Palou's Portland Masterclass, McLaren's Blockbuster, and a Championship That Stopped Being a Race

PORTLAND, OREGON - AUGUST 9: #60: Felix Rosenqvist, Meyer Shank Racing w/Curb Agajanian Honda, #10: Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, #26: Will Power, Andretti Global Honda spray champagne on the podium during the NTT INDYCAR Series Grand Prix of Portland at Portland International Raceway on August 9, 2026 in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Michael L. Levitt/Lumen via Getty Images)

By Rudy Falco | August 10, 2026

Portland gave us exactly one caution on Sunday. Two laps of yellow after Graham Rahal found the barrier at Turn 12 on lap seven, and after that... nothing. A hundred straight laps of green at a flat, grippy permanent road course, which on paper is the kind of afternoon where you wander off to make a sandwich around lap 40 and don't feel bad about it. I stayed put, though, because what was happening out front was worth watching even without a single pass for the lead. Alex Palou won the OnlyBulls Grand Prix of Portland (a sponsor name I still haven't gotten used to typing) by 4.1167 seconds over Felix Rosenqvist, and how he did it tells you more about this season than any highlight reel will.

The win itself, some housekeeping first: it's his sixth of the year, the 25th of his career, his third at Portland International Raceway. The championship lead's up to 110 points with five races to go. A race weekend maxes out somewhere around 54 points if you sweep everything, so you can do that math yourself. Kirkwood would need Palou to basically stop showing up.

Now the part I actually want to talk about, which is how the thing got decided in the space of about one lap. Rosenqvist took pole on Saturday, his second of the season, and led the first 30 laps with Palou camped a second or so behind and Will Power third. All three started the race on the harder primary Firestone. On lap 31, Rosenqvist and Power both came in and stayed on primaries. Palou didn't. He ran one more lap, and it was quick enough that when he pitted for the softer alternates and came back out, both of them were behind him. That was the race. People call the overcut a strategy. Executed like that, it's closer to a mugging.

PORTLAND, OREGON - AUGUST 9: #60: Felix Rosenqvist, Meyer Shank Racing w/Curb Agajanian Honda Start, green flag during the NTT INDYCAR Series Grand Prix of Portland at Portland International Raceway on August 9, 2026 in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Perry Nelson/Lumen via Getty Images)

"The overcut was just so powerful," Rosenqvist said afterward. "I also struggled a little bit on my launch. That's basically what did it. He got ahead of us." Which is about as gracious as you can be while describing your own pocket getting picked. Rosenqvist didn't do anything wrong all day. Palou, meanwhile, kept talking about the car like he'd borrowed it from someone. "Everybody at CGR and Honda did an incredible job," he said. "I had an absolute rocket ship today. It was very, very nice to drive every single lap. Chip puts the best guys around me, but then also everybody is just executing. That car is a rocket ship, and I'm just lucky enough to drive it."

Lucky. Sure.

PORTLAND, OREGON - AUGUST 9: #10: Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda celebrates winning the Only Bulls Grand Prix of Portland at Portland International Raceway on August 9, 2026 in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Perry Nelson/Lumen via Getty Images)

There was a stretch in the middle where it looked like we might get a fight. Palou stopped at the end of lap 56 and took scuffed primaries, Rosenqvist stopped three laps later and grabbed the red-sidewall alternates, and for about twenty laps the Swede was genuinely coming. Gap under a second by lap 80. Palou admitted afterward he'd started second-guessing the tire call: "I was a little bit worried there when we put those alternates on. They were so good. We didn't expect them to be so good. I was like, 'Man, if someone is going to keep them for the end, we might have a battle.'" So what'd he do about it? He timed his pace so that Louis Foster's Rahal Letterman Lanigan car ended up sitting between himself and Rosenqvist, and he let lapped traffic do the defending. A lap later the gap was 1.7 seconds again, and that was that. His strategist Barry Wanser said something after the race that I keep coming back to: "Having Alex and his talent, like there's nothing that replaces that. No matter how good the car is, you need the driver to be able to extract that performance out of the car."

Poor Will Power. He was third all afternoon in his first Portland start for Andretti, at a track he'd won at the two previous years in a Penske, and he had a fresh set of alternates sitting in his pit stall for the final stop with a real shot at hunting down second. Strategist Ron Ruzewski called him in at the end of lap 86. The call never made it through, so Power stayed out, got stuck behind Scott Dixon and Sting Ray Robb for a full lap, and pitted a lap late with the chance gone. "I think we would have had a better shot at Rosenqvist because the reds were really good at the first part of the stint," he said. "I never heard it. I think I missed a call there. We certainly lost a lot on that next lap." He kept the podium anyway. Rinus VeeKay was fourth for Juncos Hollinger, which people will call a surprise even though he's been quietly quick for a month. Kyle Kirkwood was fifth. Marcus Armstrong blew another engine, lap 33 this time, his second dead Honda of the summer, and David Malukas picked up a blocking penalty early and finished 12th going the wrong direction all day.

PORTLAND, OREGON - AUGUST 9: Winner #10: Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda and crew celebrate in Victory Lane at Portland International Raceway on August 9, 2026 in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Michael L. Levitt/Lumen via Getty Images)

So that's Portland. If you've been away from this sport since June, though, the race is honestly the least of what you missed, so let me back up.

Road America, late June. Palou took his fifth consecutive pole and was cruising until a pit lane speeding penalty on lap 29 dumped him into the pack. He drove back to fourth, but the story that day was Christian Lundgaard, who hit the back of Dixon at Turn 1 on the opening lap, pitted from dead last with a broken front wing, and still won the race, going from last to first. He got by Malukas on lap 49 and then inherited the lead when Marcus Armstrong's engine let go three laps from the end while Armstrong was running out front, chasing what would've been the first win of his career, which is about as brutal as this sport gets. Malukas finished second again.

