The IndyCar 2026 season ended at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca on 6 September with a familiar name on the trophy and an unfamiliar sense of finality about it. Alex Palou won a fifth championship in six years, Honda took the manufacturers’ crown, and the series spent the days after the finale turning its first laps in the car that will replace everything currently on the grid. This is the story of the year, and of what it sets up.
How the IndyCar 2026 season was won
Palou did not so much win the title as remove it from circulation. The 29-year-old Spaniard arrived at The Milwaukee Mile in late August 91 points clear of Kyle Kirkwood with three races left, and left Wisconsin as champion with a round still to run. In doing so he became both the youngest and the fastest driver in the history of American open-wheel racing to reach five championships — four of them consecutive, five in six seasons at Chip Ganassi Racing.
The coronation itself was scruffy in a way the season never was. Rain suspended Race 1 of the Milwaukee doubleheader after 90 laps, meaning Race 2 was completed first. Palou led a race-high 115 of its 250 laps from pole in the #10 Ganassi Honda before handling trouble dropped him to fifth. Kirkwood’s recovery from 24th to sixth bought a few hours’ delay, no more. Palou took 10th in the resumed opener and the maths was done.
“We were going for the win today and didn’t really have enough pace,” Palou said afterwards, in comments reported by Motorsport.com. “I felt good at the beginning but kind of fell off at the end.” We looked at how that fifth title rewrote the record books at the time.
Honda’s year, and Pato O’Ward’s afternoon
Behind the champion, the manufacturers’ fight was equally lopsided. Honda was crowned 2026 manufacturers’ champion after a campaign in which it swept every street race on the calendar, taking 15 of the 18 available podium places on temporary circuits and leading 543 of 597 laps on them.
The single best afternoon of the year, though, belonged to Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward, who won both Milwaukee races on the same day — the first driver to manage that since Rick Mears in 1981. It was the sort of statistical curiosity the rain-scrambled schedule produced almost by accident, and the sort that will be quoted for another 45 years.
Laguna Seca: a finale worth staying up for
With the championship settled, the finale had to find its drama elsewhere, and did. Scott McLaughlin led 87 of the 95 laps around the 2.238-mile circuit in the #3 Team Penske Chevrolet to end a winless run stretching back to 2024, finishing 1.3739s clear of Kirkwood. It was his eighth career victory and Penske’s 312th in the series — and, as he pointed out, his first as a father. Our full report on McLaughlin’s Laguna Seca win has the detail; if you want to understand why the circuit rewards that kind of front-running, our guide to the Corkscrew explains the geometry.
Alexander Rossi took third in the #20 Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet, a first podium since 2024 and his first with the team, closing out what he called “a pretty terrible year”. Felix Rosenqvist was fourth in his final outing for Meyer Shank Racing. Twenty-two of the 25 starters finished on the lead lap.
The season’s quiet winner
Not every headline came from the front. Rinus VeeKay took 10th in the drivers’ standings for Juncos Hollinger Racing — a first career top-10 championship result for driver and team alike, built on one podium, four top-fives and eight top-10s across 18 races. He outpointed Will Power and Scott Dixon in the process, and the result comfortably beat JHR’s previous best of 16th, set by Callum Ilott in 2023.
That mattered financially as well as sentimentally. The Leaders Circle programme guarantees the highest-placed full-season entries a payment worth $1.7m apiece, and for a team of JHR’s size the difference between one side of that line and the other shapes an entire winter. Our piece on VeeKay’s milestone finish covers the run-in.
What the IndyCar 2026 season sets up
The most consequential thing to happen after the chequered flag was not a driver announcement but a test. On 9 September, Rossi turned the first oval laps in the superspeedway configuration of the next-generation IR-28 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The Dallara-built car, due to race from 2028, is lighter than the current chassis and carries revised aerodynamics intended to reduce the turbulence that punishes a following car — the central problem of oval racing.
“It does everything that IndyCar Series machinery should do around here,” Rossi told Motorsport.com. “There was no surprise. It was really pretty standard.” Dull, in this context, is exactly what the series wanted to hear; our report on the IR-28’s first oval run explains why.
Elsewhere the grid is already reshaping. Dennis Hauger took rookie honours at Dale Coyne Racing ahead of Mick Schumacher, Rosenqvist has left Meyer Shank Racing, and Scott Dixon will line up for Arrow McLaren in 2027 after 25 seasons with Chip Ganassi Racing. The IndyCar 2026 season may have been settled early, but the years either side of it look anything but.
