Joe SkibinskiPenske Entertainment
By
Marshall Pruett - Mar 3, 2026, 1:04 PM ET
Usually the people yelling cheat are people who haven't planned well enough.
Easy to accuse, hard to prove with no evidence.. I'm reluctant to even use the C-word.
I am reluctant to even listen to someone yell the C-word when they have nothing to go on.
Why don't you loud mouths shut your mouths and learn how to drive and make your tires last!!
Remember Senna years ago who had figured out how to drive in the wet?
The loudmouths ran their mouths, and one race was even stopped early before Senna could get to the front. Nowadays, everybody drives in the wet the way Senna drove in the wet.
Is Palou cheating? No, he's the cheat code
If, as the old saying goes, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," where would accusations of cheating fall into the realm of adulation?
After their latest rollicking win, some folks are indeed struggling to accept what they’re seeing from Alex Palou and his Chip Ganassi Racing team. Especially when the No. 10 Honda squad pulled another upset after starting fourth at St. Petersburg and amassing leads that exceeded 10 seconds on two separate occasions. The trigger point is how the winning takes place.
“When Palou took the lead in St. Pete and built a 10-second lead in 10 laps, everyone, including me, started to wonder how that’s possible in a spec series without any tampering or fishiness to their car,” one such fan said in an outreach. “Add to that Ganassi’s lack of onboard cameras and I could see a recipe for some major conspiracies. Thoughts?” Yeah. Losers with not enough talent are full of bull manure.
It’s easier, it appears, to question the legality of what they’re witnessing – safer to point to exploiting of loopholes or allege skullduggery – than to accept the fantastical performances being produced by the No. 10 Honda team as honest or earned. Similar accusatory responses were elicited last year when Palou won five out of the first six races, eight total out of 17, and ran away with his fourth championship in five years.
Painting the achievements of a generational talent driving for the best team of the decade – so far, at least – as a byproduct of cheating takes no effort or evidence, which is unfortunate. But it speaks to the difficulty some have in processing Palou’s achievements or his level of skill.
Maybe you jerks should read what he actually did, you buttheads!
So is he cheating, or is Palou the ultimate cheat code?
When it comes to the spec Dallara DW12 and all of its hybrid heft,
Palou has mastered the art of finding the limit of adhesion and living a few decimal points below its razor-sharp edge.
His driving is often described in boring terms like "tidy," "clean" and "efficient." They’re a perfect fit for this car. And as the records show with 20 wins from 99 starts, "devastating" is another word that belongs among his descriptors.
Today’s DW12 is known as a killer of tires when drivers push beyond their limit and reach the point of sliding the fronts too often with bouts of understeer or locked brakes, or murdering the rears by repeatedly feeding in opposite lock to correct oversteer.
And we aren’t talking about huge, demonstrative drifts with IndyCar drivers visibly sawing at their steering wheels.
The tire-ending moments are subtle, small, and lightning fast; a swift accumulation of little corrections that accelerate rises in tire temperatures and rapid losses of grip.
Run the video back from St. Petersburg, or pretty much any of Palou’s races, and you won’t find him slewing sideways, or smoking tires through errant applications of the brake or the throttle pedal.
Palou’s super power is control, precision, and consistency with that control and precision.
If the tires start to surrender when driven at 100 percent, Palou hits 99.8 percent and lives at that self-induced threshold. I
f they can withstand less, he dials his metronomic limit down.