This weekend at Barber Motorsports Park was definitely one for the books. Following in Scott McLaughlin’s footsteps, Alex Palou scored a victory from pole position at the Children’s of Alabama Grand Prix. Following his success in qualifying on Saturday which ended with the NTT P1 Award, Palou showed great consistency leading 81 laps out of 90.
This P1 finish at Barber is the Chip Ganassi driver’s 14th career win and gives him a 60-point advantage in the fight for the championship. The reigning champ has shown once again how he stays at the top with consistent drives and a fighting spirit.
Show Up and Drive
Driving an incredible race, the Spaniard who drives the Nop. 10 DHL Honda for Chip Ganassi Racing ends his weekend all smiles.
“Amazing. Amazing weekend. It was a perfect day today for me…and for the Honda 10 car.
“Yeah, I mean, everything worked really well for us since yesterday. Getting the pole was a huge milestone for us, to start up front, try to make profit of the good performance that we had this weekend.
“Then we were a bit worried about the strategy, right? We’ve always seen here that it could go either way, two stop or three stop, depending on yellows or normal tire mileage and fuel mileage.
“We tried to open the gap early on. When I saw that we had a really good car balance, yeah, I was just getting happier and happier towards the end of the race.”
Leading ninety percent of the race at the weekend, Palou has led one thousand laps total in his whole career in the series. He did not expect to be at this point and recognized the amazing accomplishment.
“My goal was to be an INDYCAR driver, then was just to be an INDYCAR race winner or a person that could fight for wins and sometimes for championships.
“Yeah, I don’t think that I’m in a normal position. I’m aware that I’m very lucky to be in the position I am today, to be surrounded by a great team, being able to fight for wins every single weekend.
“Yeah, I don’t know how long that [is] going to continue, but hopefully it’s going to be for a long time.”
Hard Work Yields Success
Palou was 16.0035 seconds ahead of the second place finisher, Christian Lundgaard, leaving him to light-heartedly quip at how lonely it gets up front.
“Yeah, I didn’t say it [in] a bad way. It’s actually fun for a driver when you can just focus on your laps, on your car. You don’t need to really worry about gaps. You can just focus and blend into one, right?
“You know you have 22 laps in front of you. You need to pass some traffic, which was actually quite easy to do today. There’s races where you just suddenly get stuck. Today I was able to drive by.
“It’s actually fun. You get into that zone of, like, just getting lap times, and you focus on the lap time, the next corner, just trying to get as much fuel mileage but at the same time taking care of the tires and opening the gap a little bit more.
“For a driver, it’s actually super fun. I was more, like, saying it for the fans, not for me. Like for me, if every race is like this, I would love it.”
Tire strategy played a big part in Palou’s dominance during the race. He more or less mirrored the strategy that McLaughlin was on by running on reds. McLaughlin won from pole position last year and the Chip Ganassi driver wanted to see that success for himself.
“We thought for this weekend what worked best for our car was the red tires, the soft tires. We wanted to start on used reds, try and get as many laps as possible without losing too much from tire deg.
“Then we went to primaries because we saw that Colton was quite good. He maintained a quite good pace. McLaughlin at that time went to primaries as well. We wanted to be on the same page, as well, just in case there was a yellow and then suddenly at the end we had to restart on a different tire. We wanted to be on the same page as them.”
Concentrate Until the End
The 2.3 mile track at Barber is full of fast corners with low grip. Add this to the absence of power steering and drivers can expect wear and tear. Palou commented on the physicality of the race.
“Yeah, it was physical more than anything. Like, we always know that Barber is probably one of the more physical places that we have. Probably, yeah, I would say it’s the toughest on physical for the drivers. Especially today that we had no cautions, we had to run as fast as possible. We didn’t really have a huge tire deg, so you had to push.
“Physically it was tough. But then also concentration always, it’s difficult, right? It’s a long race. It’s tough. Yeah, you’re pushing as hard as possible, but the car doesn’t like it towards the end of the tire life.
“Yeah, it’s good. I mean, that’s our job, so that’s what we do. But then in traffic, yeah, we had quite a lot of traffic throughout the race. Had to do quite a lot of passes, more than any other race I would say this year.
“It’s tough. It’s a tough place to pass. At the same time it’s a place where if the car in front of you tries to block you or defend a little bit in, like, turn five, let’s say, you can probably push him into turn six and get the position there. It’s a track that generates quite a lot of passing opportunities.”
IMS Awaits
With a 60-point lead in the championship, IndyCar’s reigning champ has had a successful 2025 season so far. Going into IMS with both the road course and the 500, the Spaniard will be the one to keep an eye on. There is no doubt that Palou has shown up and proven his value and incredible prowess as a driver in this sport.
