When Alex Palou opened up the 2025 IndyCar season with three wins and a runner-up finish in the first four races to establish himself as the clear favorite to win a third straight and fourth championship overall, there were still some who doubted that his season would get to be as good as it has gotten to be.
Among those was Team Penske's Scott McLaughlin.
Make no mistake about it; McLaughlin has always had an incredible level of respect for Palou, to the point where he made clear in 2022, his second full year in the series, that he was trying to model his own production after what Palou did in his second season in 2021, when he won the championship with a three-win campaign built more on consistency than sheer dominance.
But McLaughlin, who entered the year as the odds-on top threat to be Palou's biggest title challenger after back-to-back third place finishes in the championship as both Penske's and Chevrolet's top finisher, could not have been more wrong about the 28-year-old Spaniard when asked about his dominance earlier this year.
"It's not frustrating," McLaughlin told Motorsport after Palou scored his third win of the year at Barber Motorsports Park in May. "At the end of the day you can only do as much as you can. I mean, I'm driving this thing as fast as I can. Christian [Lundgaard] is doing the same. Alex [Palou] is doing the best he can. It turns out to be a really good job and solid. We all know it was going to be that way".
"When a guy is at the top of his game, all you can do is try to be at the top of yours. We had a third place car and we finished third. That's all we can do. Nothing more, nothing less. I learned that when I was racing Supercars, championship campaigns. You just have to be there. It is all swings and roundabouts. We'll be strong at places he won't. You just have to capitalize."
Now 12 races into the season, we're still trying to figure out where, exactly, Palou isn't strong.
It's one thing to suggest that McLaughlin may be stronger, or just as strong, as Palou at certain venues. But this is a guy who went an entire season in 2023, during which he won five times, without finishing a single race lower than eighth place.
His median finish through 12 races in 2025 is a win. Palou's "not strong" days are P2 days right now.
As for 2025, Palou has only not finished ahead of the entire Penske team over a weekend once (all year), and that's when he was wrecked out of the top five in the Detroit street race by Penske hopeful David Malukas.
Yes, the entire trio did finish ahead of him in race one at Iowa Speedway this past weekend. But Palou led all drivers in total points over the weekend and won the second race, while Penske left arguably their strongest track sitting 0-for-12 (with an astounding 10 DNFs) so far in 2025.
And for what it's worth, all three of their drivers are already mathematically eliminated from championship contention.
In mid-July.
Of course, Palou isn't one to worry about "bulletin board material", per se. Asked before the Indy 500 what it would mean to final secure his first oval win, he noted that he wasn't worried about the doubters who continued to note his lack of an oval victory when talks of his greatness came up.
"Not for them; it's more for me," Palou told Beyond the Flag. "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’, because once you win the first one, the second one feels so much easier, 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."
Now he is an Indy 500 champion and just led 194 of 275 laps at Iowa to find himself with two wins in four oval races this year. Maybe it did come a little bit easier, even at one of the tracks where some felt he wasn't supposed to be strong.
Pretty good for a guy who supposedly can't turn left.
Sure, there are still five races left on the schedule, and Palou, in three combined starts at the two remaining ovals in Milwaukee in Nashville last year, hasn't had the strongest of runs.
But considering his second Milwaukee race last year was hindered by a pre-race mechanical issue and he effectively clinched the championship in Nashville a few laps into the race when Will Power's seatbelt came undone, can we really definitively say that he'll struggle at these two tracks?
Hey, maybe he'll give the fanbase another opportunity to completely overreact after a runner-up finish like he did after handing the Mid-Ohio win to teammate Scott Dixon. As Christian Lundgaard famously said afterward, "We saw ‘Mr. Perfect’ make a mistake".
Yet even after that mistake, with the sky supposedly falling on the No. 10 team, he still beat everyone else on the same pit strategy en route to one of his worst finishes of the year – second.