging over one million viewers.

We saw the same thing when Max Verstappen was dominant in Formula 1 in 2022 and 2023. As fans continued to decry the alleged downfall of the sport, Grand Prix after Grand Prix set all-time viewership records, even as Verstappen won more races in those two seasons than any other driver had ever won over any three-year stretch.

Although IndyCar's ratings were slightly down on Sunday from the 2025 St. Petersburg opener, it came amid a 93% increase in cable TV news channels during the window of the race due to the conflict in the Middle East, and NASCAR suffered the same fate. This year's race also didn't benefit from Fox broadcasting the Super Bowl and airing all of its fan-favorite IndyCar commercials.

Sunday's St. Petersburg race was still the second-most viewed IndyCar race, other than the Indy 500, over the past 16 years. And it still beat the 2025 season's average – even with the 2025 Indy 500, which was the most watched auto race (IndyCar, NASCAR, Formula 1, anything) of the year, factored into that equation.

This year, IndyCar should also benefit from the fact that there is no massive break between the season's first and second races, as we've seen seemingly every year for the past decade or so.

The doubleheader NASCAR weekend at Phoenix Raceway, even if IndyCar is viewed as the "side show", shouldn't hurt, and the hype surrounding the first Arlington race is only growing. Three races in 15 days is exactly what the series needed following yet another strong offseason of promotion from Fox.

But back to what some have called "Palou Derangement Syndrome".

It's not all that hard to see what's going on here.

Pato O'Ward is the sport's most popular driver, and it's not even close. Our best guess would be that most of the complaints are from a group of disgruntled fans because IndyCar's most popular driver has yet to take that next step and move the needle for the sport, while Palou continues to make that bar harder and harder to clear. For the past six years, O'Ward been superb, but his career has simply been overshadowed by Palou's.

There's been a target on the guy's back for all that time, specifically since 2023, yet nobody can ever seem to hit it, not even after O'Ward's terse response to a reporter who referred to Palou as "impossible to beat" (that was 15 wins ago now).

Again, it's not every IndyCar fan; it's a minority, quite frankly. But we all know that the minority are always the most vocal ones when it comes to complaining about any sport, and IndyCar is no exception.

As for O'Ward, he led the championship late in 2021, only to be beaten by Palou, despite two late-season Palou DNFs. He was forced to back out of a potential Indy 500-winning pass on Marcus Ericsson in 2022, crashed while battling Ericsson for second in 2023, and lost the lead in heartbreaking fashion to Josef Newgarden on the final lap in 2024.

Then, as the outright betting favorite to win it in 2025, he finished third. Palou won that race, despite having been criticized nonstop for never winning on an oval, en route to winning his third consecutive championship and fourth overall. He became the first driver to lead the championship from start to finish in an Indy 500-winning season since 1980, and he also won the oval championship.

O'Ward, who owns nine career victories, finished a career-best second in the standings in a year that would have comfortably won him the title when stacked up against the seasons of quite a few other recent champions.

But the deficit to Palou was four full race wins worth of points.

So naturally, instead of accepting the fact that IndyCar popularity is actually booming, there's a desire among some fans to project failure and "doom and gloom" onto the entire series simply because of unfavorable results.

It's the same logic used by those who claimed Taylor Swift was killing the entire NFL because CBS showed her in the suite a few times per game – an "I'm not enjoying this, therefore you shouldn't be allowed to enjoy it either" mentality, if you will. Meanwhile, viewership records were shattered amid the so-called "boycotts".

Sure, IndyCar would probably be in a better place if its most popular driver were to win a championship or an Indy 500 (or both). This isn't a knock on O'Ward at all; it's really the opposite. IndyCar does need him to have success. There's always room for growth, and by no means is where IndyCar is currently at the goal.

And for what it's worth, his personality is exactly what the sport needs right now. His willingness to call out obvious shortcomings is a breath of fresh air in a day and age of corporate, robotic interviews across all of motorsport.

But projecting failure that doesn't exist onto a sport out of nothing more than frustration is not helping anything.

If you're not interested, simply turn off the television, put the phone down, and accept that social media is not a real world. There are clearly plenty of others who are.

If that's not an option, simply being realistic works just as well.

Had Team Penske literally not gotten caught cheating (the first time, to be more specific) in 2024, IndyCar would have had a new champion that year, and Palou would not be seeking his fourth straight. In fact, we still wouldn't have a repeat champion since Dario Franchitti's three-peat from 2009 to 2011.

That's not really Palou's problem, and it's really not a fundamental problem with the series either.

Palou has nine wins since the start of 2025, trailing only three active drivers (Scott Dixon, Will Power, and Josef Newgarden) on the all-time wins list. No active driver outside of these four has won a championship, and they've all won at least two.

After a six-month offseason of his competitors talking about closing the gap, he opened the season looking even better than he did before. Even then, we're only talking about one out of 18 races in 2026. IndyCar may very well have a new points leader in just a few days.

So for the disgruntled fans pretending that everyone has abandoned IndyCar, are you really concerned about the health of the series, or would you really just rather see it fail because your favorite driver was beaten?

We all know the answer. Meanwhile, viewership continues to soar, and the fans interested in the sport for more than just social media engagement farming are still loving it, as they should be. Don't take the series' success for granted.