Palou’s Fifth Title Arrives on the Day O’Ward Made Milwaukee History

Alex Palou’s fifth IndyCar championship arrived at the Milwaukee Mile on Sunday evening, sealed with a tenth-place finish in a race that began under Saturday’s rain and finished Sunday evening. It ties him with Sébastien Bourdais for four consecutive titles and makes him, at 29, the youngest driver in series history to reach five. The day belonged to two men. Hours earlier Pato O’Ward had already made his own history, winning the standalone Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250 by 0.7916 seconds over Scott McLaughlin, then returning that evening to beat David Malukas by 1.7535 seconds in the delayed Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250, completing the first same-day INDYCAR doubleheader sweep since Rick Mears did it at Atlanta in 1981. Chip Ganassi Racing added an 18th team championship in the process, passing Roger Penske’s long-standing record. Three races remained when Milwaukee’s reshuffled Sunday began. Two were completed in the space of a few hours. Now only the season finale at Laguna Seca remains on September 6.

Key Points: Palou’s fifth IndyCar championship

• Alex Palou clinches his fifth IndyCar championship, finishing P10 in the delayed Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250, tying Sébastien Bourdais’s record of four straight titles and becoming the youngest five-time champion in series history
• Pato O’Ward completes the first same-day INDYCAR doubleheader sweep since Rick Mears at Atlanta in 1981, winning the Milwaukee Mile 250 by 0.7916s over McLaughlin, then the delayed Makers and Fixers 250 by 1.7535s over Malukas
• Chip Ganassi Racing claims an 18th team championship, moving the team past Roger Penske’s record for INDYCAR team titles
• David Malukas finishes runner-up in both Milwaukee races, his sixth career second-place finish without a win, four of them coming in his first season with Team Penske
• Championship standings after Milwaukee: Palou 607, Lundgaard 507, Kirkwood 505, with one race remaining
• Season closes at Laguna Seca on September 6, where Palou can extend his record further

A Fifth Title, Won From Tenth

Palou started the day 97 points clear of Kyle Kirkwood, needing to hold a lead of just 54 points once the delayed Makers and Fixers 250 was complete to seal the title mathematically. He drove to protect the points gap, not to win the race. Palou struggled with handling problems through the evening and kept a wide berth nearly every time a rival came past. Tenth place was enough. The championship was won on arithmetic as much as pace, and Palou made no secret of it afterwards.

The numbers behind the fifth title are stark on their own. Six wins, eight poles, seven podiums, 12 top fives, 14 top tens, 673 laps led across the season. Four consecutive championships tie Sébastien Bourdais’s run from 2004 to 2007. At 29, Palou becomes the youngest driver in series history to win five titles, beating the mark A.J. Foyt set in 1967 at 32. Only Foyt, with seven, and Scott Dixon, with six, have won more IndyCar championships than Palou now holds.

Team owner Chip Ganassi was sitting beside him when the questions turned to what the run has meant for the team. Eighteen championships now sit with Chip Ganassi Racing, pulling the team past Roger Penske’s total.

Race strategist Barry Wanser, who has worked the number 10 car’s strategy for the whole of Palou’s run, pointed to something less visible than pace. The team’s ability to let Palou focus purely on driving, with pit strategy and car preparation handled entirely elsewhere, has been as decisive as any single lap. Palou said much the same himself: he doesn’t worry about pit stops or strategy calls, only about pushing the car and enjoying being in it. That division of labour, repeated across five title-winning seasons, is now the foundation Ganassi’s record is built on.

O’Ward Joins an Exclusive List

Palou’s championship was the story with the bigger stakes. O’Ward’s Sunday was the one that hadn’t happened in 45 years. Al Unser, Mario Andretti, Bobby Unser, Dan Gurney, Johnny Rutherford, Rick Mears. Those are the six drivers who had won two INDYCAR races in a single day before this weekend, the last of them Mears at Atlanta Motor Speedway on June 28, 1981. O’Ward’s name now sits with theirs.

The Milwaukee Mile 250 alone was already his third win of the season and 11th career victory. The nightcap made it two wins in a single day, arriving after what he described plainly as a difficult year on ovals. Before Milwaukee, his only two podium finishes of the season had both been victories. He was blunt about how strange it felt to be reminded whose company he was keeping.

O’Ward put it down to hunger and refusing to accept anything less. Team principal Tony Kanaan pointed out O’Ward had effectively led a race for close to 24 hours by the time the second win was done, still out front in the suspended Makers and Fixers 250 from Saturday when the Milwaukee Mile 250 got underway Sunday morning.

Race One: The Milwaukee Mile 250

The standalone race came first, run in full on Sunday. Scott McLaughlin and strategist Tim Cindric gambled on four pit stops against the field’s five, and it nearly worked. O’Ward was running fourth, directly behind McLaughlin, when both made their final stops on Lap 192. A 6.6-second service from O’Ward’s crew, atoning for a slow first stop earlier in the race, got him out ahead of the Penske car.

