Where next for IndyCar’s Will Power?

If it’s September 1, the IndyCar season must be over and done with. In terms of the championship, the drama ended on August 10 as a third-place finish at Portland guaranteed Álex Palou his fourth series championship in the last five years. That’s a statistic of historical significance, achieved before only by AJ Foyt (four USAC titles between 1960-64), Sébastien Bourdais (2004-07 Champ Car) and Dario Franchitti (2007-11 IRL). And Palou has only gotten better since embarking on this streak when he joined Chip Ganassi Racing in 2021.

This was his most dominating performance yet, with eight wins in the first 15 races; he could match the record of 10 set by Foyt in 1964 and Al Unser in 1970 if he sweeps the final two ovals that wrap up the campaign. Palou has clearly figured out how to get the best out of the tail-heavy hybrid spec Indycar better than anyone else, and he could make a mockery of the final two years of the current formula until a much-needed new car arrives.

“Power said he did not expect to learn his fate until Nashville”

The Portland race was won by Will Power, providing a ray of sunshine for Team Penske in what has been a stormy season by the organisation’s usual lofty standards. But the biggest story coming out of Portland was Power’s contractual status – or lack thereof, given that Penske has kept the veteran Australian hanging all year long. Power said he did not expect to learn his fate until the week of the August 30-31 finale at Nashville, after which he was free to talk to other teams.

Power, 44, is IndyCar’s career leader with 71 pole positions, and his 45 wins rank him fourth of all time. He has been Penske’s most consistent performer during the last two turbulent years and the only one of its three drivers to reach victory lane through most of ’25. But his reflective post-race demeanour at Portland suggested that Penske had already decided to replace him with 23-year-old American David Malukas, under contract and currently farmed out to AJ Foyt Racing.

A year after IndyCar unification, Power was unemployed in early 2009 when he got the call from Penske to serve as a stand-by driver while Hélio Castroneves was embroiled in a tax-evasion trial. Power qualified on pole at Long Beach and finished second in his Penske debut, and when Castroneves was cleared of the charges and returned, Penske ran Power in a third car in a few additional races. He won at Edmonton and has been a fixture with the team ever since, winning IndyCar championships in 2014 and ’22 and the 2018 Indianapolis 500.

Public sentiment is firmly in Power’s favour, and Malukas would benefit from another year of seasoning outside the pressurised Penske environment. If he is cast adrift, Power will have no shortage of suitors – albeit unlikely to put him in as competitive a situation as he has enjoyed for the last 17 years with IndyCar’s ultimate Goliath. Still, the notion of him elevating a team like Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing is perhaps an even more appealing storyline than a one-year stay of execution with Penske.

In 2020, Kyle Larson ran 97 races on dirt in addition to his full-time schedule in the NASCAR Cup Series. The following year, he won 10 Cup races and the series championship for Hendrick Motorsports while contesting more than 50 additional sprint, midget, outlaw and late model stock car races. He cut back the last couple of years, instead attempting the same-day Indianapolis 500/Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR ‘double’.

Larson, who would race eight days a week if he could, is an extreme example. But he’s far from the only NASCAR star who moonlights from his day job.

In 2016, NASCAR started limiting the number of Xfinity Series and Truck Series races that drivers in the top-level Cup Series could enter. It was informally called the ‘Kyle Busch rule’, put in place to end the two-time Cup champion’s dominant performances in NASCAR’s lower levels.

Busch has twice won NASCAR Truck, Xfinity and Cup Series races in the same weekend. With 63 Cup wins, 102 in Xfinity and 67 in Trucks, he’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer. “I definitely miss being able to run as much as I want to,” he said.

When Larson contested the Indy/Charlotte double, a major concern from the NASCAR side was the potential of injury in the 230mph Indycar. But the grassroots dirt-track races he frequently contests at much slower speeds can be equally dangerous, as demonstrated in early August when Stewart Friesen, a long-time competitor in the Truck Series with four career wins, sustained serious injuries while running a modified dirt car at Autodrome Drummond in Canada. Likely out for the season, Friesen sportingly waived the play-off berth he had already earned.

Then again, racing can even be dangerous off the track. Xfinity Series phenom Connor Zilisch slipped off the roof of his car at Watkins Glen after his sixth win of the season. What has become a clichéd post-race celebration turned scary when the 19-year-old caught his foot in the window net and B-pillar and tumbled to the ground. He thankfully wasn’t concussed but sustained a broken collarbone and faced the prospect of missing at least one race. It was a rare stumble for Zilisch, who appears destined to be NASCAR’s next major star.

Based in Indianapolis, John Oreovicz has been covering US racing for 30 years. He is author of the 2021 book Indy Split