Chip Ganassi Racing's Alex Palou has all but wrapped up the 2025 IndyCar championship, which would be his third in a row and fourth in five years, even if he hasn't yet mathematically locked it up.
Entering this past weekend's race at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, there were three other drivers still mathematically eligible to win the title. There were 216 points left on the table, and there are now 162, so two of those drivers, Andretti Global's Kyle Kirkwood and Chip Ganassi Racing's Scott Dixon, are now officially out of the running.
Kirkwood fell to fourth in points behind Dixon and is now 213 points behind Palou, while Dixon is 198 points out of the lead.
Arrow McLaren's Pato O'Ward, who fell from 99 points behind to 121 points behind after finishing in fourth while Palou secured a dominant win, is now the only driver not named Palou who still technically has a chance to be crowned 2025 IndyCar champion.
Palou has already clinched the tiebreaker, as he owns an 8-to-2 advantage in the wins category over O'Ward with three races remaining, so if he leaves Portland International Raceway with an 108-point advantage, he would clinch it with two races left.
To put that into perspective, when he clinched it with one race left in 2023 (also in Portland), he became the first driver to do so since Dan Wheldon in 2005 (or Sebastien Bourdais in 2007 if you include Champ Car).
For those who thought my post-Laguna Seca article about the championship battle being a "fantasy" was a diss at O'Ward, that was totally not the case; I was merely highlighting the reality of the fact that the media billing the championship battle as a true "championship battle" with a 99-point gap through 13 of 17 races was simply unrealistic.
That "battle" would have required an insane level of misfortune for Palou (and still technically does) to become a reality, given not only Palou's 2025 season, but his entire five-year stint at Chip Ganassi Racing behind the wheel of the No. 10 Honda thus far. But you know what they say: anything is possible.
Let's be real here. O'Ward is quietly having a season for the ages himself. He is averaging more points per race than 2021 champion Palou, 2022 champion Will Power, and 2024 champion Palou. He has matched Palou's win total from last year and doubled Power's from 2022. With no DNFs, he leads the series with the best worst finish, a stat that typically determines who is crowned champion.
In any other year, he'd probably have the title all but locked up.
Among drivers not to win a championship, this season alone probably elevates O'Ward to one of the top spots on the all-time list, especially since he was Palou's closest challenger in 2021 as well (before Josef Newgarden overtook him in the season finale).
If he, like Palou did this year, can finally break through for an Indy 500 win, you have to start talking about how far up the all-time list he can ascend before his career is up. That talk has already started about Palou, and rightfully so.
The problem for him is he's simply up against the best driver of this generation, and possibly ever – a driver whose points per race average would actually be lower if all 14 of his finishes so far this year were runner-up finishes.
The guy's median finish is a win; there's really no way to answer that for any of his rivals. Sometimes controlling what you can control simply isn't enough, even at the highest of levels.
In some ways, that championship battle hype, as misplaced as we have to admit it was, was a great way of getting fans to pay attention to just how good O'Ward has been this year, even if he doesn't have a realistic shot at his first title until 2026. He has taken a massive step forward in regard to consistency this year, and that's something which has plagued him in the past.
His current run of two wins and three other top five finishes in a five-race stretch is by far the best run of his career. Again, it just so happens that Palou having eight wins (plus two runner-up finishes) in 14 races is just a bit better in the long run.
If Palou and O'Ward are the faces of IndyCar for the next 10, 15, or even 20 years, the series has the potential to be in a great place. We're already seeing Fox's viewership numbers up significantly, year over year, from the final year of the previous NBC deal in 2024.
And considering Fox's stellar promotion of the series, dating back to the preseason/Super Bowl commercials fans still see today, you could already make the case that that has started. Palou and O'Ward were two of the three drivers selected for those commercials, proof everyone knew exactly what they were doing in that regard.
IndyCar made out by having this year's Super Bowl on Fox, quite frankly.
The other, of course, was Newgarden, the two-time series champion who was the guy to beat at Indy after becoming the first driver in more than two decades to win back-to-back Indy 500s in 2023 and 2024. He may not be having the best season (to put it nicely), but he has emerged as one of IndyCar's biggest personalities as well, even if that has led to some viewing him as a "villain".
What O'Ward should be aiming for over the season's final three races at Portland, the Milwaukee Mile, and Nashville Superspeedway is to build momentum toward a true championship challenge in 2026. A couple more wins to aid that effort would certainly be nice as well.
The BitNile.com Grand Prix of Portland is set to be shown live on Fox from Portland International Raceway beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, August 10. Start a free trial of FuboTV and don't miss any of the action from the antepenultimate race of the 2025 IndyCar season!