June 21 produced one of those ‘Is the glass half-empty or half-full?’ moments for IndyCar fans. The IndyCar Series formally confirmed a new car to replace the ancient Dallara chassis in use since 2012 is finally forthcoming – in 2028.

Taken in isolation, any fresh technology on the way is good news for a series that has been unable to regain the popularity it enjoyed 25-30 years ago before a destructive battle for control of the sport drove away fans, sponsors and manufacturers. But there’s also a strong sense that the appearance of a new Dallara spec car – built to essentially the same technical formula that has evolved over the past 15 years – could be too little, too late to revive a form of racing that veered off track and has been spinning its wheels in gravel since the turn of the century.

“There’s a strong sense that the appearance of a new Dallara spec car could be too little, too late”

Eighteen years have passed since two competing IndyCar championships were unified into a single entity, and this is the sixth season the IndyCar Series has been owned and operated by Penske Entertainment. Given Roger Penske’s success as a businessman and especially as a racer – a record 20 Indianapolis 500 victories alone – much was expected from the new leadership.

But Indy 500 excepted, IndyCar racing has fallen backwards during the Penske era into obscurity on the American sports landscape. Overtaken by Formula 1’s US momentum, IndyCar now ranks a distant fourth in popularity behind NASCAR’s B-level Xfinity Series, just within the racing genre. The paddock and what remains of the fan base is concerned to the point of alarm, and the July 31 announcement that Fox Corporation had acquired a one-third stake in Penske Entertainment only somewhat calmed the turbulent waters.

To many, fast-tracking a new car is the most obvious way to demonstrate progress. “The time has come for a new chassis,” admitted IndyCar president J Douglas Boles. “We are pleased by what our engineers and Dallara have collaboratively designed and believe it will appeal to the fans and paddock while also upholding our standards of safety and enhancing IndyCar’s on-track competition well into the future.”

It’s been more than 20 years since the car was an exciting element of IndyCar racing. Modern era drivers talk in awe of the CART cars from the 1990s, when there was intense competition between engine, and even tyre manufacturers.

“I remember what the CART car was like,” smiled Will Power, who arrived in America in 2005 for the last three years of that formula. “At a track like Long Beach, you could hardly go flat from corner to corner with the amount of power it had. I still miss those days because the cars were much more exciting and difficult to drive. Even by the time I came in, it was already watered down a bit, but I remember Gil de Ferran telling me he came into the pits after a couple of laps in his first test in an IRL car [in 2000] because it was so slow. He thought something was wrong with the engine. But no, that’s just the way it was.”

Designed by committee and built to a price, the Dallara IR12 was tail-heavy and overweight from the start. It took on the appearance of a traditional Indycar when the current body kit was grafted on in 2018, but since then, integration of a bulky aeroscreen as well as the addition of a mild hybrid system to the powertrain have ballooned the car’s weight up to nearly 1900lb (862kg).

The 2028 brief calls for a new Dallara chassis and a slightly larger and more powerful 2.4-litre version of the current highly restricted 2.2-litre twin turbo V6. The car is expected to feature better integration of the aeroscreen and the hybrid system to reduce weight by 85-100lb (39-45kg). Limited public comments from Penske Entertainment executives suggest that as many components as possible will be carried over from the IR12 to reduce costs. A rendering shown to teams was said to resemble Dallara’s Formula 2 design.

Nothing groundbreaking, therefore, and it’s all shaping up to be a bit of a letdown when the car is revealed – likely in early 2026 with a two-year development plan that hopes to avoid the public teething troubles the IR12 went through when it was new.

“For a 1600lb car, 1000 to 1100bhp would be about right. It would make a better formula”

“The car definitely needs to step it up; it’s currently more of a junior category car and it’s quite a heavy thing,” said six-times IndyCar champion Scott Dixon. “When I first came into the sport [in 2001], I think a CART car was 12-15sec a lap faster than an Indy Lights, and now it’s more like 2-3sec. We had 1000bhp then and now we have not even 700bhp.”

