Final Indy 500-Monaco Weekend Coined 2 First-Time Winners

The Indy 500 and Monaco Grand Prix shared the same weekend for the final time—and two former teammates stood on the top of their respective podiums for the first time.

McLaren’s Lando Norris took home the Formula One Monaco Grand Prix on Sunday morning. Norris’s win and teammate Oscar Piastri’s third-place finish helped Team Papaya extend their constructors’ championship lead to 172. That lead is larger than the total point count accumulated by second-place Mercedes, which failed to score Sunday.

Norris also cut Piastri’s lead in the constructors’ championship to three points.

Hours later, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Álex Palou, McLaren’s 2023 reserve driver, won the Indy 500, two years after he took home pole position at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Palou has won three of the last four IndyCar drivers’ championships and sits at No. 1 this year.

The two races will no longer be on the same weekend starting in 2026, as the Monaco GP will be moved to the first full weekend in June.

Failed Double

For the second year in a row, Hendrick Motorsports driver Kyle Larson failed to complete The Double—which is when drivers finish both the Indy 500 and NASCAR Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte on the same day, a total of 1,100 miles.

After the weather halted his attempt last year, crashes stopped him this year. Larson crashed on Lap 91 at the Indy 500 and Lap 246 of the Coca-Cola 600.

It may be Larson’s final time to attempt The Double, and he told Front Office Sports Today on Friday that he had initially planned a two-year window to attempt the historic feat.

“The Double is a tough undertaking,” Larson said Sunday. “The window of time is just too tight.”

Monaco Misses Again

F1 enforced a rule at the Monaco GP that required teams to make two tire changes—one more than the usual race—in an effort to spice up what’s been a lackluster race in recent years. But it didn’t do much.

A year after the race featured just four overtakes, there was only one legal overtake in the 2025 Monaco GP, according to ESPN. The race, which has been renewed by F1 until 2031, was criticized by most drivers, including four-time World Champion Max Verstappen.

“You can’t race here anyway, so it doesn’t matter what you do. One stop, 10 stops. Even at the end, I was in the lead, but my tires were completely gone, and you still can’t pass. We were almost doing Mario Kart,” Verstappen said.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner was one of the leaders calling for changes in the track’s layout.

“The cars are so big now that you just don’t have a chance to get alongside. … There just needs to be one area where you can have an overtake and everybody knows that coming here the race was pretty much done on Saturday,” Horner said.