NTT INDYCAR SERIES: BORCHETTA BOURBON MUSIC CITY GRAND PRIX

August 31, 2025

Ricky Davis

Chip Ganassi

Alex Palou

Mike Parra

Barry Wanser

Press Conference

THE MODERATOR: We joined by Mike Parra, the CEO of DHL Express. Chip Ganassi, 17-time NTT INDYCAR SERIES championship team owner. Barry Wanser is also here, team manager for the 10 car. Long time chief mechanic for the 10 car as well, Ricky Davis. Also joined by Alex Palou, four-time NTT INDYCAR SERIES championship.

Alex, your thoughts about once again getting the Astor Challenge Cup, celebrating with your family.

ALEX PALOU: Amazing. Amazing season. Amazing five seasons with the team. This season has been truly, truly special. Just felt like since day one the amazing work that everybody at CGR and Honda had done over the off-season was incredible, like starting the season winning in St. Pete, then Thermal, then I cannot remember. I remember it was a really good start. Then getting the Indy 500. Eight wins, then the championship.

It's been incredible. It's been super, super fun. Yeah, I'm just lucky enough to drive that No. 10 car.

THE MODERATOR: Chip, how do you sum it up? You've had some talented drivers. This has been a remarkable season.

CHIP GANASSI: You know, what Alex said here, when you had this many accolades, whatever, all season, you start to realize you don't do this stuff by yourself. Just like he said, he's lucky enough to drive that car. I'm lucky enough to be that guy whose name is on the front door.

You have no idea the amount of hard work and late nights, questions, experiments, what have you, that go on in the race shop. Just the hard work that goes on back there trying to find a millisecond difference between our car and some of the other cars.

They call this a spec series. I tell you, it's hard to separate yourself from these other drivers. These guys will tell you.

When he says that, when he says he's just lucky enough to drive it, believe me, I feel like I'm lucky enough to be on it. The guys that do the work, the team back in Indianapolis, the young men and women who stay there in the dark hours of the night, out of bed at 5:00 in the morning, the traveling they do, just the things they put up with on the road to bring a champion to this point, is really fun to be a part of. It's just fun to be a part of that team for me.

THE MODERATOR: Mike, congratulations. We get to hear about DHL a lot. This is a partnership that's not that old. To win a couple championships...

MIKE PARRA: First and foremost, we're blessed enough to be in this series for 15 years with DHL. The last two were an absolute blessing with Chip Ganassi Racing. I was saying it back at the hospitality, to be part of an organization that's won 17 championships, 11 in the last 17 years since 2008, it's an absolute honor.

I shared that on behalf of the 620,000 employees globally and 120,000 in Express. It's been an honor for us to be a part of Chip Ganassi Racing.

Who better in the car right now than Alex Palou? Absolute true ambassador for us, supports us around our purpose and our mission. Equally someone who is fantastic with our customers, safe bet with the brand as well, which is extremely important to us. We're just excited to continue with Chip Ganassi Racing and also in the INDYCAR SERIES.

Yeah, I got to tell you, it's been an amazing ride. Two championships back to back.

THE MODERATOR: Barry, congratulations. Chip talked about the teamwork that is involved here. You've been a large part of that. What has separated this year for you than maybe some others?

BARRY WANSER: I think the engineering staff did such an amazing job developing the car in the off-season, where we unloaded cars that were super fast, in a window where certainly on the 10 car, Alex's race engineer, Julian, connecting with Alex on what the car needs. Just drastically improved the performance, qualifying further up front. When you race up front, good things happen.

Five poles, that says it right there. A lot of things happen in the races, but the poles really speak for the overall performance with the way the schedules are.

But yeah, everybody on the 10 car certainly performed at the highest level again this year. We took advantage of everything that came our way. It's been amazing.

THE MODERATOR: Ricky, for you, not what race fans see at the racetrack, but all the blood, sweat and tears that happen back in Indianapolis at the race shop. Speak to being part of another great championship like this.

RICKY DAVIS: To have the season we had this year is something I never thought I would see, let alone be a part of. It took everybody every day and every hour from the time January 1st rolled around till right now to make these kind of things happen.

The effort that our entire squad, the 8, 9 and 10 guys put out every week, pit stop practice, trying to get better, working out, lifting weights, working on the car, however long it took to get everything done, that's the key for the team to be able to move forward and not live off of the last race we won. We look forward to the next one, try to win that one also.

THE MODERATOR: Questions.

Q. Mike, at Long Beach we talked about how FOX used Alex as the face of their promotion. You said it was a great way to show DHL to a new audience. How successful was the season with him getting a fourth INDYCAR SERIES championship, third in a row?

