An NTT INDYCAR SERIES championship cannot be won in the season’s first two races. Or can it? History says yes.

Since 1979, seven of the eight drivers who captured the season’s first two races went on the hoist the championship trophy. The most recent was Scott Dixon, who in 2020 won the first three races en route to his sixth series title.

Now Alex Palou has a chance to go wire to wire, and his hold on the points lead might be the tightest yet. Reaching victory lane in Sunday’s The Thermal Club INDYCAR Grand Prix earned the Spaniard a 39-point lead on the field, and unlike Dixon, who jumped to a 29-point lead by winning the first two races of 2020, he won’t have to work through an Indianapolis 500 offering double points.

Additionally, Palou still has some of his best events to come. Fourteen venues remain, and the driver of the No. 10 DHL Honda has won series races at seven of them, scoring two wins each on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, Road America, WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca and Portland International Raceway.

If strategy is central to winning a race, count on Palou’s odds of winning to be strong there, too. He had a difference-making jump to pit road on the final stop of the season-opening Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg presented by RP Funding, and Sunday’s masterful drive featured a late overhaul of the two Arrow McLaren drivers in front of him – Pato O’Ward and Christian Lundgaard – because Palou and Chip Ganassi Racing strategist Barry Wanser had saved a new set of Firestone’s alternate tires for the final segment.

Palou has won races in so many different ways over the past four-plus years that he has competitors analyzing everything they’re doing to beat him.

“There is obviously something that we could have done better in order to give it more of a proper fight to (Palou),” O’Ward said after Sunday’s race.

O’Ward led 53 of Sunday’s first 55 laps. Executing his team’s strategy, Palou marched forward in the final segment and led the final 10 laps.

Wanser stressed that selecting the right tire strategy was something of a coin toss given that this was the first full race on the 17-turn, 3.067-mile permanent road course. No one, he said, was sure which of Firestone’s two tire compounds was going to be preferred in a 65-lap affair.

But read Wanser’s quote carefully. He alluded to what won this race and many others like it.

“You need to be able to get performance out of the tires, both the primaries and the alternates,” he said.

That’s the driver. Palou is 2-for-2 this season for a reason, and there likely will be more days like this to come.