A bizarre saga that began in 2022, when McLaren tried to get Alex Palou to violate the terms of his totally legal Chip Ganassi Racing IndyCar contract to get him to join the dark side, is in the process of coming to a long-awaited end, with McLaren and Palou battling in court to determine a resolution.
Palou, of course, is not innocent, and he's the first to admit that. He wanted to leave the No. 10 Honda to join McLaren, and he wanted to do it post-2022. Ganassi fought it, won, and retained Palou for 2023, while giving him the ability to leave post-2023. Palou took that option and signed with McLaren for 2024.
Then he reneged on that deal, which is why Zak Brown, two-plus years later, is still letting the four-time IndyCar champion, three-time reigning champion, and reigning Indy 500 winner live rent-free (for now, that is) in his head.
For what it's worth, Palou has won those three titles in a row since making the decision to stay put.
But the thing about Brown is he seemingly doesn't know when to stop, because the facts of the case are slowly but surely painting him as the real villain, and given Brown's well-known fractured relationship with above-board decisions when it comes to honoring the contracts of drivers (whether they're his drivers or not), Palou's decision not to trust the McLaren CEO is becoming fully justified.
The real reason Palou backed out of his McLaren deal for 2024 is because at that point, Oscar Piastri had replaced Daniel Ricciardo alongside Lando Norris in 2023, and Palou knew he would have no shot at actually getting a McLaren Formula 1 seat. And that's what he was always after.
Brown insists that Palou was never strung along under the false pretense of landing a Formula 1 seat, but it's obvious to literally everybody that that's why he wanted to join the organization to begin with. He even tested an F1 car; he wasn't interested in merely dropping down to a lesser Arrow McLaren IndyCar team from Chip Ganassi Racing.
And let's not forget about the actual July 2022 announcement about Palou signing with McLaren.
It mentioned IndyCar absolutely nowhere.
Still, that's something that Brown sees fit to conveniently ignore.
“I’m not sure which allegation amused me more – the notion that I would not be the one making a key decision about our driver line-up, or the suggestion that I wasn’t on board with signing the hugely talented Oscar Piastri,” Brown told Reuters. “Both allegations are clearly ludicrous – and anyone who follows our sport will see straight through them.”
So Brown made the decision to sign Piastri, was all-in on Piastri, and yet supposedly wasn't stringing Palou along the whole time?
Even if he wasn't, everybody in motorsport knew what Palou was after. That certainly includes Brown.
To play the ignorant card here simply makes no sense. We can criticize Brown all we want to for his driver decisions, but he's obviously where he is and as successful as he is for a reason, and he deserves respect for that. But for that very reason, it especially makes no sense for a businessman as savvy as he supposedly is to expect anybody to believe this.
When Palou initially tried to join McLaren for 2023 in the summer of 2022, Ricciardo was under contract through 2023. But everyone (except for Ricciardo, apparently, again adding evidence to the idea of McLaren's lack of transparency with their own drivers) knew Ricciardo was on the hot seat.
Meanwhile, the ride had already been promised to Piastri at least a week before the Palou bombshell, which again contradicts the idea that Palou would have had a shot at the seat for 2023.
Brown quietly implied that he would have sacked Piastri and put Palou in the car for 2024 had Piastri not performed well, and it might well have happened because of McLaren's historic impatience with underperforming drivers.
But it obviously didn't, and it obviously wasn't going to, otherwise Palou wouldn't have made the mid-season decision in 2023 to stay with Ganassi. With F1 out of reach, Palou made a business decision.
The real amusing part here is the fact that Brown refers to Piastri as "hugely talented", when all McLaren seem interested in lately is propping up Norris and screwing Piastri over, despite the fact that Piastri has clearly been the team's top driver in 2025 and has led the world championship for most of the year.
Brown even started the season calling this the "Lando Norris era", though to be fair, he did previously reference that Piastri has world championship potential. That does just seem like lip service at this point, however, similarly to the "hugely talented" line, because of what's actually taken place on the race track. It reeks of nothing more than a deploy-when-convenient-for-the-narrative line.
But I digress, and we'll leave that debate to the Twitters and Reddits of the totally sane world that is social media.
We all know Palou mishandled the situation. Twice. With two different teams. And while it may be working out for him, as he's since established himself as a clear-cut top five driver in IndyCar history, Palou is at the top of that list to admit that. He's already returned a bunch of money to McLaren as it is, knowing he was wrong.
But Brown trying to milk (something Palou has actually tasted at Indy, by the way) every penny out of the 28-year-old Spaniard is only making matters worse for him, at least in the court of public opinion, when you consider the arguments he's making clearly have no visible merit beyond "trust me, I'm legit."