With his second win of the year on the streets of Toronto, Arrow McLaren's Pato O'Ward cut 30 points out of the championship lead that Chip Ganassi Racing's Alex Palou has held since winning the 2025 IndyCar season opener on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida in March, reducing it from 129 to 99 with four races left on the calendar.
O'Ward has now won on back-to-back weekends, having also won the first race of the doubleheader at Iowa Speedway before Palou won the second, and he is the only driver whose deficit to the driver of the No. 10 Honda is not totally insurmountable with just over one month remaining this season.
But as far as O'Ward ability to actually pull off what Zak Brown describes as a "miracle", the word "miracle" is probably not going far enough.
O'Ward is on the hot streak of his career, and there is no doubt that momentum is on the side of the driver of the No. 5 Chevrolet. He has won twice in three races for the first time in his career; he had never previously won twice in four races.
Additionally, his currently four-race hot streak is also the best overall streak of his career. Never before had he reeled off four consecutive top five finishes, and never before had he scored an average finish of 3.0 over four events.
Yet even in the form of his life, he has only managed to outscore Palou by 12 points.
Is he going to outscore him by 100 points over the next four races?
And yes, that number is 100, not 99, since Palou has already locked up the wins tiebreaker over O'Ward.
Anything is possible. Though it may be hard to believe, given the fact that he's already set the modern win record with seven this year, Palou has had things not go his way before; think of last year's mechanical issue in the season's penultimate race at the Milwaukee Mile, which allowed Will Power to temporarily take the points lead despite Palou having built up a gap that once seemed insurmountable.
But even O'Ward's 12-point gap was aided by Palou costing himself the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course win with a late mistake, and a strategy-hindered 12th place finish in Toronto which was his worst in an error-free race since 2022 at Portland International Raceway.
So the fact that we're hearing phrases like "only 99 points" is misleading at best, and you have to wonder how many people actually believe that a full two-win gap is worthy of the word "only", vs. how many are trying to hype up a championship battle that has very little chance of actually coming to fruition.
What's more is the fact that Palou has historically never been outscored by any single driver by 99 points over a four-race stretch during his five years at Chip Ganassi Racing.
Palou has been behind the wheel of the No. 10 Honda for 81 races, so you can pick any one of 78 different stretches of four consecutive races, and you will not find a single stretch in which he was outscored by more than 79 points by anybody (using the current non-double points format).
Even in 2021, when he suffered back-to-back DNFs at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course due to a mechanical issue and World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway due to being caught up in a wreck, nobody outscored him by more than 76 points in any of the three four-race stretches including both of those events.
Sure, 99 points may not be 129. But it's still a massive number, and it's a number that nobody has ever come close to making up on Palou in four races over the last five years. And even perfection, or near-perfection, from O'Ward guarantees nothing, just as his 12-point gap from the last four races has shown.
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