Why IndyCar title glory is just the start for Ganassi's new star

Even when driving for a team as strong as Chip Ganassi Racing, being able to finish in the top three in half the season’s races is a stellar achievement in a championship as wickedly tight as the IndyCar Series right now. And when three of those eight podium visits see you standing on the centre step, that’s a championship right there.

And that’s exactly what 2021 IndyCar champion Alex Palou delivered. But how did a veteran of just 14 series starts coming into this season achieve such astounding consistency? Well, there seems little doubt that part of his (open) secret to success is his astonishing ability to stay out of trouble, to make great judgment calls on what is and isn’t feasible in the heat of battle, and to remember that Chip Ganassi – like most team owners – prefers you to bring home a certain second place rather than stick it in the wall going for a possible win.

Key to this ability to rationalise while racing is keeping a cool head, and by racing driver standards, Palou is astoundingly composed, in and out of the cockpit. He was gutted at his defeat by Helio Castroneves in the Indy 500, but found a positive way to look at it – defeated by an old master, great lessons learned, good result for the sport and so on. There was no ‘woe is me’ speech when his Honda blew up on raceday in the season’s second Indianapolis road course race, forcing him to take a nine-place grid penalty for the Gateway event.

And when, having overcome that deficit around the 1.25-mile oval, he and team-mate Scott Dixon were sent spinning into the wall by a blunder from Rinus VeeKay, the Spaniard walked away without flipping the bird at his assailant or raising his arms in frustration. Instead he just stalked away, agitatedly punching downward as he doubtless yelled his resentments into his helmet. He probably even remembered to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to the AMR Safety Team members who drove him back to the paddock.

OK, there was something more than incredulity in his voice over the radio in Portland on learning that Race Control had given him a seemingly random punishment for avoiding an accident at Turn 1, lap 1, by going slowly through the chicane rather than around it. But he bounced back in the best style possible and won the race, and his post-race comments about the powers-that-be were couched in polite terms – that the punishment was “not right” and “didn’t really make sense”.

We, the media, caused the most recent flicker of irritation in this very placid 24-year-old. At Laguna Seca, Palou’s runner-up finish meant he ended the title hopes of team-mates Scott Dixon and Marcus Ericsson, and all-but eliminated Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden from the equation. Pato O’Ward of Arrow McLaren SP still had a lifeline, but some of us slipped into the habit of saying that even if the young Mexican took all the bonus points and won the Grand Prix of Long Beach finale, Palou needed only to finish 11th to take the title. That ‘only’ bugged him.

“It's not going to be easy,” he insisted. “It's 28 drivers. You said I only need to finish 11th, but to finish 11th in IndyCar is not that easy nowadays. We'll do our best. We're not going to focus on that 11th place because I saw so many races, including last weekend, where somebody that is outside of top 10 on the last stint can finish in the top 3 [Romain Grosjean]. We just need to do the best we can…”

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

“Anything can happen in IndyCar,” he tells Autosport on Monday morning after a “not too crazy party” in Long Beach. “It’s a tight field and 28 cars. It’s a street course, a tough track. So when people were saying, ‘Oh, you only need a top-11 finish,’ I mean, yeah, it’s a good championship position I was in, and I drive for a great team, but still, we did need to get that finish, and IndyCar is not easy.”

Not easy, either, was trying to follow through on his desire to “not think about the championship until after the final pitstop in Long Beach”. Because, inevitably, everyone wanted to quiz him about whether he was staying calm, how he was staying calm, what the pressure felt like, how he’d approach the race…

“It’s hard when everybody’s talking and asking about that,” he chuckles. “But on the other hand it’s good: it’s much better than if you’re not being asked about the championship, right?! It means we are in the fight.

“Obviously I dreamt every single night about the championship, how it would feel to win it. But what I meant before that was that I didn’t want to drive Long Beach for the championship, I didn’t want to try just for 11th. I wanted to drive for the race, and then after the last pitstop, I would think about the championship. Like, I wouldn’t go for the podium if we were good in fourth place, and that’s what we did.

"I need to try and do everything better. I think there’s not only one thing that I’m missing. I think there are a lot of things that I can just bring up. With experience it will come next year" Alex Palou 

“My team-mates helped me before the last couple of races. Jimmie [Johnson] especially, but also Scott [Dixon] and Dario [Franchitti, Ganassi’s driver advisor]. They have won so many championships and they helped with some tricks to try and be ready for everything that could happen. Unfortunately, we had that yellow in qualifying that didn’t help us so we start P10 but even without running a super-aggressive strategy we made it up to fourth on Sunday. We had great cars.”

Great cars are what he can generally expect from Chip Ganassi Racing over the remainder of his time there, be it two years or 20. Palou talks about how his eyes were opened to the resources of the Ganassi empire from his very first visit, but any top driver in IndyCar will admit that when shifting teams there is still a need to acclimatise to a ‘new’ car. Yes, IndyCar’s Dallara chassis are spec, but set-up philosophies can vary hugely from team to team.

