How good is Palou - and can he be Dixon's main IndyCar title rival?

Scott Dixon, six-time and reigning IndyCar Series champion, was intrigued by what he observed during off-season testing, as he scanned the data of his new team-mate Alex Palou. There was ‘another way’ to drive the current breed of IndyCar, the IR18 complete with universal aerokit and now with the altered weight distribution caused by the addition of the aeroscreen.

Dixon realised that Palou, having joined the series at the same time as the new cockpit safety device was introduced, came in without presuppositions, his instincts untainted by memories of the car in its pre-aeroscreen form. He only ever ran one test for Dale Coyne Racing without it.

In testing for Ganassi, Palou was almost immediately on Dixon’s pace and in one test, when comparative fuel loads and tyre wear were taken into account, he was faster than the master. Not by much, but then the margins even between the great and the merely good are pinched tighter in IndyCar these days than ever before. Looking at the Q1 groups in qualifying at Barber last weekend, if one ignores the two drivers who had their best qualifying times deleted because they caused red flags, along with outlier journeyman Dalton Kellett, and Jimmie Johnson who is still coming to terms with his truly alien environment, the remaining 20 cars were covered by 1.2s.

Come Q3, the Firestone Fast Six shootout, the quickest of the Ganassi drivers was Palou, third overall and 0.34s faster than Dixon.

Chris Simmons, Chip Ganassi Racing’s performance director, was impressed but not hugely surprised. He told Autosport, “During testing, we kept saying, ‘If he does this on a race weekend, he’s going to be doing really well,’. And that’s exactly what he did."

Anyone who has tracked Palou’s career won’t have been shocked by the 24-year-old’s performance. He scored a win and three poles in his rookie season in Japan’s Super Formula – a tough championship featuring fast and deeply experienced opponents in damn fast cars – and seemed destined for the title until a component failure in the finale ended his dream.

Alex Palou, Dale Coyne Racing with Team Goh Honda

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

Then last year, Palou drove his Coyne IndyCar to a podium at Road America in only his third IndyCar start. Ovals were a bit more of a problem given that mistakes will always be more severely punished on tracks with no runoff areas, but the #55 DCR-Honda qualified in the Fast Nine for the Indianapolis 500 and might have taken pole had its weightjacker switch not failed during his four-lap run.

If we conclude that Palou has top-drawer talent, then dropping him into one of the two best teams in the series – and one that appears to have made substantial off-season gains in its road-course set-up philosophy – was always going to be a combination brimming with potential. And so it has proved. One can admire his composure as he kept at bay two of the best – Team Penske's Will Power and his own team-mate Dixon – throughout the race. But more impressive still was the pace of the #10 Ganassi car in the opening stint.

Polesitter Pato O’Ward was struggling from the start of the race, making it plain to his Arrow McLaren SP team over the radio that his car was a major handful on the softer alternate compound Firestones, and he wanted to shed the reds and get onto Firestone’s harder primary rubber as soon as possible, pushing the team in the direction of a three-stop strategy.

Meanwhile, Andretti Autosport had zero flexibility on strategy with the other front-row starter, Alexander Rossi: he had roughly just half a tank of fuel thereby committing him to a three-stopper even before the race began. If the race had run fully green, he would need to make his first stop after barely more than a dozen laps, and despite eight of the first 11 laps being run under caution, Rossi had to be called in on Lap 18. The McLaren SP team had apparently identified Rossi as its biggest threat, and decided to cover this manoeuvre, especially given O’Ward’s unhappiness with his first set of tyres.

“It just blew my mind how fast Alex was in that first stint. I had absolutely nothing for him; he just pulled away, so I figured he was doing a three-stop race, because I was getting the best lap time I could for the fuel number" Will Power

In fact, those eight laps of caution – one a consequence of the Josef Newgarden-triggered lap one shunt, the other due to Jimmie Johnson’s spin-and-stall – made two-stopping not just viable, but actually quicker. The two-stoppers could go that little bit faster and still reach their fuel mileage targets, making it harder for three-stoppers to pull the necessary margins to be ahead by the final stint. Alternatively, they would have to do a lot of overtaking on a track where it’s notoriously tricky to pass unless blessed with a huge performance advantage. Throw in the fact that some drivers – including O’Ward and Rossi – found that fresh Firestone primaries took up to five laps to come up to operational temperature, and they were doomed.

Given O’Ward’s and Rossi’s need to go hard in the first stint, O’Ward’s tyre troubles notwithstanding, it was remarkable how the two-stopping Palou pretty much kept pace with them despite his fuel-saving efforts, and also eased away from Power.

