Alex Palou's 2025 Indianapolis 500-winning car just landed in its forever home

There is a strange liminal space that exists between when a racing win is the result of a race and when it becomes history, part of a bigger story. For Alex Palou and the 2025 DHL Chip Ganassi Racing entry, that in-betweenness solidified into enshrined history on April 21 in Indianapolis – not on the oval, but inside the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, where the four-time NTT IndyCar Series champion stood next to his race-winning steed, race suits, helmets, and watched it all become a permanent fixture in IMS history.

The IMS Museum has officially added Palou's 2025 Indianapolis 500-winning car to its collection, making it the most recent winning car on display in one of the most storied motorsport institutions in the world. The acquisition was unveiled at an event with Palou on April 21, where the reigning Indianapolis 500 winner served as the featured speaker for "An Evening with Alex Palou" – an in-depth career discussion, audience Q&A, and autograph session that gave fans something considerably better than a poster to take home.

Palou’s car is the first of its kind to win the Indianapolis 500

The car's significance goes beyond the trophy. As IMS Museum president Michael Good noted at the unveiling, this is the first hybrid-powered car to win the Indianapolis 500 – a milestone that marks a proper turning point in the evolution of the sport. IndyCar's hybrid system, introduced for the 2024 season, represents the kind of technological leap that tends to look obvious in hindsight and feels enormous in the moment. Palou won with it. That matters.

"It represents a defining moment in the evolution of our sport – where innovation and performance intersect at the highest level," Good said.

Palou's reaction to seeing the car installed in the collection was refreshing, and exactly what you would hope for from a 27-year-old who has already won four IndyCar championships and the greatest race in the world. 

"It's incredible. It's a big deal having something at the Museum," he said. "I cannot believe that my car, my suit is here, my helmet as well. It makes it real." He then mentioned wanting to bring his family back in May to see it — to stand there and say, as he put it, ‘Hey, that's our car.’ That is not the quote of a man performing gratitude. That is a person genuinely reckoning with the fact that something he did is now behind glass in Indianapolis, permanently. Badass.

The IMS Museum houses one of the most significant collections in American motorsport, with winning cars stretching back across more than a century of Indianapolis 500 history. Adding Palou's car to that lineage – a hybrid-powered machine driven by a Spanish-born champion racing for one of the most successful teams in IndyCar history – is both a preservation of the present and a humble nod to the future of the sport. The museum opens to thousands of guests this May, and the 2025 winning car will be waiting for them.