Newgarden, in shifting from Ed Carpenter Racing to Team Penske in the fall of 2016, found that a Penske car had a very different feel because they generated their cornering speed in a different way than the ECR machines. And Palou’s predecessor in the #10 Ganassi car, Felix Rosenqvist, took two-thirds of this season just past to rediscover his natural pace in the Arrow McLaren SP.

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda celebrates winning the Grand Prix of Portland, Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

So for Palou, joining Ganassi after a rookie season spent at Dale Coyne Racing, the transition was interesting.

“I think you will see a difference even between the top teams,” he says, “and you see it even on the onboard cameras. We all drive differently and the cars drive differently. One car can drive really well on high-speed corners and really bad on slow-speed. The other car can be the opposite. And then even in one team, it can change depending on how a driver has set the springs, the ride-height and so on.

“Switching from one team to another, yes, you can definitely feel the difference. It’s not like the Ganassi car is faster – I think Dale’s team has some really good set-ups, fast cars that allow you to fight for race wins. But at Ganassi, we’ve been very consistent on all types of track this year and I’ve adapted to their basic set-ups really well.”

And Ganassi has adapted to Palou. While Dixon has found Palou’s preferred handling traits quite different from his own – the six-time champ says he and Marcus Ericsson are closer – it’s significant that the team is flexible enough to accommodate disparate taste, but there remains enough commonality whereby the drivers remain helpful to each other.

“One hundred percent, the team is great at letting us go in different directions,” says Palou. “At the beginning of a race weekend, I would drive a car with the team’s set-up for that track last year – Scott’s set-up. And from there we would go in a direction that felt better for me, especially at the end of the year when we knew what I needed from the car to fit my style. And sometimes we’d have different setups to Scott or Marcus, sometimes almost the same.

“I think it’s good that we have different styles inside the team, because one is going to push the other. If Scott’s faster on the high-speed corners and I’m much faster on the slow-speed, we’re both going to get better on our weaker points. That’s been great. And it’s also been great to compare with Scott because he always extracts 100 percent from whatever his set-up is!”

Another driver who appears able to wring everything out of his car is O’Ward, who finished the season third in the championship, behind Palou and Newgarden, but for much of the year was Palou’s principal title rival. The Arrow McLaren SP team’s Formula 1 connection has been influential in coming up with a set-up that turns on its tyres rapidly – useful for qualifying, starts and restarts. In the second race at Detroit, the final restart saw O’Ward make his rivals appear to be driving at only 97 percent, slicing through into the lead, and third-placed Palou pondered the phenomenon out loud in the post-race press conference.

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, Patricio O'Ward, Arrow McLaren SP Chevrolet

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images

“We just have to figure out how they’re generating this tyre temperature when the rest of us seem to not,” he said at the time. “It’s a massive difference as everyone can see. It worked really good this weekend and we need to find that compromise but we think we know what it is now. So we’re going to try and if we can get that right it’s going to be really fun.”

Four months on, Palou is non-committal about how far down that avenue the Ganassi R&D team went.

“We saw it from that team throughout the season, right?” he says. “Not just restarts but in qualifying they could get their tyres up to temperature one lap earlier than most teams. I think the Andretti guys were pretty much the same, and that’s something we still need to work on, especially for street courses.

“But at the same time we are able to have less tyre deg[radation] than them at several tracks. So it’s a balance: you don’t want to be super-slow at the beginning or on restarts but you also don’t want to start really strong and then struggle with tyre deg.

"[The Indy 500 practice crash] was the lowest moment of my season, but at the same time, I knew I had to prove something to the team, to Chip and to myself after that. And that made me a lot stronger than what I lost in that crash" Alex Palou

"That’s one of the main goals we have for next year. I think we understood a little bit what they are doing, because if you look at our pace in St. Pete [second round of the year, first street course] and now Long Beach pace, we have become much better in qualifying and the race.

“We got two of our wins and six of our podiums before we ever got our first pole! That is strange – normally you get poles before you get wins because it’s easier to be fast on one lap than to be fast enough over 100 laps to win. So that’s something we were maybe missing this year.

“I mean, you don’t need a pole to win a championship but we felt like we wanted to show we can do the job in qualifying, and we did it in Portland when we needed it most. But we will focus on that for next season, because when you start on pole everything becomes easier and smoother.”

Champion Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda and team owner Chip Ganassi

Photo by: Chris Owens

After the race on Sunday, Palou politely dealt with endless questions from the media. This writer told him that his team owner had just been on stage and had, after some prompting and careful consideration, compared him with Dixon. He had also failed to come up with any obvious flaws in his newest champ’s armoury.

After admitting he was flattered by the comparison and did not believe he was worthy, Palou said he had already recognised potential areas of self-improvement for 2022.

“What do I need to improve? Everything!” he smiled. “I need to go faster. I'm not the fastest. I need to try and do everything better. I think there's not only thing that I'm missing. I think there's a lot of things that I can bring up. With experience it will come next year.”

Spoken like a true champion. But how easy will it be to make these gains, when testing is so chronically restricted these days?

“It’s not easy, no, but actually easier than last year, I think,” he says. “I have two years of experience now, and sure, we’re not going to have much testing but I have all the data, I know exactly where I need to improve and I just need to figure out how to do it.