“It just blew my mind how fast Alex was in that first stint," Power said post-race. "I had absolutely nothing for him; he just pulled away, so I figured he was doing a three-stop race, because I was getting the best lap time I could for the fuel number [target].”

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

Palou had pulled a 6.6s lead over Power by the time he pitted for the first time, and that gap came down to beneath 5s in the second stint only because the Ganassi driver got held up worse by traffic. Power’s strong in-lap and a stellar second stop by the #12 crew got the 2014 champion much closer to Palou for the final stint, but Palou soaked up the pressure, even keeping his cool when struggling to get around a backmarker while simultaneously watching his mirrors for Power who was allowed to start using his push-to-pass only in the final two laps.

Some drivers’ first victories at a high level are lucky, and it’s only that breakthrough that provides the last percentage point of confidence whereby they can regularly contend for victories. This was not that type of win. Palou out-Powered Power and out-Dixoned Dixon at the fuel-sipping-while-going-fast game.

There are a couple of minor caveats. The Hondas seem to have a slight advantage over Chevrolet in terms of acceleration out of slower corners, and maybe they’re also superior in terms of fuel mileage, so maybe Power had a car deficit. And had Dixon not spent the whole race behind the Penske driver, maybe he’d have proven more of a threat to Palou. In other words Will and Scott may have been hampered by car and track position deficits respectively.

But Power has 236 IndyCar races to his name, and Dixon 336. Palou was making just his 15th start at Barber, and he drove like a veteran ace. According to Simmons, like a particular veteran ace – namely Dario Franchitti – and therefore quite different from the #10 car’s previous occupant, Felix Rosenqvist.

Comparing Dixon’s and Palou’s driving styles, he comments: “Scott will hardly ever say his car is loose. If he does say it’s loose, it’s probably about to crash! And Felix often liked his car even looser than that. Alex is more back toward Dario, where he drives it off the front a little more, and wants the rear more solid.

“But we are not – or not yet – back to the golden Dixon-Franchitti era where we can give them very similar cars. We used to be able to set up a car for Scott and then make a minor adjustment of spring here, a little bit of damper there, and a little bit of toe adjustment and know that Dario would like that. There used to just be minor tweaks to two or three areas whereby we could make Scott happy with Dario’s car or vice-versa. It was great and could save a lot of time.

Race winner Dario Franchitti, Chip Ganassi Racing celebrates

Photo by: Dan Streck

“I think we’re starting to get a clearer idea between what Scott likes and what Alex likes, but we don’t have that completely dialled in yet."

That being said, many an engineer will tell you there are actually benefits to having two drivers whose car preferences and driving styles don’t overlap too much, because they can then cover a broader spectrum of setup adjustments during practice and – providing they are adaptable enough – one can switch over to the other’s setup when it’s been decided which is faster and which is kindest to tyres.

When tailoring a car to suit a driver, there’s another variable which any engineer has to consider, and may yet come to define the differences or similarities between Dixon and Palou in the season ahead. Some drivers need their cars to be set up on the ‘comfortable’ or predictable side and, suitably reassured, they will then draw everything out of themselves to deliver their best lap times. Other drivers want their car to be the fastest it can possibly be, however skittish, and consider it their duty to deal with it.

"Alex is asking a lot of questions and they’re all the right questions. He recognises he has really strong resources to lean on in terms of his teammates, along with Dario, and the engineers we have here" Chris Simmons, Chip Ganassi Racing

“Scott will drive it no matter how on edge you put it, sometimes to his own detriment,” says Simmons. “We try not to put the car too on edge because even in qualifying you may have to do more than one lap to get the best out of it. But for sure he can drive more on edge than a lot of people can.

“Alex, I’d say he too has superb car control and can handle a car that’s right on the edge as well. Like I say, he shows the same kind of potential we saw from Dario. Right away we saw he was quick in testing and was able to identify the key performance of the tyres and when to put the quick lap in, something that doesn’t come easy to everybody. For Alex, everything in the cockpit seems to come pretty easy. He stays pretty calm, he’s able to do anything the team asks, whether it’s saving fuel or going fast, and he delivers good feedback. He just gets on with the job.

“His ability to fuel save on Sunday was impressive because we didn’t do a lot of practice for that during our test days, but what little we did do, it seemed to come pretty easy to him. He actually finished with a bit more fuel in the tank than Scott, to be honest, so he had enough in reserve if Power had gotten close. Basically, he just seemed to have it all in hand from the moment the two guys ahead [O’Ward and Rossi] stuck to three stops and hit pitlane for the first time.”

