Alex Palou not only had a masterful drive en route to the win in Sunday’s BITNILE.com Grand Prix of Portland, but he also took home the NTT INDYCAR SERIES championship in the process. Here’s some notes from the notebook.

• Andretti had a rough race weekend – Colton Herta’s P3 in qualifying masked the problems that plagued the team this weekend. They struggled in practice, saw Herta have a speeding penalty on his first stop and a spin with 4 to go late to take him down to 13th. Kyle Kirkwood had multiple blocking penalties and still finished 10th. He got off track on Lap 1. Romain Grosjean was a 1st lap casualty too. It was a weekend to forget for the Andretti camp.
• Row 6 shines – Felix Rosenqvist shouldn’t have started 11th. Neither should Josef Newgarden in 12th. They both had issues in the second round of qualifying on Saturday. Both were on the right tire strategy on Sunday and were in the top 7 after the first round of stops. For Rosenqvist, he was third. He’d finish on the podium while Newgarden was P5. Newgarden was P2 in Saturday morning’s practice and quickest in the final session on Saturday evening.
• Palou best driver on natural road courses – Palou has 9 INDYCAR wins, 8 of which have come on natural road courses. He won in 2021 at Barber, Road America and Portland. He won last year in Laguna Seca. This year, he won on the Indy Road Course, Road America, Mid-Ohio and Portland. The other non natural road course that he won at was on the streets of Detroit back in June. His 8 wins on these tracks since 2020 are tops in the series. Will Power, Josef Newgarden, Scott McLaughlin, Scott Dixon and Colton Herta each have 3. Power and Palou each have 14 podiums in this same span.
• Ganassi and Penske are tops on natural road courses in general – They’ve won all 6 tracks this season including each of the last 5 by Ganassi. They’ve also won the last 4 in Portland too. for podiums, Ganassi has 24 and Penske 22 since 2020. Andretti is next best with 17. McLaren is next after that with 7.
• Leaders Circle – Santino Ferrucci (+35), Helio Castroneves (+34) and Ryan Hunter-Reay (+13) added some comfort on Sunday while Juri Vips took the 30 ride from +1 to +6. Devlin DeFrancesco benefited from Agustin Canapino’s late race spin to go from -4 to +3 and holding the 22nd and final spot with one race remaining. Tom Blomqvist is -3 while Canapino is -5.
• Rahal – He has 2 poles in the last 3 races but finishes of 2nd and 12th in them. Pit strategy is the only reason for which he didn’t win either race. For here, the last 2 pole winners had won this race. Rahal couldn’t even muster a top 10.
• O’Ward surging – O’Ward had 3 runner-up finishes in the first 5 races of the season. He was 4th in 1 of the other 2 races. The one that he wasn’t was being overzealous in Long Beach.
  • The Indy 500 he was aggressive on the Lap 192 restart with Marcus Ericsson in Turn 3. He was first, slipped to third by time we got to Turn 1 and when trying to get back, he overstepped it. In Detroit, a bad pit stop while leading and pushing too hard to make up for it saw him catch the wall.
  • Take those three races out, his average finish on the season is 4.53.
  • He comes to the season finale with finishes of 3rd, 8th, 8th, 3rd, 10th, 8th, 3rd, 2nd, 4th in the last 9 races.
• Dixon/Palou untouchable – Dixon has had a top 7 finish in all but 1 race this year. That was when he was punted by Pato O’Ward in Long Beach. He was sixth at the time.
  • Since May, Dixon has finished 6th, 6th, 4th, 4th, 2nd, 4th, 6th, 6th, 5th, 1st, 1st, 3rd. That’s an average finish of 4.0 in that 12-race stretch.
• It’s just that Palou has been a little bit better. Palou has finished 1st, 4th, 1st, 1st, 1st, 2nd, 8th, 3rd, 3rd, 7th, 7th, 1st in the same 12 races for an average finish of 3.25. He’s not finished worse than 8th since Portland last year. It was those mid season wins from Palou and it taking Dixon until it was too late to go on his run.
• Each of the last 5 race winners have come from Row 3 on back: 7th, 8th, 15th, 16th, 5th. Prior to that, 10 of the 11 came from the top 2 rows: 4th, 4th, 1st, 4th, 3rd, 17th, 1st, 3rd, 4th, 1st, 3rd.
• There’s been 5 combined cautions over the last three races. 92.1% of the laps since August were run under green flag conditions. 72 of 80 laps in Nashville, 79 of 85 for the Gallagher Grand Prix, 238 of 260 at World Wide Technology Raceway and now 104 of 110 in Portland.