Bad D.C. day puts hitch in Alex Palou’s march toward fifth title
Maybe Alex Palou was right. Maybe it’s best to have all the bad luck in the same NTT INDYCAR SERIES race.
Palou certainly did that Sunday in the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C. by suffering through a sequence of mistakes and misfortunes that led to a 20th-place finish. Yes, Palou had a lower finish earlier this year at Phoenix Raceway – he finished 24th after crashing with Rinus VeeKay – but this race in the nation’s capital was overall his worst and certainly his most forgettable. The Spaniard incurred a rare penalty hitting another driver’s tire on pit road, saw his Chip Ganassi Racing crew botch a pit stop, clipped one of the track’s concrete barriers and spun with broken suspension.
The messy day knocked a huge dent out of Palou’s once-massive points lead. He entered this race weekend with a 133-point lead over Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood and then earned a point for winning the NTT P1 Award as Saturday’s fastest qualifier. But Palou’s advantage heading to the season’s final three races is 91 points after Kirkwood won Sunday.
“It hurts, man, it hurts,” Palou said after his race mercifully came to an end three laps off the winner’s pace. “It was one of those races that I really wanted – I wanted to get that win. So, it kind of hurts a lot that it’s this bad of a day. But it’s OK; things happen. I’m at least kind of happy that everything happened in the same day instead of spreading out throughout different races.”
Most surprising among the miscues was Palou striking a tire laid out in Mick Schumacher’s pit box. That drew a penalty on the driver who seldom makes noticeable mistakes. Prior to the contact with VeeKay at Phoenix, Palou hadn’t had a major error in a race since crashing by himself in 2024 at Iowa Speedway. This was the first in-race penalty of his doing since the 2020 season when he drove for Dale Coyne Racing w/ Team Goh. Palou served Sunday’s mandated drive through pit lane on Lap 43, returning to the track in the 21st position. On the next pit stop, the left front tire changer had trouble getting the wheel nut affixed, forcing Palou to stop the car a split second after initially pulling away. The delay allowed Kirkwood to put the No. 10 OpenAI Chip Ganassi Racing Honda a lap down.