There are about a million different ways to illustrate just how dominant Alex Palou's run, which now includes five IndyCar championships in six years and four in a row dating back to 2023, has been.
But perhaps none is more notable than the fact that after Pato O'Ward infamously stated, "Impossible to beat? I don't agree", following Palou's first win of the 2023 season, Palou has gone 4-for-4 in terms of winning the championship.
The problem? McLaren don't seem to have any interest in actually beating him, even after falling for 0-for-2 when attempting to sign him. Because their top driver, Christian Lundgaard, is second in this year's championship standings. And just a few months past a year after he made his McLaren debut, they already decided to fire him for 2027.
Palou's biggest strength since arriving in IndyCar back in 2020 has been road courses; he was on the podium in only his second road course race for Dale Coyne Racing with Team Goh as a rookie. Yet Lundgaard, with two wins (and what could have been a third at Barber, if not for a pit road issue), has outscored Palou on road courses this year, with one race left to run.
If there is anybody who can go head-to-head with Palou, after years and years of searching, Lundgaard is the closest thing IndyCar has seen.
That's apparently, and inexplicably, not good enough for Zak Brown and Tony Kanaan.
Make no mistake about it; O'Ward is a fantastic driver himself. But it almost seems like he's always just shy of actually becoming a true championship contender. This year is a perfect example; he has three wins, second behind Palou, but consistency has eluded him, with no other podium finishes. Even a year ago, he was second in points, but he was four full race wins behind. He's basically stuck in Tier 1B.
Lundgaard, on the other hand, has seven podium finishes this year, and perhaps none is more notable than his most recent.
The main reason why McLaren decided to pull the plug on the 25-year-old Danish driver, after only 16 months, is their belief that he can't win on ovals. The problem? They never gave him a real chance.
You can throw Lundgaard's oval stats from 2022 to 2024 out the window. We've all seen how abysmal Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing have been on ovals since adding their third car, and Lundgaard fell victim to that trend for the first three years of his career. The fact that he actually scored multiple top 10 oval finishes, and led laps of the Indy 500, during those three years is actually kind of impressive.
Lundgaard qualified eighth and finished seventh for his first Indy 500 with McLaren; O'Ward qualified 15th and finished sixth in his first in 2020. Lundgaard bettered that result twice on ovals later in the year, and it would have been three times, had he not been knocked out at Nashville Superspeedway with a mechanical issue after qualifying third.
It was no secret that he was still looking for his true oval breakthrough, magnified by the fact that the Fox Sports broadcast team could literally not so much as mention his name up without mentioning why McLaren fired him. Ever.
That breakthrough came this past Sunday at the Milwaukee Mile, where he finished third in the second race (first due to the postponement) of the doubleheader for his first career oval podium finish.
And based on the time he lost in the pits on his final stop, and the gap to the leader once he came out, Lundgaard absolutely would have won that race if not for the issue.
Sure, Milwaukee isn't Indy, and McLaren have been clear that their main goal is to win the Indy 500. But giving up on Lundgaard seems like the biggest possible knee-jerk reaction they could have possibly made, and Milwaukee proved it. For what it's worth, six of O'Ward's 12 career wins are oval wins on doubleheader weekends, but he still hasn't won at Indy either.
Releasing Nolan Siegel made sense; he has underperformed since joining the team mid-2024, and it was laughable that they tried to pretend that he wasn't a pay driver, before Palou hilariously exposed that lie in court. But giving him a longer leash than Lundgaard, with zero top five finishes? What a complete farce.
McLaren instead decided to bring in Felix Rosenqvist and Scott Dixon to join O'Ward next year. Rosenqvist, who competed for the team from 2021 to 2023, is the reigning Indy 500 winner, so there's no denying what he can bring to the team. But in eight IndyCar seasons, he doesn't have a single other podium finish on an oval.
Even with that Indy 500 win, he only finished seventh in this year's oval standings, with only one other top 10 finish. It almost feels like McLaren are counting on lightning striking twice here, for a driver who broke the all-time record for the longest win drought ended by an Indy 500 triumph.
And Dixon, for as legendary as he is, went more than three months at one point this season without a top 10 finish. He only finished one of this year's six oval races in the top 10, has one oval win since 2021 (a fuel mileage victory at Gateway), and just turned 46 years old in July. Just look at his overall numbers since Palou joined Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021; he is no longer performing anywhere close to the level that made him a six-time champion.
But both are apparently better suited for the job than the driver who is literally Palou's closest championship challenger over the past two years.
At this point, Lundgaard is probably better off without McLaren anyway.
"Can't win on ovals" might be the laziest excuse in the modern IndyCar book when it comes to criticism of any young driver. For one, road and street courses dominate the schedule, and two, Josef Newgarden has completely monopolized the ovals for much of this decade. There was a point when if you won on an oval and your name wasn't Newgarden, it was probably due to extenuating circumstances (like, for example, O'Ward at Iowa in 2022...).
We heard that same lazy line for years about Palou, since it took him until his sixth season to win on one. Given the fact that McLaren tried to sign him in 2022, would they have fired him after two years also?
Other notable "can't win on ovals" drivers included Scott McLaughlin, Colton Herta, and Kyle Kirkwood. Of course, all have since won on ovals. Palou, an Indy 500 winner, and McLaughlin have both even managed to win oval championships. Imagine that.
Don't be surprised if Lundgaard finds victory lane on an oval as well, presumably as Dixon's replacement at Chip Ganassi Racing after upgrading his papaya McLaren hat to one with a PNC Bank logo.
While we know that, had he won at Milwaukee, he would've responded with class (and typical PR speak), it would have been the ultimate mic drop, "stuff it" moment to flex on his bosses who basically kicked him to the curb and treated his career as if it's worth nothing simply because his greatest successes weren't appropriately valued.
But maybe he doesn't want to burn bridges. After all, McLaren did come crawling back to Rosenqvist (only after he won Indy, of course), after casting him aside not too long ago too.
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