Josef Newgarden is another IndyCar star who advocates a lighter, more powerful car.

“As a driver, I want a car that I can feel well, that I have complete control over,” he said. “We’ve gotten away from that over the years with more and more downforce and the way the tyres have changed. In my opinion, it’s gone away from feel and control. You’re more reliant on the pure speed and capability of the car rather than relying on both the car and the driver. The balance has shifted too much to rely purely on the car. A driver is still required to do the job, but most drivers prefer a 50/50 mix of the driver and car rather than it being mostly dependent on the car. For a 1600lb [726kg] car, 1000 to 1100bhp would be about right. What we’re asking for is not complex. It’s simple in a lot of ways, and it would make a much better formula.”

For racing purists, the need for any form of newness to IndyCar racing’s technical package is critically important to maintain or grow interest. Yet the fact that the likes of Dixon, Newgarden, Pato O’Ward and Álex Palou are out there banging around in a chassis designed in 2010 that could be eligible for vintage racing is also arguably the least of IndyCar’s problems.

When Roger Penske acquired the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in late 2019 for an estimated £240-280m, it came as part of a package deal that included the IndyCar Series and IMS Productions, a long established and highly capable video production company. Over the past six years, Penske made a nine-figure investment into the Speedway, with tasteful (and often needed) updates and upgrades that modernised the historic venue without altering its unique character. As a result, the Indianapolis 500 is at a modern era peak, achieving a 300,000-strong sell-out this year for the first time since the celebration of the landmark 100th running in 2016.

The Speedway is personal for Penske. He started attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1951, and taking ownership of the venue and event that sparked his lifelong passion for auto racing is arguably the crowning achievement of his 65-year business career. But Penske’s ownership of the IndyCar Series forced him to create separation from his IndyCar team, and the fate of IndyCar events outside the Indy 500 seems to hold little of Penske’s interest. Yet it’s the rest of the calendar that urgently requires attention.

Lost in IMS tunnel vision, Penske and his management team fail to recognise the same ‘big picture’ issues that affected IndyCar racing in 1978 when he co-founded CART are still holding the sport back. In those days, the Indianapolis 500 was at the zenith of its popularity but the competing teams needed a strong overall series of races to keep the sport in the spotlight (and themselves in business) for all 12 months of the year instead of the near total focus on Indianapolis and the Month of May.

CART fulfilled that objective; its legacy in the history of IndyCar racing is how it successfully grew the Indy 500 and a handful of unsuccessful other races into a popular international championship that was gaining ground on F1 worldwide prior to the hostile creation of the IRL. Now IndyCar racing appears to be right back where it was in 1978, when the Indy 500 was cruising right along, but the USAC National Championship had no national traction and many of the competitors were functioning on life support. Sure, a new car is forthcoming in 2028. But it’s a sticking plaster for a burn victim. If IndyCar racing is to succeed and grow again, a rethink of the sport’s philosophy and its antiquated business and marketing model is needed. To paraphrase a well-meaning but toxic phrase from American politics, how do you make IndyCar great again?

Even prior to Fox Corporation’s direct investment of a reported £97m, IndyCar was already counting on a new television package with all races broadcast on the free-to-air Fox network to bump up its popularity. But the Fox association has not delivered the anticipated ratings boost; the US TV audience for races outside the Indianapolis 500 has declined by 19% in 2025. IndyCar’s male-dominated audience is also the oldest among just about every sport in America. A 2023 media summary noted that 70% of its fans were 55 or older, including 45% over the age of 65. Fox Corp has the power and the platforms to make a difference. But its near-£100m investment is tiny in comparative terms; on the same day the 33% acquisition of Penske Entertainment was revealed, a 4.6% stake in the Aston Martin Formula 1 team sold for a reported £110m. With an ownership slice of the Speedway and IMS Productions, it’s a shrewd investment by Fox. It remains to be seen whether it was made purely to gain assets or out of a genuine commitment to growing IndyCar.

