IndyCar’s Arlington GP signals a breakthrough in Texas after decades of racing struggles

Texas has long resisted top-tier motorsport, but IndyCar’s Arlington Grand Prix may finally change that narrative. Backed by serious investment and meticulous planning, the series’ newest street race delivered a polished debut and a rare sense of long-term promise in a notoriously difficult market

Crowded IndyCar street race at Arlington near AT&T Stadium

Arlington’s street circuit skirts the AT&T Stadium

OE Skibinsk

John Oreovicz
April 1, 2026

They like to say everything is bigger and better in Texas, but that hasn’t always been the case for auto racing. NASCAR was historically embedded in the American south-east, IndyCar staked its claim in the Midwest, and road racing enjoyed a strong presence along the east coast and California. But Texas was a curious outlier until NASCAR’s popularity grew nationally in the 1990s and more recently, Formula 1 finally grabbed a solid US foothold at Circuit of The Americas outside Austin.

Texas World Speedway – a higher banked version of the Michigan Speedway – opened in 1968 and sporadically hosted NASCAR Cup Series and USAC-sanctioned IndyCar and stock car races up to 1981 when the track fell into disrepair. Other than F1’s one-off 1984 Dallas Grand Prix, major racing was absent from Texas until Bruton Smith built the palatial Texas Motor Speedway in 1997. It enjoyed a strong initial run, pulling 150,000-strong crowds twice a year for NASCAR in its first decade of operation. TMS was also an important venue in the early days of the Indy Racing League.

But the shine faded. Attendance dwindled for IRL races to the point where Texas was finally dropped from the IndyCar schedule in 2023. Even NASCAR has struggled to attract interest, and the Cup Series no longer comes close to filling the venue, with capacity cut in half to 75,000 for a single annual visit.

Street races are IndyCar’s modern bread and butter, and CART, Champ Car and IndyCar all tried and failed to crack the Texas market with two different temporary venues in Houston. Now IndyCar’s Arlington Grand Prix (a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth in the so-called ‘Metroplex’) is the latest attempt to penetrate America’s fifth-largest media market, and the first-year event did a solid job showing it could generate some staying power.

“Kirkwood scored a popular win, passing Palou in a straight fight”

The Arlington GP is a joint venture between IndyCar owner Penske Entertainment, the Dallas Cowboys and REV Entertainment, with a 2.73-mile circuit winding through a park-like property that houses the AT&T Stadium, home venue for the Dallas Cowboys, and Globe Life Field, where the Texas Rangers baseball team play their home games. There’s been no shortage of investment in the event, with all-new walls, fences and multi-level suites that set a new standard of presentation for IndyCar.

Operations for first year IndyCar events on temporary circuits have a chequered history, but the Arlington GP weekend was generally smooth and without significant delay – other than when a catering crew managed to wander onto the circuit during qualifying as cars accelerated out of the pits. The drivers couldn’t stop raving about the track. The race start was bumped up an hour due to predicted windy conditions with gusts up to 50mph, but a huge crowd still turned out for what was a much cleaner race than expected. Kyle Kirkwood scored a popular win for Andretti Global, passing and beating four-time IndyCar champion Álex Palou in a straight fight.

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This year, three new temporary courses join the IndyCar rota: Arlington, Washington DC and Markham, Ontario, a stand-in for the traditional Canadian stop at the Exhibition Place fairgrounds near downtown Toronto. IndyCar street races rarely catch on for the long term; for every Long Beach or St Petersburg that demonstrates real staying power, there are dozens of failures, from Miami to Denver to San José. But Arlington looks like it’s the real deal. I’ve attended almost every first-year IndyCar event since the early 1990s, and Arlington was by far the one that came out of the oven closest to fully baked. Its success was the pay-off for the kind of investment and attention that fans have been expecting from Penske ownership of the IndyCar Series.

Vintage racing has a different flavour in America, with more of an emphasis at the high end of demonstrating machinery as opposed to outright competition. The cars are rarely as exotic as those on the European scene, and the paddock atmosphere is generally more laid-back and friendly. A working relationship between Historic SportsCar Racing (HSR) and Sportscar Vintage Racing Association (SVRA) dissolved amicably in 2010, and since then differences between the two groups have been magnified. But you can’t go wrong with either.

HSR was acquired by IMSA in 2022, and it enjoys a strong relationship with tracks owned by IMSA’s parent company NASCAR, including Daytona, Sebring, Watkins Glen and Road Atlanta. HSR’s key events include the Monterey Historics (now known as the Monterey Motorsports Reunion) at Laguna Seca and ‘The Mitty’ at Road Atlanta; both were established in the 1970s and remain among the world’s most prestigious vintage racing events. HSR also stages events that incorporate short group sprints into a 6, 10, 12, or 24-hour endurance race format.

SVRA is owned by Parella Motorsports Holdings, which is also the parent company for the long-running Trans-Am championship. SVRA attracts larger fields and boasts a broader schedule that includes most of the key HSR venues along with American gems like Road America, Lime Rock, Barber, Mid-Ohio and Sonoma. SVRA’s event at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway attracted 700 entries in its first year and remains one of the most popular vintage meetings in the US. Several of SVRA’s meetings are incorporated into SpeedTour weekends that include Trans-Am and the US Formula 4 championship, an appealing combination of past and present.

Based in Indianapolis, John Oreovicz has been covering US racing for 33 years. He is the author of Indy Split (2021) and Class of ’99 (2025)

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