Alex Palou swats away Red Bull rumours: “There’s been nothing. Nothing at all.”
IndyCar’s unstoppable force has heard the whispers. He’s seen his name pop up next to Red Bull’s logo, paired in headlines with a 2026 seat alongside Max Verstappen. And then he calmly knocked the whole thing down.
“There’s been nothing, nothing at all,” Palou told the Associated Press when asked about suggestions he’d been in talks with Red Bull for 2026. “We have heard nothing from anyone.”
The line from his camp matches the driver’s. Roger Yasukawa, who manages Palou, echoed that stance when contacted by PlanetF1.com: “I have not talked to, nor have been contacted by any F1 team about Alex.”
So how did the rumour start? Palou reckons it wasn’t organic. “The only thing I’ve heard was it was a manager for some other driver in IndyCar who would like to have my seat who said it to start something,” he said, suggesting the spark may have been more tactical than truthful.
It’s not hard to see why his name keeps getting dragged into F1’s orbit. The 28-year-old has carved up IndyCar with surgical precision, racking up four titles — including a dominant 2025 campaign that made it three championships on the bounce. He sampled the F1 paddock as a McLaren reserve before choosing the American route full-time, and hasn’t looked back.
And yet the F1 talk refuses to die, largely because Red Bull’s second seat remains the sport’s most notorious measuring stick. Whoever shares a garage with Verstappen has to perform on Saturdays, survive Sundays and do it with minimal warm-up laps. Since Daniel Ricciardo left at the end of 2018, the revolving door has claimed Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon, Sergio Perez and Liam Lawson, while Yuki Tsunoda’s footing has often looked precarious. It’s a punishing audition.
Palou, to his credit, isn’t seduced by the romance of stepping into that maelstrom just as Formula 1 flips the page to all-new chassis and power unit regulations in 2026. He’s pragmatic about both the challenge and the timeline.
“You cannot go to F1 as a rookie at 29 and ask for two years to learn the track and learn the car and ask them to wait for you to start to perform,” he said. “You need to go there and perform immediately. I don’t think I am missing out on anything not going to F1.”
There’s a refreshing candour to that. Plenty of drivers talk about the dream. Palou talks about the job. And right now, his job is winning in IndyCar — which he’s doing with unnerving regularity. The decision to pivot away from the traditional European ladder and commit to the U.S. could have been a career cul-de-sac. Instead, it’s become a freeway. He’s not just successful; he’s the benchmark.
From Red Bull’s side, the speculation is understandable. Every team is working backwards from 2026, when new rules will reset much of what we know. Red Bull will want a bulletproof line-up around Verstappen as they navigate that shift. One phone call to the most efficient racer in North America would hardly be poor due diligence.
But in this case, per Palou and his manager, that phone hasn’t rung.
There’s also the fit question. Red Bull’s second car is a heat lamp. It exposes everything: tyre management, adaptability, mental resilience. Palou ticks a lot of boxes on paper — speed, brain, mechanical sympathy, racecraft — but he knows the deal. If you don’t land on your feet immediately, the walls close in fast. When he says he won’t go without a guaranteed chance to be himself from lap one, it doesn’t sound like hedging. It sounds like hard-won self-awareness.
So where does that leave us? With a rumour that made sense in theory, but not in reality. With a driver who’s built his own empire and isn’t desperate to swap it for a European timeshare. And with a second Red Bull seat that remains the paddock’s most expensive game of musical chairs.
Silly season will keep spinning, because it always does. Names will be shuffled, futures will be hinted at, and the 2026 grid will slowly click into place. For now, count Palou out of that particular storyline. He’s got another championship to defend — and no interest in learning a new language when the one he speaks so fluently is winning.
