Maybe Alex Palou was right. Maybe it’s best to have all the bad luck in the same NTT INDYCAR SERIES race.

Palou certainly did that Sunday in the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C. by suffering through a sequence of mistakes and misfortunes that led to a 20th-place finish.

Yes, Palou had a lower finish earlier this year at Phoenix Raceway – he finished 24th after crashing with Rinus VeeKay – but this race in the nation’s capital was overall his worst and certainly his most forgettable. The Spaniard incurred a rare penalty hitting another driver’s tire on pit road, saw his Chip Ganassi Racing crew botch a pit stop, clipped one of the track’s concrete barriers and spun with broken suspension.

The messy day knocked a huge dent out of Palou’s once-massive points lead. He entered this race weekend with a 133-point lead over Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood and then earned a point for winning the NTT P1 Award as Saturday’s fastest qualifier. But Palou’s advantage heading to the season’s final three races is 91 points after Kirkwood won Sunday.

“It hurts, man, it hurts,” Palou said after his race mercifully came to an end three laps off the winner’s pace. “It was one of those races that I really wanted – I wanted to get that win. So, it kind of hurts a lot that it’s this bad of a day.

“But it’s OK; things happen. I’m at least kind of happy that everything happened in the same day instead of spreading out throughout different races.”

Most surprising among the miscues was Palou striking a tire laid out in Mick Schumacher’s pit box. That drew a penalty on the driver who seldom makes noticeable mistakes. Prior to the contact with VeeKay at Phoenix, Palou hadn’t had a major error in a race since crashing by himself in 2024 at Iowa Speedway. This was the first in-race penalty of his doing since the 2020 season when he drove for Dale Coyne Racing w/ Team Goh.

Alex Palou

Palou (photo, above) served Sunday’s mandated drive through pit lane on Lap 43, returning to the track in the 21st position. On the next pit stop, the left front tire changer had trouble getting the wheel nut affixed, forcing Palou to stop the car a split second after initially pulling away. The delay allowed Kirkwood to put the No. 10 OpenAI Chip Ganassi Racing Honda a lap down.

Through pit cycles, Palou was able to get his car back on the lead lap near the tail end of the 25-car field, but his spin on Lap 122 ultimately doomed him.

“We had some issues in pit lane, one my fault (and) one out of my control,” Palou said. “I kind of bumped a little bit of the wall (in the second half of the race), and 20 laps later the rear (suspension) broke. That’s why we spun.

“Yeah, not a good day, but that’s all right, things happen.”

Still, Palou is in a strong position to win his fourth consecutive series championship and fifth title in six years. The next three races will be held at tracks where he scored significantly more points than Kirkwood last year.

Palou finished second in last year’s race at the Milwaukee Mile, where a doubleheader will be contested next weekend, and he has won three of the past four races, including the past two, at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, site of the season-ending race Sept. 6.

Last year, Kirkwood finished 12th at Milwaukee and 16th at Laguna Seca.

Palou had a historically strong season last year, winning the title by a staggering 196 points. He likely won’t finish with the same margin this year, but he will win another Astor Challenge Cup unless he has three more races like this one.