Mid-Ohio came two weeks after that, and for one afternoon Arrow McLaren looked like the best team in the series. Lundgaard on pole, Pato O'Ward past him mid-race for the win (his first of the year, tenth of his career), and the first one-two finish McLaren's ever managed in IndyCar. Palou was fifth. There was a week or so there where you could talk yourself into a championship fight if you really wanted to.

Then Nashville. The Music City Grand Prix got rained out of its Sunday slot, ran Monday July 20, got shortened to 225 laps because of the heat, and Palou won it on an oval... which is the whole ballgame, because ovals were the one place this man was beatable, the lone soft spot anyone had left to aim at. He led 97 laps, and when the day's decisive caution came out on lap 130 he'd already committed to pit lane, beating the yellow by three tenths of a second. He cycled to the front, stayed there, and held off Josef Newgarden, the best oval racer of his generation, by four tenths at the line. It was Palou's third career oval win and his fifth victory of the season, and whatever scouting report existed on him before that Monday doesn't exist anymore.

The standings, since we're here: Palou's at 510 points, with six wins and six poles from thirteen races. Kirkwood's second at 400. Malukas is third at 392 and somehow still winless in a year where he's finished second what feels like every other weekend. Lundgaard 375, O'Ward 355, Rosenqvist 338. Second place is a real fight and I'll enjoy watching it. First place isn't.

Which brings us to July 6, and the press release that mattered more than any race this summer.

Scott Dixon is leaving Chip Ganassi Racing, and it still doesn't feel real to type. He's spent twenty-five seasons with one team, won six championships and the 2008 Indy 500, and sits second on the all-time wins list. He signed with Ganassi in 2002, back when some of the guys he races against were in diapers, and next year he'll drive for Arrow McLaren. Rosenqvist's going with him, which stings differently... he's walking out on Meyer Shank six weeks after winning them the Indianapolis 500 by two hundredths of a second. McLaren will run four cars at the 500 next May: Dixon, Rosenqvist, O'Ward, and Ryan Hunter-Reay in an Indy-only entry. Zak Brown wants that race. He isn't being subtle about the budget.

And the guy who paid for all of it is Lundgaard, who has two wins this year (more than anyone else on that team), four podiums, and the best championship position of any McLaren driver... and who won a race from dead last in June. They released him anyway, along with Nolan Siegel, because the program wants proven oval winners around O'Ward and Lundgaard's oval numbers were the soft spot on an otherwise excellent resume. Here's the twist, though, and it's a good one: every report out of the paddock has him closing on a deal at Ganassi, in the No. 9... Dixon's car. The driver McLaren cut loose to make room for a legend may end up sitting in the legend's old seat, next to Palou, at the best team in the sport. If it gets announced, savor it, because this business almost never writes endings that tidy. Oh, and Andretti re-upped Marcus Ericsson for 2027, which got about a day of coverage and probably deserved more given the year he's having.

One more thing that flew under the radar, and I'd argue it's the most consequential item in this whole column. Back in April, IndyCar finalized a rule barring non-chartered entries from every race except the Indy 500 starting in 2027. The 500 keeps its 33 spots and its open door. Everything else becomes a closed grid: 25 franchised cars, going to 27 in 2028 when Honda and Chevy each get a charter as part of their new engine deals. The league calls it stability. Maybe it is. It's also the end of the one-off entry, full stop, and a wall in front of anybody who wants to start a team from scratch without buying somebody out first. Depending on your age and your memories of this sport, that's either sensible governance or something worth mourning a little.

So what's left? Five races in four weeks, and it's a genuinely wild stretch of calendar. Markham, Ontario this Sunday, August 16, a brand-new street circuit replacing Toronto that nobody's turned a wheel on. The week after that, August 23, they race right on the National Mall. The Freedom 250 in Washington D.C. is a 1.7-mile, seven-turn street course with the Washington Monument and the Capitol in the background, admission's free, and the support bill is an IROC revival with Jeff Gordon, Kurt Busch, Bobby Labonte, Rusty Wallace and Bill Elliott in the same paddock as Tony Kanaan, Helio Castroneves and Dario Franchitti. I don't know what qualifying looks like on the Mall and I can't wait to find out. Then a Milwaukee Mile doubleheader August 29 and 30, then the finale at Laguna Seca on September 6, the first time Monterey's hosted the closer.

My read on how it goes: Palou wraps the title at Milwaukee. Two oval races in one weekend is exactly where a 110-point cushion turns into arithmetic, and as Nashville proved, the oval excuse is gone. Markham's the one I wouldn't bet on him winning, and not because of any weakness... just because a circuit with zero data tilts toward the aggressive drivers over the surgical ones. Kirkwood took the inaugural Arlington race back in March under the same conditions, so he's my pick there. Lundgaard worries me in the best way, a fast driver spending his last few months at a team that already fired him, and O'Ward usually finds one more win in the back half. The one I keep thinking about is Malukas. Third in the championship, fast at every kind of track, zero career wins. If he doesn't get one in these five, that stat's going to follow him into every press availability all winter.

The season's got no question mark left at the top. Palou cleaned up the pit lane mistakes, solved the ovals, and on Sunday he beat a full field with one caution and no luck involved... just one smarter lap than anybody else had in them. The racing behind him has been some of the best in years. Both of those things are true at once, and only one of them ends up in the record book.