When Alex Palou opened up the 2025 IndyCar season by winning on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, a track which had not historically been one of his best, a sizable portion of the fanbase probably started thinking ahead to what was to come, even after only a single afternoon of action.
Palou entered the year as three-time and two-time reigning champion, having never failed to win a championship since putting the whole McLaren contract saga behind him.
He had also never failed to win a championship in a season during which he, at any point, entered a race having already won earlier in the year; his lone 2022 win came in the season finale.
Fox Sports' Bob Pockrass, who has traditionally covered NASCAR but took on a massive role within the IndyCar paddock this year with the 2025 season being the first of Fox Sports' deal as the exclusive broadcast rights holder of the open-wheel series, was among those who saw what was coming.
IndyCar does Josef Newgarden dirty with epic throwback
Pockrass asked St. Petersburg podium finishers Scott Dixon and Josef Newgarden how they'd be able to beat Palou to win the championship.
Dixon, of course, referenced the radio issue which caused a pit stop communication that likely cost him his first win in St. Petersburg. Fair enough.
Newgarden took on a more Newgarden tone.
Looks like @bobpockrass was on to something 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/TeEcOTtuTc
— NTT INDYCAR SERIES (@IndyCar) September 10, 2025
"I'm sorry," Newgarden started to say. "That is an incredible question. Bob, it's round one. I know this is your first race here, but it's round one, dude."
Skip ahead to the present. After round 17 of Pockrass' IndyCar career, and round 232 of Newgarden's IndyCar career, Newgarden wrapped up the 2025 season with 316 points and one win. If you add 394 points and six wins (his career-high is five) to that total, the two-time series champion would still have finished behind Palou.
To be fair to Newgarden, he entered the year considered among the top two favorites to challenge Palou for the Astor Cup, but whatever challenge he was supposed to mount never really got off the ground.
He didn't finish on the podium after St. Petersburg for another four months, by which point Palou had six wins, and it took until the season finale at Nashville Superspeedway for him to extend his winning streak to 11 years.
He finished the year with seven finishes of 22nd place or worse, including five DNFs and three in a row at one point. His 12th place championship finish was his worst since 2014 when he was with Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing.
Additionally, predicting the kind of season Palou ended up having would have been hard to do. He became the first driver to win the Indy 500 in a year he led the championship wire-to-wire since Johnny Rutherford in 1980.
No driver had even led the standings wire-to-wire since Dixon in 2020, and no driver had even won the Indy 500 and the championship in the same year since Dario Franchitti in 2010, and that's despite the fact that the race was a double points race from 2014 to 2022.
While some fans like to peddle the nonsense that his dominance is ruining the sport (in a year ratings were up 27%; but don't let facts get in the way), what Palou did was special. Period.
Interestingly enough, Newgarden led off the season with a win when he won his second championship back in 2019, and he only failed to lead the standings after one race. So early-season momentum is something he is familiar with.
But the reality is that the 2025 season is what finally forced fans, and even some of Palou's rivals, to take notice of the fact that the Spaniard isn't just riding around collecting points and building championships on the strength of top five finishes.
It's one of the most overblown narratives that exists in the series today.
While consistency has indeed been one of his greatest strengths, in all four of his title-winning seasons, Palou has led the series or been tied for the series lead in wins, and while two of those championship battles did come down to the season finale, neither of them was particularly close, and it would have taken a disaster for the No. 10 team to open up the door for somebody else to win it.
And although it only took Pockrass one race to see what was likely in store, I guess it just took a modern era record eight-win season for others to finally see what Palou is really about. For what it's worth, he could have replaced four of those eight wins with DNFs and still won the title.
No driver not named Palou has led the IndyCar championship standings since Saturday, June 22, 2024.
St. Petersburg is set to open up the 2026 IndyCar season on Sunday, March 1. Fox is once again set to provide live coverage.