There is dominance, and then there is what Alex Palou has done to the NTT IndyCar Series. His 2026 championship — sealed with 631 points and an 86-point margin over Kyle Kirkwood — is his fifth title in six seasons, a run of sustained control over a famously unpredictable series that has few parallels in its modern history. In a category where spec machinery, tight Balance and a mix of ovals, road courses and street circuits are specifically designed to spread success around, one driver has simply refused to let it.

The margin tells the story. Eighty-six points clear across an 18-round season is not a last-race escape — it is a driver who was in control for most of the year, banking podiums when he could not win and rarely giving his rivals a weekend to claw meaningful ground back. Kirkwood’s Andretti Global campaign was strong enough to be best of the rest by a distance, yet still finished the year closer to third place than to Palou at the top.

The complete final classification, including the full-season regulars (all 18 starts) and the one-off entries who appeared only at the Indianapolis 500.

Palou’s title was built on Honda power and Chip Ganassi Racing machinery, but the depth chart behind him tells a more balanced story. The top ten split almost evenly between the two engine manufacturers — Honda taking positions 1, 2, 7 and 9, Chevrolet taking 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 10 — a competitive equilibrium the series works hard to maintain.

Team Penske placed the most cars in the top ten with three — Malukas, McLaughlin and Newgarden — yet none finished higher than fifth, an illustration of consistent strength without a title-challenging peak. Arrow McLaren’s Lundgaard and O’Ward were the best-matched pairing behind the champion, third and fourth and separated by just 13 points. For how these championship points are accumulated across IndyCar’s mixed calendar of ovals, road and street courses, see our guide to how racing championships are scored.

The 2026 rookie class was unusually deep, and it was Louis Foster who led it home — the Rahal Letterman Lanigan driver finishing 18th overall on 267 points across a full 18-start season, the top rookie in the final standings. Behind him came a genuinely eye-catching group.

Elsewhere in the field, veteran presence remained strong: six-time champion Scott Dixon finished 12th on 331 points in another full season for Ganassi, while the Indianapolis 500 drew its usual roll-call of legends and part-timers — Hélio Castroneves, Ed Carpenter, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Takuma Sato and Katherine Legge all appearing for their single starts of the year.

Read as a whole, the 2026 standings describe a season with one certainty and a great deal of chaos beneath it. Palou was the certainty — six wins and metronomic points-scoring that made the title a formality well before Laguna Seca. Everything from second place down was a scramble.

The 31 points covering second to fifth is the headline of that scramble: Kirkwood, Lundgaard, O’Ward and Malukas spent the season trading positions in a fight that never resolved into a clear “best of the rest.” That four drivers from four different squads — Andretti, Arrow McLaren (twice) and Penske — finished that tightly bunched speaks to how level the field is once you remove the champion from the equation.

For the wider open-wheel picture, our Formula 1 standings hub tracks the championship on the other side of the Atlantic, and our feature on the most Indy 500 wins of all time puts the careers of the one-off entries at the foot of this table into historical context.