Alex Palou is as humble as they come. The Spaniard is arguably one of the best, if not the best, race car drivers in the world right now. In F1, you have Max Verstappen. He’s the two-time defending world champion. The thing is, Verstappen is also dominating with a team that’s been untouchable too. Red Bull has won all eight races run this year.

Here stateside, Palou is dominating in ways that we’ve not seen over here in years and doing so in an era of racing that has been as close as it’s ever been before.

No one is disputing the fact that the NTT INDYCAR SERIES is from top down the best racing series in regards to competition and closeness of racing. However, Palou is still shining and standing out in a series of such parity.

The 26-year-old 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.

This amount of success isn’t new to Palou. It’s something that he’s experienced before as he told me that he remembers a Pro League in 2012 in go-karts to where he was battling every single weekend with Callum Ilott, George Russell, some others. It was every weekend. It was awesome he says and he excelled at it.

He also was strong in Super Formula too. As he got used to the car he also got more and more comfortable. The results showed. This is similar. However, that was karting and Super Formula. This is INDYCAR. This holds a lot more weight and is the best moment of his racing career so far he says.

He went from nine points down entering the Month of May to 74 points up heading into Sunday’s Honda Indy 200 (1:30 p.m. ET, USA, INDYCAR Radio Network) in Mid-Ohio.

“I would say it’s getting bigger,” Palou said of this momentum.

Next up is Mid-Ohio this weekend to where he’s finished third and second respectively in each of 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 run on the season.

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.

The points championship is essentially his to lose at the moment. In saying that, he’s also not looking at or approaching Sunday’s race at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course any differently as the eight races prior or the immediate races after.

“If it was another series, maybe yeah, you could try and just finish where you need to finish. In INDYCAR you really can’t,” he notes.

He said that he did points race at the end of the 2021 season, but that was due to trying to secure his championship. He drove under the limit in doing so. This time, it’s far too early to be doing that and he feels like he should try and score more points to get an even bigger gap.

He tells me that he feels like there’s still some areas that he needs to improve upon and what gives him confidence is the fact that he doesn’t feel like they’ve done anything differently on his car now than they did this past spring. His recent success if a byproduct of them having luck on their side and others having misfortunes on theirs.

“At the same time I just think that everything is working really good for us now,” he continued. “I feel like we were as strong as we are now at the beginning of the season, but we had some ups and downs during the races. Long Beach was a clear example where we were running in the top four, got caught up on an accident, dropped back to 15th and still finished P5.

“Our performance is there. It’s just we’re able to get the results and get clean weekends, which is not real easy to do very often in INDYCAR.

“I feel like we have momentum. Momentum in motorsports matters a lot for driver confidence, team confidence, mechanic confidence. Everybody want to get the win, just like you are asking for more and more. It just gets better and better.

“Hopefully we can, as I said, keep the wave big or even bigger. Hopefully we can continue having some success.”

In saying that, Palou is taking the humbling approach to these upcoming races. He feels the momentum right now. He truly does. He also feels the large wave of confidence that it has brought forth too.

In this day-and-age, for a driver that’s doing what Palou is, he has every right to let the world know about it. He’s shown that he should be considered as the best in the world right now. Instead, he struggles to place himself in the top five.

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” he told me on Tuesday afternoon ahead of Sunday’s race at Mid-Ohio. “I think it’s very tough to compare drivers with the equipment you have, with the experience you have… So, yeah, I wouldn’t say that.

“Obviously I rate myself very high, I have to say. Otherwise, yeah, I wouldn’t be doing this. Yeah, I still think there’s a lot of things that I can improve as a driver, that I want to improve as a driver, and that I see from other people like Scott Dixon doing better.

“Yeah, I rate myself high, but not too high. I don’t think I’m here like top five in the world. I think there’s very, very talented guys out there, even in INDYCAR.”

As humble of a statement as that is, his stats paint a better picture than what he sees.

His Road America win was his 7th straight top five finish and 8th top 10 in as many races. He’s 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?

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 and I feel like he’s absolutely a top five driver in this world too.

“Oh, yeah, feels amazing,” Palou said of this recent string of races that he’s put together. “We had obviously really fast cars throughout all the year and we were able to maximize and get those wins that we were maybe lacking last year.

“So, yeah, hopefully it doesn’t stop here. Hopefully we can keep it going. We have a couple of races now coming up that we were really strong last year as well. We feel very confident. So yeah, hopefully we can add some more wins this year.”

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 and the ones that he feels did, they’d still rebound.

As far as why they’re clicking better now than last year, he says it’s tough to say. What he does say is a statement that’s scary for the rest of the field – he’s getting comfortable.

“I would say I have more confidence with the car,” says Palou as to why. “I know a little bit more what I need from the car. The same for the team. They know what I need. They know what works for me, what doesn’t.

“In 2021 we were just guessing and trying stuff. Sometimes works, sometimes it didn’t. ’22 we understood a little bit more. This year I just have more confidence with myself, with the car, obviously with the team.

“So yeah, it’s tough to say. I don’t think it’s one thing. I would say it’s a little bit of a lot of things that are helping us be more consistent.”

Now, he’s at a place in Mid-Ohio that’s special to him.

“It was my first INDYCAR test there. So my first INDYCAR test was at Mid-Ohio. I like it. It’s a really short track and really tight. Like you cannot really breathe a lot. But it’s amazing. It just feels very, very nice, especially sector two, sector three areas.

“I don’t know, I like it. As I said, it’s extra special because it was my first test there, and we had good cars the last couple of years. Hopefully we can try and improve it a little bit more and get one step higher than what we did last year.”