Asked by Autosport after the race if he could have also beaten O’Ward and Rossi if everyone had gone for a three-stop race, Palou replied: “You never know what could happen, but I think I [would have been] able just because when we started pushing, like when we were racing with them, I was saving fuel already. I was hitting my numbers and I was just keeping my tyres and saving fuel to be able to go for a two-stop. I thought Pato was strong, so it would have been something with strategy that we could do to overtake him, and with Rossi I think we could have done something on track to overtake.”

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Art Fleischmann

And he’s doing the work behind the scenes too – cheerfully relating post-race how he’s been pestering Dixon and Johnson since he joined up with two drivers who have 13 top-rank championships between them.

“Absolutely, yeah, Alex is asking a lot of questions and they’re all the right questions,” says Simmons. “He recognises he has really strong resources to lean on in terms of his teammates, along with Dario, and the engineers we have here. Plenty of people here to help him learn, and he’s very receptive and open and adaptable to make full use of it.”

Of course, putting a top-tier driver into a top-tier team isn’t an absolute guarantee of regular success, and in the case of Chip Ganassi Racing and Rosenqvist, the courtship lasted rather longer than the marriage. They scored a win together, but Rosenqvist didn’t look the same ebullient driver by the time he left the team after two seasons.

Some suspected the turning point was his shunt in last year’s season opener at Texas, while looking set to complete a Ganassi 1-2 behind Dixon, but that wouldn’t make sense given that his victory at Road America came after that. Maybe Rosenqvist’s confidence took a knock from the fact that however often he started ahead of Dixon – six times in the 14 races in 2020 – he always seemed to finish behind him.

Regardless, Felix became considered dispensable, and Simmons was wary of who Chip might get to replace him.

“Felix has a lot of talent and finding another special guy, one who can jump right in, is difficult,” he says. “However successful he’s been somewhere else, be it another series or another team, you never know how successful he might be when he comes onboard. It’s just so difficult to fully evaluate a driver’s talent from afar when you don’t know the circumstances he’s been in. So we were definitely worried about losing Felix because we believe he has a lot of great days ahead.

“But Alex was super-surprising with his pace immediately in testing, and we were all taken aback. We were a little bit reserved going into Barber, not wanting to get our hopes too high - clearly, we should have had more faith in what we’d seen from him in the offseason."

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

Of course it’s unwise to use the sample of the first race in a 17-race season as a foundation for predictions. But certainly Palou should be able to look ahead with confidence to the road courses… and maybe the street courses, too.

“Last year for sure, qualifying on road courses was one of our Achilles Heels, so at Barber last weekend it was great to see Marcus [Ericsson] make the Firestone Fast Six for the first time and give us three cars in there,” says Simmons. “Street courses, we don’t know about because obviously we only had one last year [due to the schedule changes enforced by COVID pandemic]. We struggled in qualifying due to a technical issue with the brakes, but in the race Scott was pretty happy with the car.

“But the Andretti guys were really controlling the race until they all took themselves out, so we’re certainly looking like we might have some work to do there. But we tested at Sebring and came up with some new ideas and new things to try for street courses, and in 2019 we were good on street courses, so we don’t think that’s going to be a problem area for us.”

Nor is the engine according to the early-season perception of how Honda’s low-end torque stacks up compared with Chevrolet.

“I think Alex is going to be in the championship discussion all year long. Certainly it’s our goal to have Scott, Alex and Marcus up there so we can just fight among ourselves for the championship! But obviously, no one’s going to run away with it" Chris Simmons

“I think HPD’s given us very good driveability the last several years, actually,” says Simmons, “and I think they’ve made some improvements there. But we were also surprised at how fast the Chevys were through the speedtraps at Barber, so we’ll see how those characteristics carry over to other road and street courses. The truth is that at this stage in the engine cycle, no one’s going to have a big advantage."

Which leaves Gateway, where Dixon won last year, Indy where Dixon damn nearly won last year, and two races at Texas Motor Speedway, where Dixon dominated and Ganassi could have pulled off a 1-2-3 without Rosenqvist’s shunt and Ericsson’s refuelling issue. Palou does seem to be joining Chip’s chargers at precisely the right time, and while the team did not test with Palou at Texas along with most of the rest of the field pre-season, the engineering braintrust aren’t in the dark about Palou’s preferences around big left turns.

