Maiden Indy 500 win completes Palou's domination of IndyCar

SPEEDWAY, Ind. -- We love to poke holes in the resumés of heroes. LeBron James has won four NBA titles ... but he's lost six. Tom Brady won seven Super Bowls ... but didn't he let the air out of the footballs that one time?

In the IndyCar world, no one has enjoyed more success in the past half decade than Álex Palou. Few in history can match his current run of checkered flags and rings. Since mid-April 2021, he had won 15 races, eight poles and three championships.

But ... he hadn't won the Indy 500. But ... he hadn't won on any oval at all. But ... OK, that was really it. But ... those two buts were a lingering pain the butt for Palou, a cool-headed perfectionist, who just this week said repeatedly that his career, even his life, would feel incomplete should he never find his way into motorsports' most coveted Victory Lane.

Consider the man completed. On Sunday, the 28-year-old became the 74th winner of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing and the first from Spain, closing out the 109th edition of the race by riding a flawless pit strategy to the front and then riding a fast machine to hold off a weaving 2022 Indy 500 winner Marcus Ericsson by 0.6822 seconds.

"I did say that. And I did mean that. Perhaps that makes me greedy, but I believe that any racer, all they want to do is win the greatest events, and this is the greatest event," Palou said, standing behind the winner's circle, still wet with the celebratory milk. As he talked, a LaLiga-worthy cheer of "Palou! Pa-lou Pa-lou Pa-lou! Pa-looou, Pa-looou!" broke out from a group of fans below, waving the Spanish flag. "Even with the wins and even with the three championships, to some, there was something missing. And it was missing for me, too."

He pointed to his dancing countrymen and women.

"I had no idea there would be so many Spaniards here. I think we can see that it was missing for them, too! I love giving this gift to them!"

In the larger scope of the season, Palou is giving everyone the gift of watching the greatest start witnessed in IndyCar since nearly two decades before his birth. He's won four of six races and finished second in the other two. In 1979, A.J. Foyt won five of his first six starts, the only miss being a second place in the Indy 500. Current Foyt team driver David Malukas was one of the cars Palou battled late, finishing third.

There isn't much that race car drivers dislike more than when they are asked to frame up their place in their chosen sport's history. They always serve up the same deflections: that they are too focused on the here and now, that there will be time for all of that perspective stuff later, when their helmet is hung up.

Unless they have just won the Indianapolis 500.

"Am I supposed to be cool now and tell you that we knew we would win it and it is just another race and we are already thinking about the next one, all of that stuff?" he replied, laughing, and flashing his right-out-of-the-box winner's ring. "No, I will enjoy it. I will enjoy it for the rest of my life."

He also enjoyed the moment that brought him that win.

His Chip Ganassi Honda was in fuel-saving mode during the last stanza of the race, tucked in behind Ericsson and forcing the Swede's Andretti Global ride to do the air-splitting work up front. But with 15 laps remaining, a little ahead of schedule, he felt the field nipping at his rear. Rolling through Turn One, he took at a glance at the pit lane and the jumbo TV screens and saw that several potential race rivals were pitting for fuel. Knowing that he had driven into the window that would allow him to stand on the throttle, he did just that and whipped his car into the lead.

A crestfallen Ericsson, a former teammate, said that the move "Will keep me up at night. What I did. And what I didn't do."

As with any Indy 500, there was one winner and 32 others who will lay awake Sunday night, but this year seemed crueler than most. Palou made history. Others who had a chance came up short. All of them.

Kyle Larson, in his second attempt at the Indy-to-Charlotte Memorial Day Double, crashed out just shy of halfway, on lap 91, losing control on a restart, hitting the wall and immediately flying away for NASCAR's Coca-Cola 600.

Marco Andretti wrecked nearly as soon as his 20th Indy 500 started, extending the family losing streak that has continued since his grandfather Mario won the event in 1969.

Former winners Ryan Hunter-Reay and Alex Rossi were undone by a failure of IndyCar's still-new hybrid engine system and a frightening fuel fire. Scott McLaughlin, the only Team Penske driver not to be caught up in the week's rules violation scandal, never saw the green flag, embarrassingly spinning out during the warmup laps as he tried to warm up his tires on the coldest race day since 1992, when pole sitter Roberto Guerrero did the same. It was 58 degrees following a frigid morning in '92. On Sunday, 50 degree sunrise temps never rose above the low 60s and the racetrack surface was in the 90s, well below its normal steamy May self and easily the coldest it had been in two weeks of Indy 500 prep.

And the unwitting face of that rules controversy, Team Penske's Josef Newgarden, saw his chance at redemption, as well as a shot to become the first to win three consecutive 500s, undone by a fuel pressure issue, coming after he had raced his way from a penalty-caused last-row starting position and into the top ten before exiting on lap 135.

"There aren't many races left that are true endurance races, apart from the 24-hour events and, I don't know, rally and off-road?" Palou thought aloud. "But this race feels like an endurance race. I can tell you that when it is over, you are never more exhausted, mentally and physically."

Even now?

"Well, no. Maybe they put some espresso in that milk. Or sugar. It was definitely the sweetest milk I've ever tasted."

The providers of that traditional milk, the American Dairy Association of Indiana, give the Indy 500 participants a choice of which jug of white stuff they want to chug should they find themselves celebrating the win. Palou chose whole milk. Fitting, since he is now finally whole, complete as a racer and person. That is what he said about winning this race, after all.

"I don't know ..." he amended, pulling his mouth into a smirk because he realized what he was about to say was going to contradict everything he had said up to this point. "Maybe to really be complete, I might need to win another one of these."