DETROIT, Mich — Alex Palou has been untouchable. The Spaniard is on a string of races to where he’s started 3rd, 1st, 1st and finished 1st, 4th, 1st. He’s led 162 of the 385 laps in the process.

He went from nine points down entering the Month of May to 51 points up heading to the week off.

“Honestly, there’s a lot of races to go,” Palou admitted. “We got the lead two races ago, now suddenly we have this amazing lead.

“On the same way that we go up, there’s somebody that can go up as well, and we can go down. That’s INDYCAR. That’s the high competition that we have here. There’s a lot. I think in 15 weeks we can have 10 race weekends. It’s going to be tough to keep the energy up for everybody. But having that lead, it’s going to help us. Hopefully we can keep it going and getting bigger.”

Josef Newgarden noted during the preseason test that his main goal this year outside of winning the Indy 500, which he did last Sunday, was to have the championship wrapped up early. He didn’t want to have to go into the season finale stressed like he has the last few years in which he’s finished runner-up in points in each of the last three years.

While he’s won twice in 2023, equaling Palou, he’s 70 points behind in third.

That’s how good Palou has been and it may be he, not Newgarden, having this thing wrapped up by September to score his second title in three years.

Palou is showing right now why Chip Ganassi fought so hard to keep him last season. It would have been just as easy for Ganassi to let Palou walk like most are expecting him to at the end of this season anyways. Why keep a dead-end driver one more season?

Sunday’s race in Detroit is why.

Palou led a race-high 74 of 100 laps from the pole en route to a dominating race on a dominating race weekend. It was his second straight pole after having 1 pole in his previous 52 starts and second win in the last three races.

“It feels amazing,” Palou said of this momentum.” You need to try to ride the wave while you have it. Yeah, happy that we have a wave and that we can ride it because we know the season is really long, you have some races that don’t go that well.”

So far, Palou hasn’t really had many races that didn’t go well.

He won by nearly 20-seconds in the GMR Grand Prix. He overcame Rinus VeeKay running into him on pit road last Sunday in Indy to finish fourth. Prior to May, he was eighth in St. Pete, third in Texas and fifth in Long Beach and Barber respectively.

He led 22 laps in Texas, two in Long Beach, 52 in the GMR Grand Prix, 36 in the Indy 500 and now 76 more.

This dominance has him opening up a 51-point lead in the standings. It was 20 entering this weekend. For a series that has seen the championship not decided until the final race for 18 straight years now, Palou is on a pace to maybe wrap this up early.

He’s 70 points clear of third, 82 points clear of fifth. When going back to last year, he won the season finale by a half-a-minute in leading 67 of 95 laps in the process. It was that weekend he and Ganassi patched things up and off he’s went since with an average finish of 3.5 over the last eight races. He’s led 255 laps in that span with three wins.

Prior to last year’s season finale, Palou had just two podiums in 12 starts. That’s because of his battle with Ganassi to leave and go to McLaren. His access was cutoff and it cost him results.

Still, while in that battle, he did have eight top 10’s. It’s just the fact that he had three podiums in the four races to start last season before these issues arose.

He’s by far the top driver in this paddock right now and the most consistent by a wide margin.

Sunday was Palou’s 6th straight top 5 finish and 7th top 10 in as many races. Palou has scored 22 top five finishes in the last 40 races. Among those 22 are 16 podium finishes. By comparison, over that same span, Scott Dixon has 21 top five finishes but 10 of those were on the podium. Marcus Ericsson has 11 top five finishes with 9 of those on the podium. The thing is, he has 31 top 10’s in this span. Just 9 of those 31 top 10’s were on the podium.

Palou has 35 top 10’s in that span with 16 on the podium. See the difference?

Same for Josef Newgarden. He has 30 top 10 finishes with 18 of those in the top five but just 13 of those 30 were on the podium. Palou is consistently in the top 10 (87.5%) with 55% in the top five and 40% of the time on the podium.

In order to make up that gap, you have to start winning and doing so in bunches. In order to do that, you have to take risks.

That’s forcing others into making some costly errors.

Pato O’Ward was from three points out of the lead entering the GMR Grand Prix to 82 back leaving Detroit. He crashed in Indy while battling for second. He compounded a pit road mistake in Detroit with a crash of his own. That and being overzealous in Long Beach relegated him to finishes of 17th, 24th and 26th in those three races.

That’s why despite three runner-up’s and a fourth-place run, he’s that far out.

Same for Romain Grosjean. So much speed. So much promise. So many mistakes.

A crash in the season opener in St. Pete while battling for the lead with 29 laps to go. A crash with two laps to go while running fourth in Texas. A crash in the Indy 500. A crash while running seventh in Detroit.

Those finishes?

18th, 14th, 30th, 24th.

In the races he’s not had problems?

2nd, 2nd, 11th.

He fell from fourth in points (-15) entering May to 11th (-128).

Even Newgarden has made mistakes. St. Pete had an electrical issue (17th). Long Beach had to save fuel (9th), Barber had damage early (15th) and now here a slower first pit stop left him 10th.

Ericsson has had a top 10 finish in all seven races, it’s just the fact that he has one win and three podiums. 4 of the 7 races have seen him finish between 8th-10th.

That’s the difference and in a series that is seeing Palou untouchable, I think it’s going to be hard to close that gap, especially with what lies ahead.

Next up is Road America. He was third in 2020 and won in 2021. After that is Mid-Ohio. Palou was third and second in each of the last two years. Then maybe some relief in the Iowa doubleheader as short ovals are his worst tracks. That’s however, short lived.

August is Nashville to where he was runner-up last season, back to the Indy road course to where he just won by 18 seconds last month, then to Gateway. September is Portland to where he won in 2021 and to wrap the season up in Monterey to where he won by a half of a minute last year.