Says Simmons: “We had Eric Cowdin join us in the offseason to run the #48 car [Jimmie Johnson on road and streets, Tony Kanaan on ovals] and he was Alex’s race engineer at Coyne last year, so we already have some good insight on what he likes on ovals. I’m fully expecting him to be as fast as anybody.”

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

“I think Alex is going to be in the championship discussion all year long. You never know how luck can turn, but he has the speed and the calm demeanour. Certainly it’s our goal to have Scott, Alex and Marcus up there so we can just fight among ourselves for the championship! But obviously, no one’s going to run away with it – it’s amazingly close, as we saw at Barber.”

If Palou is a title contender, it’s going to be fascinating to see what effect this has on Dixon. Last Sunday, the six-time champion acknowledged the quality of his teammate’s performance and admitted he expects Palou to be a title contender. But Dixon has almost always been polite about his teammates in public and given that this is his 21st year at Ganassi, he probably does genuinely take a degree of pleasure when one of them wins, because he sees the happiness it brings to a lot of people he considers friends.

But he has always taken a close interest in his top-line teammates, used them as a gauge for his own performances, and learned where he can improve. When Franchitti returned to IndyCar from his hapless one-year dalliance with NASCAR in 2008, he joined Dixon at Ganassi, right after the Kiwi had earned his second title. Soon into the ’09 season, Dixon realised he needed to up his work rate. He recalled one evening after qualifying at some track in the midwest when he and wife Emma had left their motorhome and driven off into town for ice cream. As they returned and pulled up in the paddock more than an hour later, they spotted Franchitti and Simmons, notepads under their arms, coming down the steps from the Ganassi trailer, having only just finished debriefing. At season’s end, Dario had beaten him – and Team Penske’s Ryan Briscoe – to win his second championship.

Then, Dario beat him to the title again in 2010 - and then again in 2011. Partly it was down to Dixon's dreadful luck, but it’s easy to forget how emulating Franchitti helped shape Dixon into the colossus he is today – and how much he has missed that utterly and dependably fast presence in the #10 car since Dario’s enforced retirement at the end of 2013. Sure, Franchitti has remained a Ganassi man, but inevitably his focus has been more on trying to bring less experienced drivers up nearer Scott’s level – or keeping Kanaan calm...

If, as Simmons suggests, Palou is as receptive to learning from Dixon, Franchitti and Ericsson and using the inbuilt resources at Ganassi, and he already has the raw speed, then he could truly become one of those year in, year out aces who racks up big numbers in the years ahead. In other words he could slow down Dixon’s win rate.

But equally, he could speed it up if he helps drive Ganassi to a position of supremacy – and if he does so, it’s still very hard to picture Palou gaining preeminence within the team. In the first half of 2019, when Rosenqvist blew into town as a spirited rookie, his pace briefly cast some shade over Dixon. But then he suffered a couple of crashes, had a rough middle-third of the season, and by the time he was back to his best, Dixon had dug deep, learned from what Felix was doing with his car, and was at least a match for him for qualifying pace, while remaining near flawless on race days. The best never stop learning, as he made abundantly clear just last month after observing Palou’s data over the winter.

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

When will 40-year-old Dixon finally call time on his illustrious career? The day he feels his motivation is flickering or his crown slipping – and we can be sure that he will inwardly acknowledge this and make the decision before any outside observer notices a diminution of his powers. And according to Simmons, that day could be years away.

“Scott still has the speed,” he says, in response to the observation that he hasn’t earned a pole since Indy 500 four years ago. “If you look at Portland and Laguna in 2019, he missed pole by less than a tenth combined. It’s a competitive field out there. And at Barber on Saturday, if he had put his best sectors together he’d have been better in the Fast Six. But I don’t think that’s down to his age, that’s for sure. His fitness regimen seems to be better than ever, and he gets the job done, he’s as enthusiastic about it as ever.

“I don’t know what Scott’s plans are, but he has nothing left to prove, so if he ever feels he’s on the downside of his career, you’re right, he’s not going to hang on just to hang on.”

True, Dixon has nothing left to prove but while he retains that crucial enthusiasm, he’ll want to keep on proving and improving himself. Were Palou to outperform him over the course of a 17-race season, who’d bet against Dixon coming back faster and stronger in 2022?

So far Palou has outperformed him at just one race, and it would be foolish to bet against Dixon coming back faster and stronger as soon as this weekend. That’s the kind of quality, permanent and relentless, that drivers face when being directly compared with Dixon. Alex has given himself the best possible start, but he still has so much to prove.

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, Will Power, Team Penske Chevrolet, Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda celebrate in victory lane

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images