Alex Palou’s IndyCar team principal Chip Ganassi strongly denied reports the driver has been approached about a move to F1.

Ganassi added he wouldn’t want to see the four-times IndyCar champion and Indy 500 winner sacrifice his strong position in the series for a less competitive seat in F1.

A report earlier this week claimed Red Bull is seeking to hire Palou to be Max Verstappen’s team mate next year. Ganassi, who hired Palou in 2021 and resisted McLaren’s efforts to lure the driver away, emphatically dismissed the claim.

“I read that myself and there was nobody quoted in there,” he began. “I talked to Palou, Palou says he’s never talked to anybody, there’s nothing about it.

“I talked to his management, they know nothing about and I know nothing about it, so I think it’s a clickbait story and somebody needs to brush up their investigative journalism.”

Ganassi said Palou is “more like a brother to me than anything else” and stressed “I take him at his word, what he says to me.”

Although Ganassi has seen his former IndyCar drivers such as Alex Zanardi and Juan Pablo Montoya switch to F1, he believes it is no longer as attractive to drivers as it once was. He also suggested Palou might have to accept a secondary role at a team if he did move.

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“I don’t know that the draw there is what it used to be when we were growing up,” said Ganassi. “There’s two or three coveted seats there and outside of that, I wouldn’t want to see him go to be a ‘number two’ driver anywhere.”

“I don’t stop people from doing those kinds of things, but I focus on what we do,” he added. “Every time I get a call from a Formula 1 driver, I won’t call the press up and say ‘hey, I got a phone call from somebody and they want to come drive IndyCars’.

“We get calls all the time from Formula 1 drivers. They go this way, that way, I don’t think it’s as interesting a thing as it used to be, the draw one way or the other for that matter. I think they’re both very specialised. And I don’t know how you go from winning the biggest race in the world to one that’s not.”

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