2026 XPEL Grand Prix

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Road America Returns With Palou in Command and McLaughlin Chasing a Breakthrough

The NTT IndyCar Series rolls into Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, this weekend for the XPEL Grand Prix at Road America, the 37th Indy car race held at the 4.014-mile, 14-turn permanent road course since the track first opened its gates to the discipline in 1982. It arrives at a moment when the title fight looks both lopsided and suddenly fragile: Alex Palou has won four of the season's first nine races and leads the standings with 342 points, yet the door he had slammed shut over the past two summers has begun to creak open.

Palou returns to a circuit he has made his own. The Spaniard, who drives the No. 10 DHL Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, owns three Road America wins — in 2021, 2023 and 2025 — the most of any active driver, and all three came in seasons he went on to win the championship. His victory a year ago was part of a Chip Ganassi Racing run that has delivered five of the last seven races at "America's National Park of Speed." Ganassi has won eight times here, more than any current team, with Team Penske (seven) and Andretti Global (one) the only other entered organizations holding a Road America trophy.

Scott McLaughlin would like to add to Penske's tally, and he has personal stakes this weekend beyond the points. The New Zealander pilots the No. 3 XPEL Team Penske Chevrolet into his sponsor's title event, and he made no secret of what he wants from it. "This is their race entitlement deal. XPEL Grand Prix. I'm the XPEL guy. Excited to go to a track that I love and win the race," McLaughlin said.

He sits seventh in the standings, 120 points behind Palou, and carries a winless run of 28 starts into the weekend. McLaughlin has seven career IndyCar victories, the last of them in the second race of the 2024 Milwaukee Mile doubleheader. By his own telling, he has led the race in each of the past three years at Road America and finished on the podium in 2024, but the results have not matched the pace. Asked to assess his season at its midpoint, he reached for a familiar grade. "I'd give myself so far a B minus probably, B," he said. "But from the perspective we want to be a little bit better, for sure. As a team, we want to keep winning races. We're working hard to do that."

Part of the explanation, McLaughlin said, has been the time required to settle in with a new engineering group. "I think it's probably taken me a little longer to gel with my new engineering team, with Raul and stuff," he said. "Since May, we've really started to gel well. I see a lot of light at the end of the tunnel for our relationship."

The Streets of Detroit, he admitted, was the weekend that got away. "Detroit was disappointing not to get a podium there or a solid top five. We were fast all weekend. ... It's part and parcel of how it works out in IndyCar sometimes," he said. As for the drought, McLaughlin has weathered the like before. "I'm a racer, I'm competitive, I want to win," he said. "At the same time, like, it is what it is. We've had chances and we've had speed to do it. ... Sometimes it's like this. I've had this before in my career where I've gone 18 months, two years without a win."

Nor is he prepared to concede the championship, even with Palou so far clear. "I think 100% it's still wide open for anyone really," he said. "For sure Alex is an amazing race driver, super fast, always there or thereabouts. As we can see, cracks do start to appear eventually. The problems that he had at Gateway, that could happen again at some point."

Road America's defining feature, the sheer length of its lap, promises to shape the strategic calculus, and McLaughlin expects track position and timing to be everything. "It's a long, long lap for sure. We've seen in the past the overcut be a long strategic thing instead of the undercut," he said. Weather could scramble those plans further, with rain in the forecast across the weekend, a prospect the New Zealander welcomes. "I love driving in the rain personally," he said. "You always have a little bit of a shower here or there at Road America at some time."

Experience tends to pay at Road America, and the entry list is thick with it. Josef Newgarden, in the No. 2 PPG Team Penske Chevrolet, has led 159 laps here, more than any driver in the field. Newgarden, Scott Dixon and Will Power have each won twice at the track, and Dixon and Power share the most appearances among entered drivers, 13 apiece. Alexander Rossi and Felix Rosenqvist are the other former Road America winners in the field. Eight drivers have won the Road America race from the pole, but none has managed it since Newgarden in 2018 — a reminder that the front row guarantees nothing over a lap this long. Louis Foster can attest to that. He took the NTT P1 Award here a year ago in the No. 45 Droplight Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda with a lap of 1:44.5141, only to watch Palou drive on to the win. The all-time qualifying mark still belongs to Dario Franchitti, whose 1:39.866 has stood since 2000.

Three drivers will make their first IndyCar start at Road America: Caio Collet in the No. 4 Combitrans Amazonia AJ Foyt Racing Chevrolet, Dennis Hauger in the No. 19 Ault Block Chain Dale Coyne Racing Honda and Mick Schumacher in the No. 47 ENVE Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda. Collet arrives with the freshest knowledge of the place, having won the 2025 Indy NXT race at the circuit.

The race covers 55 laps and 220.77 miles. Drivers will have 200 seconds of push-to-pass, capped at 20 seconds per activation, and a hybrid deployment ceiling that has been turned down to 600 kilojoules per lap for this event, a change McLaughlin took in stride. "I know the limit got turned down. We practiced that on the sim. It doesn't really change the way I go about it," he said. Firestone has supplied six sets of primary tires and five sets of alternates for the weekend, with one set each of primary and new alternate tires required for at least two laps in the race.

On-track action opens with practice Friday afternoon and continues Saturday with a second practice and three rounds of knockout qualifying for the NTT P1 Award. Sunday brings a morning warm-up before the green flag, with FOX's coverage beginning at 1 p.m. CT (2 p.m. ET).

Whether the door Palou left ajar at World Wide Technology Raceway swings any wider may come down to who blinks first over a long, demanding lap. McLaughlin, fresh off a courtside seat for his wife's hometown New York Knicks winning the NBA championship, would happily make it his own kind of homecoming. "The Knicks championship was a very good warm-up for what's going to be a pretty big weekend with XPEL," he said.