After an early caution they jockeyed for position, running side-by-side for three laps. Álex Palou was already crowned the champion two races ago in Portland, and Pato O’Ward had numerically locked in second place after the cars had rolled out of Milwaukee the week before. But the two still gave it all at Nashville Super Speedway, their feet on the floor as they whipped around at 190mph looking for that one last season win.
Neither would end up taking it. O’Ward’s car gave out on him on lap 127 and sent him cruising into the wall for a mid-race retirement. And while Palou fought hard and finally “unlocked” the art of oval racing in his otherwise dominant run in the championship—having finally clinched an Indy 500 win this May (having taken runner up at his second entry in 2021)—Palou was bested on Sunday by the man who couldn’t be beat the last couple of years on ovals.
Until his win in Nashville, Josef Newgarden had a disastrous year behind the wheel of an IndyCar. In 2023, Newgarden won every single oval on the schedule until the old six-time champ Scott Dixon kept him from perfection and being the first IndyCar driver in history to win every oval in a season at Gateway (Newgarden kept himself from that when he crashed out). It was a slow downhill from there. While Newgarden did become the sixth back-to-back Indy 500 winner in 2024, his season and championship run was mired by a cheating scandal at the opener in St. Petersburg, stripping him of victory and his teammate Scott McLaughlin was stripped of a podium as well.
While those two were participatory in the scandal, using the hybrid “push-to-pass” system illegally during a race restart after a caution, the other Team Penske driver, Will Power, was only docked 10 championship points for not using that hacked electronic component. Power, too, has been on something of a decline. The driver with the most pole positions in the series’ history, the 44-year-old Australian driver has reached the twilight of his career, clinching his second (and probably last) championship in 2022 and losing it at the closer in 2024 after a seatbelt failure took him out of contention before they even rolled to green. Power’s future is undetermined as he’ll likely lose his drive at Penske, maybe going to a smaller team, maybe not.
But Penske cutting one of their staple drivers at the end of such a disastrous season for them—their worst this century—feels sadly right. The organization’s going through a massive overhaul, having fired their president and likely successor to Roger Penske, Tim Cindric, after Newgarden and Power’s cars failed a post-qualifying tech inspection at this year’s Indy 500. The scandals were getting too much for Penske, who runs the risk of compromising the entire sport with his team’s mismanagement given that he now owns the series and its most famous speedway. Penske hasn’t been a steward to America’s greatest motorsport so much as that old race car driver in him has gamed it to be in his favor only. But IndyCar goes on regardless, and others have been fighting to maintain its prestige.
The first year being broadcast on Fox Sports since they bought the rights from NBC has been a mixed bag. Production values are higher, and they had a whole suite of Super Bowl ads—but numbers aren’t up enough to make the investment seem worth it, and the new hybrid system the series introduced last year at Mid-Ohio has neutralized much of the sport’s road and street racing because the cars are just too heavy now. It’s disappointing that the pushes to expand the sport have resulted in showing how stagnate it is, but maybe the introduction of a new chassis in 2028 (they’ve been running the same car design since 2012) will remedy this. The racing product on ovals, at least, remains good as ever, with the 250 miles they ran at Milwaukee some of the best racing all year and crowning a first-time winner, Christian Rasmussen.
Some fans have pointed to Palou’s dominance this year as a problem for the series, although it’s hard to argue that watching the Spaniard win eight out of the series’ 17 outings this year isn’t once-in-a-lifetime impressive. He’s an unbelievably brilliant driver, one of, if not the best, in any series in every part of the world, and we get to watch drive around Midwestern towns for the cost of a fancy lunch. It’s easy to complain about how much better IndyCar could be, making it easy to forget that it’s still one of the best motorsports around, requiring the most multi-disciplinary driving (short ovals, superspeedways, road and street circuits) of any racing series. There’s rumors abound about a possible NASCAR double-header next year, maybe even at a return to the Phoenix Motor Speedway. If IndyCar didn’t really get a chance to show their chops in 2025, that could be the moment of truth in 2026.