On First Things First from Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Carb Day, Nick Wright compared Alex Palou to Lamar Jackson.
He likened Palou's IndyCar success since joining Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021 to Jackson's regular season succes with the Baltimore Ravens, as Palou still hadn't won the Indy 500, much like Jackson still hasn't been to a Super Bowl.
While Palou may be a three-time champion, an Indy 500 win is largely considered bigger than a series title.
In fact, Palou had never won an oval race, despite having won 15 IndyCar races since moving over to the No. 10 Honda. He has come close to winning the Indy 500 before, no closer than in 2021 when it took a fourth Helio Castroneves victory to hold him off, but the lack of an oval win was becoming a bigger and bigger talking point.
Now, of course, Wright is no Palou hater; the Spaniard is his guy, which he stated multiple times, and he picked him to win the 109th running of the Indy 500.
But there are plenty of haters and critics out there who have pointed to Palou's lack of an oval win, even though he has had incredible success across a variety of oval tracks in his career, when discussing his place among the greats, a place that is now cemented beyond doubt.
Palou even admitted before the Indy 500, despite winning three of four IndyCar championships since 2021, that he would not consider his career a success without an Indy 500 victory.
But he has always known what he is capable of, and he wasn't getting caught up in the noise.
When speaking to Beyond the Flag ahead of Sunday's 200-lap race around the four-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval, a confident, but not overconfident, Palou said the motivation was strictly internal.
He wasn't worried about proving anybody wrong.
"Not for them," Palou said. "It's more for me, just for being like ‘hey Alex, yeah you're capable of doing it,’, right? I never have the motivation of telling somebody that ‘I won it and you told me that I would never win it.’ It's more for me and for my people, like ‘yeah man, we just did it, and this is awesome, and let's do it again.'"
He elaborated on his answer, which, now that he has indeed emerged as an Indy 500 champion, could serve as a major warning to the rest of his IndyCar rivals.
"Because once you win the first one, the second one feels so much easier," he said. "Because you already know that you're capable of doing it and it just happens with a normal race as well in IndyCar. My first race, it took like a year to win, and then the second one came really fast after that, and I think that's just because you start trusting yourself more, start trusting your team more, and you can see it in the results."
It's an amazing approach, and now it's indisputable. When you focus on controlling what you control, you don't have to worry about proving anybody wrong. With success, especially with the level of success that Palou has had, that happens naturally.
Of course, there are no guarantees at Indy. But Palou has been a contender for the win in all five races since joining Chip Ganassi Racing four years ago, and he was able to seal the deal in 2025.
And though it's secondary, his IndyCar championship lead has skyrocketed, now that he has won five of six races to start the season. Another win would make him the first six-race winner in a single season since 2011.
It's no longer just about the consistency. Now it's turned into the domination. And now that domination, though his Indy 500 victory itself was not a runaway win, includes an oval victory, an oval victory in the world's greatest race.
Here are the full results of Sunday's Indy 500.
1st - Alex Palou
2nd - Marcus Ericsson
3rd - David Malukas
4th - Pato O'Ward
5th - Felix Rosenqvist
6th - Kyle Kirkwood
7th - Santino Ferrucci
8th - Christian Rasmussen
9th - Christian Lundgaard
10th - Conor Daly
11th - Takuma Sato
12th - Callum Ilott
13th - Helio Castroneves
14th - Devlin DeFrancesco
15th - Louis Foster
16th - Nolan Siegel
17th - Colton Herta
18th - Ed Carpenter
19th - Will Power
20th - Graham Rahal
21st - Marcus Armstrong
22nd - Jack Harvey
23rd - Scott Dixon
24th - Ryan Hunter-Reay
25th - Josef Newgarden
26th - Sting Ray Robb
27th - Kyle Larson
28th - Kyffin Simpson
29th - Robert Shwartzman
30th - Rinus VeeKay
31st - Alexander Rossi
32nd - Marco Andretti
33rd - Scott McLaughlin
The 110th running of the Indy 500 is set to be shown live on Fox from Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Sunday, May 24, 2026.