0ne of IndyCar racing’s fundamental problems is that decades of ‘Indy 500 über alles’ rhetoric created generations of ‘place fans’ who love and care only about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indianapolis 500. The majority are not ‘race fans’ who attend other IndyCar events and follow the series all season long on television. The Speedway has created a Disney-like cult following; loyalists genuinely believe IMS is the most wonderful place on earth and pledge their total devotion to it. That’s been great for the Speedway, but harmful in the long-term to the sport. The Indy 500 should be promoted and prioritised with the respect and reverence it deserves, but not to the point where it trivialises every other event on the schedule.

When IndyCar racing was at its popular peak from 1985-95, the growing strength of the CART series didn’t weaken the Indy 500. But losing that connection with Indianapolis during the split certainly harmed the likes of Mid-Ohio and Milwaukee and led to the demise of historic IndyCar venues including Phoenix and Michigan. Except for the season-opener at St Petersburg and Long Beach, today’s ancillary races get little love or promotion from IndyCar, and Long Beach – billed as the series’ marquee road racing event – attracted barely half a million TV viewers this year. A new event set for March ’26 featuring a temporary course that winds around the Dallas Cowboys football stadium is expected to be an attention grabber.

IndyCar must also change the mindset that it can’t schedule races after Labor Day weekend (early September) to avoid going up against American football on television. No racing series can afford to disappear from public view for six or more months of the year, especially one that hasn’t offered anything substantively fresh in terms of its product for nearly a decade. This is where the association with Fox – which carries a full slate of NFL games every Sunday afternoon and evening from September to December – can pay off, with the opportunity to experiment with weeknight races on TV.

In fact, the entire business model where IndyCar and its teams rely on television ratings to dictate sponsorship values needs a rethink. With content available in so many forms and formats, TV ratings have become a bygone measurement of a sport’s popularity. But then IndyCar also lags badly behind Formula 1 and NASCAR in terms of digital reach, social media and supplemental programming; its 100 Days to Indy mini-series, which is now in its third season, is a weak copycat of F1’s Drive To Survive and has had little impact.

IndyCar has its share of characters – the wildly popular O’Ward, California-cool Colton Herta, rising stars Kyle Kirkwood and Christian Lundgaard, competitive veterans Dixon and Power, not to mention Newgarden, the series villain, and the smiling assassin – four-time champion Palou. If Fox has the imagination and the commitment, it has the digital reach to make them household names.

Still, the roots of IndyCar’s stagnancy can be traced to the very focal point of the series: the car. Even when it was new in 2012, the Dallara IR12 was a couple of generations behind F1 technology. It’s a fossil now. The most current IR18/Aerokit/Hybrid iteration of the Dallara Indycar is humdrum when compared to the LMDh/Hypercars now competing in IMSA’s top class. NASCAR, which stubbornly championed 1940s technology until well into the 2000s, has a newer car than IndyCar.

Since the formation of the Indy Racing League as a cut-rate competitor to the CART series, a crippling emphasis has been placed on controlling costs and levelling the field rather than creating awe-inducing race cars. The evidence can be seen in a lack of track record speeds at many racetracks – most notably Indianapolis, where Arie Luyendyk set the benchmarks that still stand in a CART-specification Reynard in 1996. Current Indycars are 6sec a lap slower around Road America than when Dario Franchitti took pole position in 2000.

Once an arena for open competition between chassis, engine and tyre manufacturers, IndyCar racing’s zeal to lower the cost of racing drove away innovation and created a stale, spec racing environment. The on-track action is close, but it’s an artificial closeness because, engine excepted, every car is exactly the same. Honda and Chevrolet can’t push the envelope because of conservative engine mileage requirements and series-mandated caps on the cost of engine leases. Teams are not permitted any avenue of development outside shocks and dampers – hardly the stuff that creates interest from casual fans.

