Alex Palou (Chris Owens/Penske Entertainment photo)

By Thomas Hughes, SWN Staff Writer

BLACKSBURG, Va. (June 6, 2026) – There are few ways to argue against dominance when a driver has won four of the first eight races of the NTT IndyCar Series season.

Still, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou sounded more measured than celebratory — even about a Detroit Grand Prix where he led a race-high 71 of 100 laps, delivered the event’s fastest one-lap pace, and won by more than three seconds over Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood last Sunday.

It comes as bullish, even despite Palou’s now 62-point lead over Kirkwood. Palou is 79 points ahead of Team Penske’s David Malukas in third – who finished second at the Indianapolis 500 but crashed and finished 18th in Detroit.

Palou’s ability to seemingly always land on top comes down to a smorgasbord of metrics where he ranks favorably. Be it pit stops, fuel saving, overtaking at the right instances, restarts, Palou simply takes care of business.

After all, he led the championship for 623 straight days before losing the point lead briefly to Kirkwood earlier this season.

“It’s not like he blew anybody’s doors off [at Detroit], but he does everything extremely well,” said Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Graham Rahal.

It did not take long for Palou to stamp his early mark on the 2026 title, which would be his fifth overall and fourth in a row if he ends the season first in the championship.

At St. Petersburg, Palou was dominant, leading 59 laps and driving away from the field en route to a 12.4948-second victory over Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin. The win was the largest in the history of the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg.

Simply put, Palou does not beat himself. Rarely do you see the mistakes that set back other drivers: pit road miscues, a twitch of the wheel into the grass or a misjudged overcut or undercut. Palou is simply there, waiting and ready.

More often than not, being in position rather than holding the position offers a clearer route to victory. 

The second race was an aberration from the norm: on lap 21 at Phoenix, Palou’s No. 10 CGR Honda drifted up the track and collided with Juncos Hollinger Racing’s Rinus VeeKay, sending the two into the wall — and Palou to a season-worst 24th-place finish.

The bounce back came quickly though. Palou finished second in both practice sessions ahead of the inaugural Java House Grand Prix of Arlington, which was contested on a street circuit traveling around AT&T Stadium and Globe Life Field, home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and MLB’s Texas Rangers.

On the street circuit – not always Palou’s bread-and-butter, but quickly becoming one – he snagged second place in qualifying, only starting behind Andretti Global’s Marcus Ericsson.

In the race, Palou led a joint-race-high 16 laps and nearly snagged the win, though he lost the lead on lap 55 and the race by .3140 seconds under caution to Kirkwood.

Kirkwood also snagged the point lead at that juncture, though Palou remained in the hunt. 

Race four of the season at Barber Motorsports Park was far more pedestrian. Palou led all but 11 of the race’s 90-lap distance and romped to a 13.2775-second victory over Arrow McLaren’s Christian Lundgaard.

“It was a very tough race,” Palou said of Barber. “I guess you guys cannot really see it from outside, but we struggled quite a lot. We had to run a used set of primaries in our third stint, which we never, ever do that.”

Then, the Long Beach Grand Prix wasn’t a dominant Palou day, but it turned into a victorious one.

With a quick pit stop, Palou unseated the event’s dominant driver — Meyer Shank Racing’s Felix Rosenqvist — and did not relinquish the lead. Though Rosenqvist led a race-high 51 laps, he did not win, becoming one of many to fall to the Spaniard.

Thanks to the victory, the third of the season for Palou, he took the lead with a 19-point swing in the championship chase with his first-ever victory at Long Beach.

“It just feels like I’m living on this amazing cloud of happiness,” Palou said. “… I feel like every win is so special… [but] this probably ranks top three. … This team is amazing. It just gives me the opportunity every single weekend to have a car that is capable of fighting for wins or for podiums or for top fives.

“Whenever I'm not in the zone, they kind of put myself there with pit stop strategy or just with the car.”

At the Sonsio Grand Prix, Palou led every practice session and claimed his third consecutive pole position, though the local yellow assessed during a crash from Ed Carpenter Racing’s Alexander Rossi threw a wrench into Palou’s race-winning plans at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course.

Both he and Kirkwood elected to stay out, while the majority of the field pitted. That left the battle between eventual winner Lundgaard and Malukas. Palou did not let the miscue define his day; he rallied for a fifth-place finish that extended his championship lead to 27 points.

The Indianapolis 500 saw Palou again be an omnipresent fixture. He and Malukas battled for the race lead, though the two pitted with around 25 laps to go. A caution thrown on lap 192 resulted in a red flag, taking Palou out of race-winning contention.

Malukas himself nearly snagged first, only losing it by .0233 seconds to Rosenqvist, but Palou still finished seventh – though he sustained a five-point penalty for violating an IndyCar rule regarding maximum wing end plate height. 

Still, Palou remained lurking. The Spaniard seized pole at Detroit and converted it into a race win, despite falling behind Andretti Global’s Will Power, McLaughlin, and Lundgaard at various points in the race.

“It didn’t really feel like we were leading that much,” Palou said. “I know that we were leading, but man it was a lot of work with the restarts, and got myself into trouble on the first stint.”

Palou previously struggled at street courses, in Kirkwood’s words, but those woes have been rectified.

Eight races in, Palou’s four-win campaign has been bookmarked by street course wins at St. Petersburg and Detroit, with another tacked on at Long Beach for good measure. In every street course IndyCar has ventured to this season, the Spaniard has finished either first or second.

Palou can usually win any way he chooses, though that way typically starts with a top-notch effort in qualifying. This season, the Spaniard has seized four poles: Barber, the IMS road-course race, the Indianapolis 500 and most recently, Detroit last Sunday.

Interestingly enough, Palou has won twice from pole — Barber and Detroit — while finishing fifth and seventh in the other two.

Palou was unusually tepid about his dominant stretch after his Detroit victory. Perhaps that’s down to the 2026 Indianapolis 500, an event that Palou finished seventh in, wiping out his chances of going back-to-back and converting on his second-straight pole in the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

Perhaps that’s down to how much of an advantage that the Honda powertrain has possessed over its Chevrolet counterpart.

Honda has outscored Chevy 184 to 133 in the engine manufacturer standings over the last two races, and at publication time, it holds a 103-point lead in that title battle after eight rounds.

Then again, Honda has always produced championship-worthy drivers. Extending that statement further, Chip Ganassi Racing has almost always had a factor in the title hunt.

Across the garage from Palou is six-time NTT IndyCar Series champion Scott Dixon — though Dixon himself has endured an unusually rough start to the 2026 season, sitting 11th in the standings after a 24th-place run at Detroit.

Palou’s team is simply “well-oiled”. That’s exactly what Palou’s race engineer Julian Robertson said of the team after the Barber win.

“Obviously, Alex is super good at driving,” Robertson said. “The whole team is well-oiled, acts pretty efficiently. As long as we can keep it running smooth, we try and execute as best as we can. That's the key. [He] tends to stay pretty calm and execute as needed.”

Palou’s next chance to claim victory comes Sunday night, June 7 at World Wide Technology Raceway. The Bommarito Automotive Group 500 will start at 9 p.m. ET, with coverage available on FOX, the IndyCar Radio Network, and SiriusXM IndyCar Nation, channel 218.

If the first eight races have shown anything, it is that Palou does not need to overwhelm the field every weekend. He only needs to keep executing better than everyone else.