"Then I will come up with some ideas with the team and hopefully one of them works. I really don’t think it’s going to be hard to get better. We finished out so strong but I feel I can get one step ahead – not me, but globally. I’m not talking about, like, improving my braking technique but some other stuff… I’m sorry, I cannot say too much!”

Ganassi also cited Palou’s ability to bounce back from his huge Indy practice crash, and qualify sixth as a particularly impressive show of resilience. Palou reveals it was a moment of huge personal significance.

“That was the lowest moment of my season, but at the same time, I knew I had to prove something to the team, to Chip and to myself after that,” he says. “And that made me a lot stronger than what I lost in that crash. Proving to myself, that hey, you did a mistake but you need to keep on going, going fast and staying competitive – it gave me the confidence for the rest of the season to know that we could do anything.

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

“That was a hard moment, but having confidence the day after, being in the Fast Nine in qualifying and then having to do four laps flat out not knowing if the car was going to stick, not knowing if my feeling was good enough or not… And then going into the race and fighting for the win, that was a big, big moment, not just of this year but in my whole career. It’s going to stick with me forever.”

The day after Palou landed that sixth place on the grid, this writer bumped into Palou’s crew chief Ricky Davis, a Ganassi stalwart for more than a quarter-century. Congratulations were in order for performing such a phenomenal rebuild, as every millimetre of imperfection in terms of bodywork fit and extra mechanical friction can cost vital microseconds at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Few crews could have honed their back-up parts to such an astonishingly degree of perfection.

"Alex is already at that point where he knows what he wants, he’s very precise. The psychology part, he’s right there" Dario Franchitti

“Thanks mate, but I’m impressed with Alex,” he replied. “He still doesn’t have much Indy experience and he just went for it yesterday. It’s like he never crashed. Right back on it. He’s special.

“And do you know? He’s such a great kid, so positive, so nice. Even if we weren’t paid to do this, we’d do anything for him.”

Dixon agrees: “He's the nicest guy you'll ever meet,” he says. “He's always smiling, even when he has a bad day. He's a good person and he's done a tremendous job this year.”

In terms of judging his team-mate’s talent, too, Dixon’s opinions carry a lot of weight – and it’s reassuring to learn from the outgoing champ that the new champ is as good a driver as he appears to be from the results sheets. Palou’s podium and win tally prompted Dixon to comment that his team-mate “races like a veteran but he's a young guy, very adaptive.

“I've struggled a bit with the tyre at some of the circuits, one specific tyre has been really tough for me, but Alex and actually Marcus in some situations have done a very good job. Alex definitely asks a lot of questions. He's not shy to ask. But he processes the answers very well.”

Champion Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Geoff Miller / Motorsport Images

Palou has often commented on the huge part that Franchitti has played in his development in 2021, while the veteran has clearly loved working with such a burgeoning success story. But in Laguna Seca, he admitted to Autosport that he was initially shocked at the scale of Palou’s potential.

“We thought he was good, that’s why we signed him,” said the man who scored three of his four series titles and two of his three Indy 500 wins in Ganassi cars. “We thought he had raw talent and it would be a process with him – and then of course he goes and wins the first race!”

So how do the pair interact?

“Driving the car-wise, it’s very small areas with Alex – I’ll nudge him and say, ‘Have you thought about that?’ and he’ll say ‘Oh yeah!’ It’s much like what I do with Scott. I don’t say, ‘You need to do this, this and this in the corner’. It’s more, ‘Why aren’t you doing that?’ and the reply is usually, ‘I can’t do that because of something else’.

“Alex is already at that point where he knows what he wants, he’s very precise. The psychology part, he’s right there. He’s hungry, but I haven’t seen too many – touch wood – rookie moments, especially when he’s leading a race. Even at Portland, he was the one saying ‘We’ve got this! We can do this!’ after he got put to the back; there was no temper tantrum. So we just need to keep him in that sweet spot. He’s been better than we hoped immediately.

“Is he perfect? Of course not, nobody is. There are areas we can improve, and we’re working on them. He’s very receptive to everything – his team-mates, the data, his engineers, my experience – he’s always asking questions. He’s been a great addition.

“There’s no point in an old guy like me sitting there if you’re not going to ask questions so he takes advantage of that and uses that knowledge. He’ll walk into a team meeting and say, ‘Hey Scott, what’s going on here? How are you doing that? Explain it to me’.

Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, Dario Franchitti

Photo by: Phillip Abbott / Motorsport Images

“The other side of it is that Scott is feeding off him too, and Marcus is getting into that whole thing as well – the three are feeding off each other. And Jimmie is benefiting from it as well, due to his lack of experience. There’s a lot of good stuff going on in our trailer.”

That’s for damn certain. And what should alarm the opposition is that Palou, Franchitti and others in the know are already focusing on areas of potential improvement.

Palou is the first driver under 25 to clinch the IndyCar championship since Dixon captured his first title in 2003. Was the 2021 IndyCar Series season the foundation of another astonishing Ganassi driver’s career? Right now, that prospect seems very real.

Champion Alex Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing Honda

Photo by: Barry Cantrell / Motorsport Images