The possibility of a route to Formula 1 was always a big factor in soon to be double IndyCar champion Alex Palou’s interest in joining McLaren.
So how does his latest contract drama and apparent snub of McLaren impact his future F1 chances?
We know there has been interest from AlphaTauri and Williams in Palou for 2024, and that the runaway IndyCar points leader holds the all-important superlicence points he would need for F1, unlike IndyCar rival Colton Herta when he was trying to get into F1 a year ago.
And we also know that Palou’s IndyCar form has been crucial to his rise in international profile. So sticking with the team that has allowed him to win four races and build that huge lead this year – Ganassi – makes a lot of sense, especially as McLaren is winless in IndyCar this season, and is currently limited by needing a new factory which it isn’t set to move into until 2025.
If Palou does indeed stay at Ganassi and doesn’t sign to race for a team on the moon, which seems like the logical next step in this story, then he may actually have made his decision to spurn an IndyCar team with an F1 arm because he thinks it’s his best move given the current F1 driver market.
He’s repeatedly stated in recent weeks that there are no seats in F1 for him now. That’s true at this moment.
AlphaTauri has brought in Daniel Ricciardo as a Nyck de Vries replacement, and even if Ricciardo impresses so much that he merits a drive in the senior Red Bull team, there’s no easy pathway to dropping Sergio Perez.
He’s under contract for next year and does wonders for Red Bull’s marketing and sales in Mexico. He has big on- and off-track benefits.
So it’s not impossible that Palou would end up in the Red Bull fold eventually, but it’s not straightforward, either.
Williams might be the more likely scenario, with Logan Sargeant having a mixed year in his rookie season for the team. There’s been impressive pace and inconsistency seemingly in equal measure, and Palou might be a more experienced – outside of F1 at least – option with plenty of upside of his own.
Like AlphaTauri though, Williams won’t make this call until late in the F1 season or after. Those two teams need more races to form their judgements on Ricciardo and Sargeant respectively.
With the big seats in IndyCar being decided well before then, Palou knew he needed to make an IndyCar team decision before AlphaTauri and Williams do in F1, and therefore whatever happened with his IndyCar decision, any opportunity to race in F1 would require a future contract buyout by that team.
Or would it?
The other option is, if he’d have stayed at McLaren, that it could have loaned him out to another team.
Of course, that would create a vacuum in McLaren’s IndyCar team that would require a replacement.
But there’s every chance McLaren still won’t quite be ready to contend for an IndyCar title next year and therefore losing Palou won’t be the difference between winning a title or the all-important Indianapolis 500 or not.
So if McLaren was serious about Palou as a future F1 prospect, giving him say a year or two on loan at Williams would give it a great way to see if Palou is a potential replacement for Oscar Piastri or Lando Norris should an even bigger team move for them.
That’s a hypothetical option that McLaren would have had to agree to, of course, and maybe it wouldn’t agree that the real-life assessment of Palou as an F1 prospect through the loan would be more important than having Palou in its IndyCar team.
Or it might not have him under a long enough contract to ensure it would get to use him at the end of the assessment. The last thing you’d want to do is loan him out and not have the first choice on him at the end of that assessment period.
His McLaren contract – which team boss Zak Brown says Palou signed – is also believed to have had a clause that meant after July 1, McLaren did not need to release Palou if he received an offer from another F1 team.
We know McLaren doesn’t have an F1 seat, so after that clause expired, contractually McLaren would be well within its rights to force Palou to race for it in IndyCar next year and not allow him to leave for another team at all in any series. That’s another reason Palou may have decided to stick with Ganassi.
One thing that isn’t hypothetical is the access Palou would have had to F1 race weekends, a team with a much bigger global profile and probably more F1 testing had he gone with McLaren.
Ganassi has sent IndyCar drivers to F1 before. But the most recent (Juan Pablo Montoya) was over 20 years ago, and F1 is now a much different place. While Ganassi is respected for its achievements worldwide, it’s much more significant in North American than anywhere else. It doesn’t have anywhere near the marketing and media power that McLaren carries globally.
If Palou wanted to continue to build his brand, and his reputation in the F1 paddock, the only way to do that more than winning a championship by over 100 points in IndyCar is to be in the F1 paddock; to be in an F1 car; to be part of it.
He won’t get that access staying at Ganassi or at any IndyCar team other than McLaren.
But what of everything that has unfolded with his actions over the last 12 months?
It’s unlikely Palou and/or his advisors at any given time would have got away with some of their actions if he was currently racing in F1.
In IndyCar, Palou is the big fish, the star athlete with all the power. Teams can’t afford to lose him and his abilities.
In F1, I’m sure the teams would be confident of locking up Palou, and in their legal teams in creating a more structured deal for Palou to have to stick to. Plus, very few drivers are the big fish in F1, certainly not usually ones driving for midfield teams and with little experience in the championship.
My feeling is that if an F1 team thinks he is a driver with the right amount of potential, little attention will be paid to his previous actions and he’d still get the chance.
But if there’s even a shred of doubt in their minds, surely this affair offers a significant amount of weight in the debate process as to whether to take the risk or not.
One thing in Palou’s favour is that his contractual complexity previously had been mentioned as a potential deterrent for another F1 team to sign him. But that’s now cleared and there’s likely no way Palou could end up racing for McLaren, making his a more straightforward situation.
With F1 returning from its summer break in a week, we may well get a more clear and definitive answer on how Palou’s new contract drama is being viewed in the grand prix paddock.
For now, it looks like Palou has prioritised being in the fastest IndyCar team to ensure he can continue to win and impress with the hope of attracting a Formula 1 team in the future, as opposed to taking advantage of McLaren’s testing and marketing abilities while knowing that it’s unlikely to have an F1 vacancy any time soon given Norris’s and Piastri’s form.
Neither would have been an easy opportunity to pass up.
Keyword: How Mc Laren contract row affects Palou’s F1 chances