MIKE PARRA: We were just talking about this about an hour ago. This will be the best year we have had in INDYCAR in the last 15 years. By far the greatest level of eyeballs, the greatest level of media value. It's big. It's been absolutely big.

Plus it's the first time that we've now got a global audience that's tuning in. Alex in Spain is growing, getting a lot of media attention there as well.

I look forward to something happening next year, which I've been pitching to Mark Miles and the team for a long time, and that is that we're going to Mexico. That is absolutely exciting for someone like myself. We have a big group of people there in that marketplace. I look forward to seeing a sea of yellow in Mexico. I'm sure we're going to be competing with Pato there from that perspective.

No, excited. It's been a great year for us.

Q. The investment that sponsors are taking, equity partners joining in INDYCAR, how do you see the INDYCAR business at this time, especially for a partner such as yourself?

MIKE PARRA: For us, we're leveraging an opportunity as well, what we call business to business. We've been working the paddock for a long time. We got a gentleman called Rick Stark who has been working with a lot of people. We're working across all the teams, offering the opportunity to leverage our strength in 220 countries globally, as well.

It is a business opportunity, but also an opportunity for our employees.

Q. Chip, could you speak about the business value for your team with DHL.

CHIP GANASSI: I mean, that's a good question. I think the answer is very simple. It's taken our brand, just exposes our brand, to a new audience, a larger audience, and an international audience. To me that's very important. Expands our footprint immensely.

Q. Rick, you've been on pit lane for a long time. Careers tend to slow down. Yours keeps speeding up.

RICKY DAVIS: It's all thanks to Chip keeping me around first off, then with Alex with how he's lifted our team.

I told him a while back I wish I were 20 years younger. But he'd be 20 years younger, so it wouldn't work out.

I'll do the best I can for as long as I can, as long as Chip allows me to do this and I get to stay with Alex, it's going to be wonderful.

ALEX PALOU: He said he'll stay at least eight more years. We go by eight years. In eight years, yeah, we can talk about it again (smiling). He's good. He's getting younger.

RICKY DAVIS: It's going to be in dog years.

ALEX PALOU: That's okay (smiling).

Q. Chip, many, many years ago during the era of Champ Car and CART, you had a driver with Alex Zanardi. Do you see a rebirth of Alex Zanardi into Alex Palou?

CHIP GANASSI: That's a good question. It's so hard to compare these guys. I said to someone the other day, it's like comparing...

In Pittsburgh right now we have a great pitcher Paul Skenes in baseball. It's like comparing him to any of the great pitchers, to Cy Young or Bob Gibson. They say, Who is the better pitcher? You'll never know.

That's the great thing about sports, when you have different drivers in different eras that are great, the good news is their names are etched in the record books forever. The great thing about sports is we always go back and forth about who's better, who would do better in whose car.

Boy, it would be great if we could bring all those guys back, put them all in a race and see on the same day in the same kind of car. We'll never know. But that's the great thing about sports, comparing one driver from one era to a driver from another era.

Certainly a lot of similarities between the two Alexes. No question.

Q. (No microphone.)

CHIP GANASSI: Certainly. Again, this guy's a four-time champion. Zanardi, I don't know that he was four times.

THE MODERATOR: Two time.

CHIP GANASSI: Two-time champion. Probably would have been four if he stuck around.

Q. Barry, you said on Friday it was the two-year anniversary of you being in surgery, fighting through cancer. All clear. I hope this is getting old for you guys, but on a personal level you're really feeling like life is getting to the sweetest spot for you.

BARRY WANSER: Yeah, thanks. I didn't mention it to anybody else but you because I know you're equally battling at home, having great success. Just a longer battle than I had.

Yesterday was two years ago I had my first surgery. Yeah, feeling good. Feeling healthy. Feeling strong. Winning never gets old (smiling). Never going to get tired of it.

Q. Alex, one person in here, I'm not going to name names, made the comment even when you have bad luck, you somehow turn it into good luck. What were your thoughts early in the race?

ALEX PALOU: I was lucky enough that it started happening at the entry of the corner, so I was able to feel it, slow down a little bit. Yeah, I was very lucky that it didn't blow off in the middle of the corner. It waited until the exit.

Yeah, I thought that I was going to end up in the wall. Obviously I thought we were going to lose a lot of places. But I think we were lucky enough that we were able to get a really fast pit stop, even though that the tire was flat, get really good out-laps and fast laps at the beginning before people started pitting. I think we only lost four or five places.

It was one of those lucky moments, for sure. At the same time it was not lucky that we got a puncture while running second.

BARRY WANSER: To clarify, the tire didn't fail from something other than it was a cut. There was a cut in the tire that happened during contact early in the race.

Q. Early in the race you were running side by side with Pato O'Ward. In the closing laps, you weren't able to replicate that success with Josef Newgarden. What happened there?

