PLYMOUTH, Wisc — Alex Palou was a driver I was watching this weekend. Even after a mistake in Saturday’s practice, he still rebounded to qualify third and a day after that, won his third race in the last four tries. As a result, it opens up an insurmountable points lead to 74 points over teammate Marcus Ericsson. Josef Newgarden is 81 points out. Pato O’Ward and Scott Dixon are each tied for fourth but 98 points arrears. Everyone else is 125+ behind.

With 9 races remaining, can anyone catch him?

“It’s kind of out of our control,” said second place finisher, Josef Newgarden on Sunday. “They’ve had a good run up to this point, right? They’ve not had a bad race. I think that’s to be expected.

“We had an engine pop on us in the very first round. Everybody has a different story. If you look at their story, they’ve not had one bad race yet. When you have eight races in a row without a bad one, this is what happens points-wise.

“What’s going to happen on the final nine, it’s impossible to say. There’s so much season still that he’s got a good cushion at this point, they’ve done a great job, but I don’t think that guarantees anything in INDYCAR.”

Even with podium finishes for Newgarden and Pato O’Ward in Road America, they were still disappointed to see Palou extend his lead.

“Obviously happy with the result. But yeah, I think we all need to be better if we want to catch the 10 car,” O’Ward lambasted. “That’s just the reality of it. We had a massive opportunity to capitalize and I think to win this race, because I feel like I definitely had the pace. We kind of threw that away in our last pit stop.

“Yeah, we’re just going to keep on fighting. We win together, we lose together. That’s how it’s always going to be.

“So, yeah, I’m excited for the nine races to come. It’s still a long championship, lots can happen. We just need to keep improving.”

Newgarden agreed saying that he felt like while Palou had the field covered in the end, he could have done a better job in the middle of the race to get ahead of the Spaniard.

 “I mean, it was a pretty good day. Yeah, it was an okay day,” said the Indy 500 champion. “Disappointing for the way it finished for us just because there was a great opportunity in the middle to win this race.

“I think at the end Alex had the field covered. He was very good on that final stint. I don’t think we were going to make anything happen there. In the middle there was a great opportunity, we just didn’t capitalize on it. Got pretty dicey with the restarts.

“I’m conflicted because on the one hand it was a great recovery for all of us on Team Penske. We started this weekend in pretty bad shape, were really far off the pace. We chipped away at it, did a lot of work, felt like we got really close in qualifying, had a really good race car.

“From that standpoint I’m elated, but just disappointed. Looked like we had an opportunity today and we weren’t really able to seal the deal. It was a great job for our team.”

The thing is, podiums are no longer going to cut it. O’Ward has squandered finishes of 2nd, 2nd, 4th, 2nd and 3rd respectively when he’s finished on the lead lap. It’s those finishes of 17th (Long Beach), 24th (Indy 500) and 26th (Detroit) as to why he’s where he’s at.

Same for Newgarden. He’s won twice (Texas, Indy 500). He’s finished second once (Road America). It’s 17th in St. Pete. It’s 15th in Barber. It’s 10th in Detroit. That’s why podiums no longer cut it.

It’s also that Palou has been untouchable. The Spaniard is on a string of races to where he’s started 3rd, 1st, 1st and 3rd and finished 1st, 4th, 1st and 1st. He’s led 172 of the 440 laps in the process.

He went from nine points down entering the Month of May to 74 points up leaving Road America. The only real way to catch him now is if he makes some uncharacteristically bad mistakes and I use that in plural since he has such a big cushion.

So far? Palou hasn’t really had that 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 in the Indy 500 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, 76 more in Detroit and 10 in Road America.

Sunday was Palou’s 7th straight top 5 finish and 8th top 10 in as many races. Palou has scored 23 top five finishes in the last 41 races. Among those 23 are 17 podium finishes. By comparison, over that same span, Scott Dixon has 22 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 32 top 10’s in this span. Just 9 of those 32 top 10’s were on the podium.

Palou has 36 top 10’s in that span with 17 on the podium. See the difference?

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

Same for Newgarden. He has 31 top 10 finishes with 19 of those in the top five but just 14 of those 31 were on the podium. Palou is consistently in the top 10 (87.8%) with 56% in the top five and 41.4% of the time on the podium.

In order to make up that gap, you have to start winning and doing so in bunches. That’s forcing others into making some costly errors.

In order to do that, you have to take risks, hence O’Ward’s three costly errors.

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.

The thing is, he’s not overly confident in doing so either.

“Yeah, I mean, I would understand racing for points on the last two races, but it’s too early,” he notes. “We did eight races. There’s still eight or nine left.

“Yeah, I mean, somebody else can do the same amount of points that we did, or even more, with the races that we have left.

“Yeah, we’re going to focus on scoring wins because that’s the way we can score more points. That’s the best way. Honestly, there’s some races coming up now that are still really good for us and we know we’re going to have a car and my confidence to fight for wins.

“I mean, everybody can win seven races in a row. It’s tough in INDYCAR, but we can do that. Somebody else could do that.

“We’re going to focus on each weekend. Each weekend is different. It’s like the work starts from zero. We’re taking that mentality this year. I think it’s working, it’s paying off.

“So yeah, I’m glad that we have those points in our camp, and we don’t have to catch other people, but I’m not relaxed by the points gap at all because it’s INDYCAR. If it was another series, yeah, maybe I would be a bit more relaxed. In INDYCAR you can’t.

“We’re going to keep pushing and trying for the wins, focus on the championship the last couple races.”

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 3.2 over the last nine races. He’s led 265 laps in that span with four race 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.

Next up is to Mid-Ohio to where he’s finished third and second the last two years. Then it’s to Toronto to where he was sixth as a rookie there a year ago but has finished fifth and first respectively in his last two street races.

While Iowa and Gateway could pose problems, you still have the Indy Road course (he won the last time out), Portland (he won in 2021) and Laguna Seca (he won last year) left too.

His lead could be approaching 100 leaving Mid-Ohio.

“Yeah, absolutely. I feel a lot better,” Palou said on this run compared to his 2021 championship season. “In ’21, everything was new for me. I didn’t really know how to manage stuff. It was all new for me.

“At least now I have some more experience both on track and off track. Hopefully we can maintain that gap.”