2026 Snap-on INDYCAR Weekend

Use the tabs or menu above to view session results, schedule, entrant facts, weather forecast, track facts and history.

How to Watch

Visit the Schedule tab for detailed schedule information.

Palou Can Close Out a Fourth Straight Title in Milwaukee's Two-Race Weekend

The NTT IndyCar Series arrives at the Milwaukee Mile with a championship nearly decided and two chances in two days to finish the job.

Saturday's Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 and Sunday's Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250 are each 250 laps and 253.75 miles around the 1.015-mile West Allis oval, the 16th and 17th races of an 18-race season. Alex Palou carries a 91-point lead over Kyle Kirkwood into the weekend, and if the No. 10 DHL Chip Ganassi Racing Honda does its usual work on Saturday afternoon, the fight could be over before the cars are unloaded for Sunday.

Palou has 553 points to Kirkwood's 462, with Christian Lundgaard third on 443, David Malukas fourth on 411 and Pato O'Ward fifth on 399. Those five are the only drivers still mathematically alive. Anyone who leaves Saturday trailing Palou by 108 points or more is out.

The margin itself is historically large. The 91 points separating Palou and Kirkwood represent the third-biggest lead with three races remaining since 2008, a stretch in which the average gap at this stage has been 39.1 points. History also likes the leader: since 2008, the driver in front with three to go has gone on to win the title 12 times, a list that includes Scott Dixon in 2008, 2018 and 2020, Dario Franchitti in 2011, Will Power in 2014 and 2022, Simon Pagenaud in 2016, Josef Newgarden in 2017 and 2019 and Palou in each of the past three seasons.

This is the fourth time Palou has led the standings with three races to go, and the previous three all ended with a trophy. He has been the points leader after 11 of the 15 races run this season and has won six of them, at St. Petersburg, Barber Motorsports Park, Long Beach, Detroit, Nashville Superspeedway and Portland. A fifth series championship would move him alongside Sebastien Bourdais, whose four consecutive titles from 2004-07 remain the benchmark. Should Palou clinch on Saturday, he would become the first driver to wrap up IndyCar championships with two races remaining in back-to-back seasons.

Kirkwood is the only driver with a realistic path to keeping this alive into September. The No. 27 Sam's Club Andretti Global Honda has won twice this year, at Arlington and Washington, D.C., the second of those coming just five days before the Milwaukee garage opened. He arrives at a track where his three previous starts have produced finishes of 12th, eighth and 12th.

The doubleheader format hands the field an unusual Saturday morning. NTT P1 Award qualifying is a single-car, two-lap run, with Saturday's starting lineup set by each driver's first lap and Sunday's lineup set by the second. One session, two grids, and no second chance on Sunday morning to fix a bad one. Teams have 14 sets of Firestone Firehawk tires to cover the entire weekend, and hybrid deployment is unlimited with a maximum of 135 kilojoules per lap.

Christian Rasmussen returns as the defending winner, having taken the 2025 race in the No. 21 Splenda Stevia Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet. He is one of five entered drivers with a Milwaukee victory, joining Dixon (2009), Power (2014), O'Ward (Race 1 in 2024) and Scott McLaughlin (Race 2 in 2024). Power has led more laps here than anyone else in the field with 306, ahead of Palou's 199 and Dixon's 190. Twenty-two drivers in the 25-car entry have started at the Mile before, Dixon most of all with 15. Caio Collet, Dennis Hauger and Mick Schumacher will make their first starts at the track.

Palou set the fastest qualifying lap here a year ago at 44.8422 seconds and 162.971 mph over two laps. The track's outright marks are older and belong to another era of Indy car competition: Patrick Carpentier's one-lap record of 20.028 seconds and 185.500 mph, set on May 30, 1998, and Franchitti's two-lap record of 42.7768 seconds and 170.840 mph from June 18, 2011.

Rinus VeeKay comes to Wisconsin convinced this is the weekend the No. 76 Juncos Hollinger Racing Chevrolet finally converts speed into hardware. He has finished fourth three times in 2026 without cracking the podium, and he tested at Milwaukee earlier this year.

"Really excited for Milwaukee," VeeKay said. "Always loved that track, and for sure we tested here earlier, like everybody else. It was a 25-car test, and we were second quick. That gave us confidence for sure, and I think we're going to have a great weekend."

VeeKay was blunter still about his expectations: "I've kind of checked Milwaukee off as a potential race-winning weekend after we tested there."

The 11th-place driver in the standings is also chasing a first top-10 championship finish, for himself and for a team that has never finished inside the top 15 in the standings. He sits 302 points, 26 behind 10th-place Power and 12 clear of Dixon.

"I think we've got a shot for a podium in Milwaukee, and it would be really cool to get a podium to finish off a season like this one, I think, with some deserved hardware," VeeKay said.

What makes the Mile worth watching, in his telling, is the absence of a single correct way around it. "Often we see when there's one groove, we don't see any passing," he said. "But the thing in Milwaukee is we're not stuck to the bottom. It's not really like there's one best way around the track."

The numbers back him up. The three races run since IndyCar returned to Milwaukee have produced 2,115 passes — 667 in the first 2024 race, 763 in the second and 685 last year. VeeKay credits the track's shallow banking for spreading cars across the width of the corners rather than pinning them to a single line.

The strategic rhythm on a short oval also runs backward from what road-course fans expect. "You want to pit as late as possible, so you get a free pit stop," VeeKay said. "You don't go a lap down under yellow. You can be the quickest driver out there, but if you time your yellows wrong and you're not pitting under yellow, you're screwed."

Turning Saturday into Sunday is its own exercise with no practice session between the races. "Usually a good result on day one makes day two a lot easier," VeeKay said. "That's going to be the focus, to be successful and really make sure the morale is high so we can pick up where we left off on Sunday."

These will be the fifth and sixth oval races of the season, a discipline that has spread its wins around. Newgarden took Phoenix and World Wide Technology Raceway for Team Penske, Felix Rosenqvist won the Indianapolis 500 for Meyer Shank Racing and Palou claimed Nashville for Chip Ganassi Racing. Malukas leads all drivers in oval points with 152 despite not yet winning on one this year.

Milwaukee's ledger stretches back further than almost anything else on the calendar. Saturday and Sunday mark the 117th and 118th Indy car events at the track since racing arrived there in 1939, and 19 drivers have won at the Mile during a season in which they also won the championship, from Rex Mays in 1941 through Power in 2014.

The weekend also carries a run of endurance milestones. Dixon will attempt his 373rd and 374th consecutive starts, extending his own series record, and can push his career total to 436 starts. Graham Rahal goes for his 273rd and 274th consecutive starts, third-longest in series history. Newgarden's start on Saturday will be his 249th in a row, breaking a tie with Marco Andretti for fourth-longest, with No. 250 to follow on Sunday. Kyffin Simpson is scheduled to make his 50th IndyCar start Saturday.

One visual note for anyone watching closely: McLaughlin's No. 3 Team Penske Chevrolet runs Clarience Technologies colors on Saturday and switches to PPG for Sunday.

Practice opens the weekend at 6 p.m. ET Friday on FS1, with qualifying at 11 a.m. ET Saturday, also on FS1. The Snap-on Makers and Fixers 250 airs at 2:30 p.m. ET Saturday on FOX, and the Snap-on Milwaukee Mile 250 follows at 1 p.m. ET Sunday on FOX. Both races air on INDYCAR Radio powered by OnlyBulls and SiriusXM INDYCAR Nation 218.