Alex Palou’s Indy 500 celebration
Alex Palou skips the Indy 500 milk-dump tradition, choosing to share the moment with his team instead.
- Alex Palou, current IndyCar points leader, is aiming for his fourth NTT IndyCar Series championship in five seasons.
- Palou recently won his first oval race at the Indianapolis 500, a significant achievement considering his limited oval racing experience.
- Despite not growing up racing on ovals, Palou feels confident and comfortable racing on them, highlighting the importance of car setup and driver input.
IndyCar’s race at the Milwaukee Mile is almost half a season away and much can change in the standings before Aug. 24.
But through seven races, 28-year-old Spaniard Alex Palou is well on his way to a fourth NTT IndyCar Series championship in five seasons, one he could even wrap up at the Mile.
Palou, who had raced in Europe and Japan before coming to the United States, had never seen an oval in person until 2019, a year before joining the series. Last season he raced at Milwaukee for the first time. And in May, after 15 road- and street-course victories, Palou won for the first time on an oval, the most important one of all, when he took the checkered flag in the 109th Indianapolis 500 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Looking ahead to Milwaukee – even with another short oval race June 15 at World Wide Technology Raceway near St. Louis and then June 22 on the Road America road course outside Elkhart Lake immediately ahead – the series and track made Palou available to talk up the Snap-On 250 with local media affiliates, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Here are highlights.
Question: You don’t come from an oval background. The first time you even saw an oval, what did you think?
Alex Palou: I thought it was crazy. That’s what I thought. I thought it was just crazy, the amount of speed and the way that you had to race on an oval. It was exciting, and I got to learn a lot. But at the beginning, obviously, I thought that it was a very different way of racing and something that I didn’t know if I was going to be able to do or not.So then the first time you pulled out of the pits and actually were about to drive on one, do you remember what was kind of going through your mind?It was nerve wracking, for sure. The car doesn’t feel normal. Obviously it’s a lot faster. You know you’re not going to use the brakes as much, and you feel strapped in a lot different, in a different way than you normally are. But, yeah, honestly, it’s … it’s a pretty cool experience, especially at the beginning when you don’t know how is it gonna be.
We tend to lump Indy and Milwaukee and World Wide Technology Raceway and Texas and Iowa together as ovals. As a driver who didn’t grow up on ovals, do they even belong in the same conversation?
Every track has its own character (just as) when you go to a road course. You can prefer some tracks than others, because the way the car feels, the amount of steering you need to put the speed that you’ll carry there, but so far, I like all of them. Obviously, I prefer the Speedway because I won, so I feel more confident. But I cannot wait to win at other places.
From a driving standpoint, if you’re good and comfortable at Indy or Texas or Iowa or one of the others, does any of that carry over to the rest?
Confidence, comfort, yes, for sure. It just carries a big, big momentum in the way I feel, and just the confidence that I have now, it’s a lot better than two weeks ago.
Is getting to that point more about getting you to learn what you need to do, or is it about getting you to learn what the car needs to do?
I would say it’s half/half because it’s never easy. As a driver, you always know what you need to do. Like it’s easy, you just go through the data, you speak to your team and understand what you need to do. But then it’s about what do I need to tell the car? What inputs do I need to do to the car for it to behave well? And what do I need to go faster?
What you said at Indy (a few days before the 500) was interesting: If it happens, it happens. If not, we come back, we do it next year. Is that your nature or something that you had to develop?
I would say you develop slowly. Probably as a kid, you have no patience. But yeah, I would say by every year, you’re gaining some patience, and at least that’s the way I work better.
Like every single race, (the 500)’s so tough to win (because) there could be somebody else that is doing just a slightly better job than you, or just has a better day than you, and that’s it, it’s not your year and you need to wait for the next one. All the races are really tough, but especially the 500 knowing that you have only one chance a year, and there’s 500 miles, there’s a lot of stuff that can go wrong.
The first time you saw Milwaukee you were much deeper into your IndyCar career, so perspective was a little different from seeing your first oval. What was that like?
It was an interesting place, because it just feels like you’re in the middle of the city, and there’s other tracks where you need to drive, like, 40 miles away from the city to go to the racetrack. So it felt amazing to just be there in the middle of the craziness.
And then the track itself, it just felt really, really fast at the beginning. It just felt like you had to push the car a lot to try and get lap time and speed.
From the very first time you pulled out of the pits on that test day to the final checkered flag on Sunday a couple months later – it’s funny because there’s a giant gap there – what was the progression of your learning and your comfort? (Note: Palou finished fifth in the first half of a doubleheader and 19th in the second after mechanical issues at before the start.)
Already when we went to the race weekend the confidence was really high. I learned how to race better, or how to overtake, how to defend, how the strategies were playing out at Milwaukee specifically after the race.
Are there little nuances you can point to, or little things you picked up, where you felt you really gained?
There’s some stuff that we know about the car now that we’ve raced there, but driving specifically there’s not one thing (in particular) that I’m like, oh yeah, I can overtake here or there. I would say restarts are very, very important. You can gain a lot of spots, or you can just lose a ton of spots as well, depending on how aggressive you go, which line you take. But that always changes race to race.
Are you a big video guy or sim guy? How did you prepare that way for Milwaukee?
I think nowadays almost everybody does the same. With the team (Chip Ganassi Racing), always before each event but especially if it’s the first time that we go, we spend a ton of time at the simulator with different drivers just trying to get comfortable and then trying to get some performance out of the car, see what that track likes better, like, if it’s better to have stronger front end or stronger rear end. It’s just great to be able to utilize those tools before we go to a real event.
Going into that weekend last year, I probably tended to think about Josef Newgarden and Will Power and Scott Dixon as guys who would do well, and now (2024 winners) Scott McLaughlin and Pato O’Ward as guys to watch. Who am I missing?
There’s a ton of people that suddenly pop up and then they get confidence there. I think Conor (Daly) has done amazingly on ovals, and he did amazing last year at Milwaukee. I think (David) Malukas has been doing really, really good as well. Colton (Herta) as well. He won Nashville and he was up there in Milwaukee. It always depends on the year.
And where do you fit in that?
Well, hopefully I’m one of the guys to watch, right?