ALEX PALOU: Yeah, at the beginning I knew that Pato was going to be a tough, tough opponent. I just wanted to get clean air and try to see if I was going to be able to get better through traffic. I couldn't really overtake him.

There was a point that the tires started telling me they were not happy being up there, flat out, fighting for that long. I was like, I'm not going to really overtake Pato here.

The issue at the end was marbles, honestly. There were so many marbles that you couldn't really go up there. I wasn't super comfortable running up there. On top of that, the tires were not new. We had, like, probably 20, 30 laps. You couldn't really go side by side as aggressive as we had with Pato at the beginning of the race.

Q. Chip, 'one goal' is this team's mantra. Talk about the growth of Kyffin Simpson, what he's been able to bring to the team. Best oval finish here today.

CHIP GANASSI: No question. How about that at the end, side by side with McLaughlin. I thought they showed great respect for each other. They got and were shaking hands, laughing and scratching about it. It was good. It was a great race.

Believe me, it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to all of you. We were glad to see him up there on these ovals.

I had a discussion, I was talking with his father, not three weeks ago or something, talking about his development. Put him in this series, that series, do this, do that. I said, David, we've got to help him on the ovals. That's where he needs help. I almost had to eat those words today.

It was great. Happy with his development.

Q. Alex, you look at what you have been able to accomplish, the information in every room, debrief, St. Pete, Indy, so much information from the team goes into all this. Talk about that, having some of the smartest people in the sport.

ALEX PALOU: Oh, yeah. I mean, the way we work at CGR, we share everything, the mechanics, in the engineering room, the drivers room. We know we're going to get much farther if we all share what works for us. If Scott or Kyffin are able to get a faster car, that will benefit me.

It's been amazing. It's been super fun. It was really fun to see Kyffin as well from the mirrors. I was just trying to help him a little with the tow, trying to play my car on the inside, see if that would give him that mile an hour that he needed. It's great to see.

For sure I wouldn't be here if I didn't have any teammates.

Q. Chip, Barry, could you talk a little bit about the hellacious engines that Honda has given you this year.

CHIP GANASSI: Yeah, I mean, I think always. I think our team has the most wins with Honda. That's really a feather in our cap. We've had a great relationship with them over the years. It's a true partnership. We're always pushing each other to do better. Couldn't be happier with the engines they give us.

I mean, we've had some issues. You're going to have that when you push the envelope. You're going to have that from time to time.

Scott Dixon finished third in the championship. I don't know if any of you knew that. It's been the quietest third-place championship we've ever had. I mean, no one knows (smiling). It's like Dixon finished third. It was Palou, O'Ward, Dixon in the championship. We're P1, P2. He won P1 in the pit stop challenge. Palou was P2. It's a big thing.

Scott had some challenges in the engine department this year. None of his doing. But you're going to have that. Honda is pushing. I like when they push. So it's good.

Q. There's never been a sport like this where so much speculation and people talk about rumors, what have you. As far as Honda is concerned, their future in this series. I think it would be catastrophic if they were no longer in INDYCAR. I'm not trying to force you to say something about that. The bottom line is it's been a remarkable run with them.

CHIP GANASSI: Yes (smiling). Is that a question there?

Q. Just seems impossible to think about this sport...

CHIP GANASSI: That's over my pay grade, so I don't know. Yeah, I hope they stay.

Q. Alex, you said you were going to tell us how you were going to celebrate your championship win here. How are you going to celebrate your championship win?

ALEX PALOU: I still don't know, honestly. I am not very good planner. I know that, so...

We had some employ champagne. I'm going to drink a little bit more. I'm going to New York tonight, doing a big media tour for the next few days. I'll drink a little bit more champagne there. We might get some really good sushi. Sushi, champagne, some media maybe. I don't know.

Honestly, I cannot wait to be able to enjoy those moments, then go back to Indy, celebrate big with the team. I think this year we've been celebrating almost every race, getting pictures. Chip has been paying a lot of lunches to everybody at the shop. Hopefully we get more of that. Then celebrate with the family once I'm back home in Spain.

Q. Do you have any plans for yourselves?

CHIP GANASSI: For me to celebrate?

Q. Yes.

ALEX PALOU: You're throwing a party, as well.

CHIP GANASSI: I'm having a party. I'm not going to tell any of you when it is, but we're having a party.

ALEX PALOU: It's going to be my first time at a Chip-organized party. I can't wait for that.

CHIP GANASSI: It will be good.

Q. (No microphone.)

ALEX PALOU: No, this is a party party.

CHIP GANASSI: This is different.

THE MODERATOR: Congratulations. This will go down as one of the most remarkable seasons in NTT INDYCAR SERIES history. The numbers speak for themselves. Countdown to 2026 is now on.