The next lap complicated things further up the road. Will Power was caught speeding entering the pits and handed a drive-through penalty. Christian Lundgaard’s crew fumbled the right front and left rear tyres for an 11.3-second stop, a delay that likely cost him a shot at his first career oval win; he still finished third, his best career oval result. O’Ward took the lead for good on Lap 196 when Santino Ferrucci pitted from the front.

What followed was the most contested finish in the venue’s INDYCAR history: 333 passes for position across the 250 laps, a race record for Milwaukee. O’Ward’s lead over McLaughlin shrank from 3.299 seconds on Lap 224 to half a second five laps later as he worked through Power, running at the tail of the lead lap after his penalty and fighting hard to stay there. O’Ward cleared him on Lap 235 and pulled away, leading by two seconds by Lap 245.

Christian Lundgaard’s third place gave Arrow McLaren two of the three podium positions, while O’Ward, McLaughlin and Lundgaard completed the first all-Chevrolet podium of the season. Honda still had something bigger to celebrate, clinching its 12th INDYCAR manufacturers’ championship. Palou finished fifth in this race, Kirkwood sixth, with Palou’s lead over Kirkwood sitting at 97 points heading into the evening’s rescheduled race.

Official Race Classification: Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250

Race Two: Completing the Sweep

The Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 had been sitting unfinished since Saturday, suspended after 90 laps by rain and a wet track. O’Ward and Malukas had been the dominant cars before the stoppage and picked up exactly where they left off once the race resumed Sunday evening, combining to lead 212 of the 250 laps between them, O’Ward 119 and Malukas 93.

Malukas led the field to the green flag on the decisive restart but was sluggish off the line. O’Ward dove low, McLaughlin came from high, and the three ran wide into Turn 1. O’Ward came out of it in front on Lap 226 and was never headed again. Malukas stayed within a second for ten laps before fading over the closing stretch, finishing second, 1.7535 seconds back, his sixth career runner-up finish without a win and the fourth of those in his first season at Team Penske.

Rinus VeeKay took his first podium of the season in third for Juncos Hollinger Racing. McLaughlin was fourth, Christian Rasmussen, the 2025 Milwaukee winner, completed the top five for ECR. Chevrolet-powered cars filled the top seven positions in the finishing order.

Palou’s evening in this one was harder than the result suggests. He described struggling with handling all evening and drove with the points gap in mind rather than the finishing position, keeping clear of contact wherever a rival came through. Tenth place and a fifth championship arrived together.

Official Race Classification: Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250

Championship Standings

Palou’s title is already secured, but the placings behind him are still live heading into the finale. Lundgaard’s podium in the Milwaukee Mile 250 lifted him above Kirkwood into second overall by two points, with O’Ward fourth on 503 after his sweep. The fight for second in the championship, a battle O’Ward said he’d like to repeat from last season, goes to Laguna Seca unresolved. Full 2026 IndyCar championship standings are updated after every round.

Coffee Corner Take

Five championships in six years is the kind of number that stops meaning anything the moment you try to compare it to something else. Four of those five have come in a row. That’s a genuine four-peat, matching Sébastien Bourdais’s run from 2004 to 2007 and putting Palou in territory only one other driver in the modern era has occupied. Foyt’s youngest-champion mark from 1967 is gone too. Only Foyt and Dixon stand above him now. Palou is 29. He said himself he doesn’t know how long this lasts. Neither does anyone else, and that’s the uncomfortable part for the rest of the paddock.

What stands out about this title is how little it looked like domination on the day. Palou didn’t win either Milwaukee race. He finished fifth, then tenth, managing trouble instead of chasing position. It’s a different version of Palou than the highlight reels usually show, and arguably the more instructive one. A driver who can win a championship on a bad weekend, by his own admission a bad weekend, is a harder problem for Kirkwood and Lundgaard to solve than one who only wins when the car is fast.

O’Ward’s day deserves to stand on its own and mostly will, eventually, once the history books catch up to what happened at the Milwaukee Mile. Two wins in a day, a list that hadn’t added a name since 1981, delivered in a season he’s openly called a struggle on ovals until this weekend. He talked afterwards about writing his own story rather than measuring himself against Unser and Andretti and Mears, and that’s the right instinct. But the list exists whether he reaches for it or not.

Chip Ganassi’s 18 championships now sit clear of Roger Penske’s total, a number that will get plenty of attention in its own right this week. Ganassi was careful afterward to credit Penske for setting the bar his own team eventually cleared. That’s a rare thing to hear from a rival owner on the day he passes you, and he chose to say it anyway.

One race left. The title is decided. The rest isn’t. Laguna Seca will run in a livery honouring Alex Zanardi, a fitting closing image for a season that produced a fifth crown for Palou and a piece of 45-year-old history for O’Ward on the very same Sunday.