“IndyCar lags behind Formula 1 and NASCAR in its digital reach ”

The costs to compete were certainly higher in the ’90s than they are now. But the CART teams had the sponsorship to afford it until the effects of the split really started to take hold. The IRL, and later CART/Champ Car, came to believe they had the responsibility to save the teams from themselves and ensure that the wealthy ‘have’ teams didn’t force out the less-capable ‘have-nots’. And that’s the ultimate legacy of the split: it cheapened IndyCar racing, to the point where it no longer feels special. That’s a major problem for a sport that once prided itself on speed, excellence and technical innovation.

“One can say the racing is close in IndyCar, which it is,” observed McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown. “But IndyCar racing once had enough diversity that while it was not Formula 1, everyone was still excited about each year’s new cars and new technology. There were Lolas, Reynards, Penskes, Marches and Eagles. Ford/Cosworth, Ilmor/Chevy, Honda and Toyota were constantly evolving their engines.

“IMSA has a new product, NASCAR has a new product, and Formula 1 has a brand new product every year,” Brown added. “But for the past dozen or more years there’s been no reminiscing about the new Indycars coming along. IndyCar also needs to get out of the mindset of quantity over quality. I often think fans show up for the top 15 cars and that cars from 20-27 are a little bit of noise.”

One of the maddening realities of IndyCar’s tech malaise is that even though the original DW12 iteration of the Dallara IR12 was an ugly duckling, the ICONIC (Innovative, Competitive, Open-wheel, New, Industry-relevant, Cost-Effective) Committee that plotted its initial design direction came up with a good concept. The idea was that engine and potentially outside manufacturers from the aerospace industry could develop their own body parts (wings, sidepods and engine cover) that would create differences in appearance and performance between cars based on a common safety cell.

IndyCar’s 2015-17 aero kit era was a flop, but IMSA has used the concept to perfection with LMDh. Manufacturers design their own bodywork for one of four homologated chassis, mating the powerplant format of their choice to a common bellhousing and hybrid components. A BMW with its 4-litre turbocharged V8 looks and sounds different than a naturally aspirated 5.5-litre Cadillac, though they both incorporate the same chassis and other key common components.

While long committed to a single chassis supplier model, IndyCar has been searching for support from an additional engine manufacturer since the Lotus programme came and went in 2012. But IndyCar can’t even be certain it will move into its new era in 2028 with the two incumbents. Chevrolet’s participation is thought to be safe, given Roger Penske’s stature in the Detroit business community and his ownership of Ilmor Engineering that designs and builds the Chevy engine. But for the past two years Honda has hinted it will end its 30-plus-year involvement in IndyCar that includes a six-year stint as its sole engine supplier from 2006-11. Honda has actually suggested it would support a single-spec engine produced by Ilmor if it would significantly reduce the costs of competing and attract other manufacturers.

Fixing IndyCar racing starts with recognising the severity of the problem. When Penske executives see a full house and improved TV ratings for the Indy 500, spurred on by the cheerleading local Indianapolis media, it’s easy for them to conclude all is well. A quick look at the TV numbers for Long Beach or the attendance at Iowa Speedway clearly demonstrate that IndyCar is in poor health.

“I think a lot of the powers that be don’t realise once you sink a product how long it takes to get it back,” commented Mario Andretti, a four-times IndyCar champion. “It’s so tragic that you have unprecedented talent lined up in the series, but nobody knows about it. If you take Scott Dixon somewhere, he won’t be recognised. When the cop stopped you and said, ‘Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?’, all that is gone. I don’t hear, ‘Who do you think you are, Dario Franchitti?’ And these guys have won their share. They’ve won championships, they’ve won Indy. How do you explain that? Is there not an impact with the fans? What is it? I don’t know what the formula is.”

“A lot of the powers that be don’t realise once you sink a product how long it takes to get it back”

Prior to announcement of the Fox investment, many believed the easiest and best way to start solving IndyCar racing’s problems would be for Penske Entertainment to divest itself from ownership and management of the IndyCar Series – especially in the wake of Team Penske’s involvement in a pair of high-profile cheating scandals that resulted in the dismissal of three key managers. When Penske ownership was announced in 2019 IndyCar fans celebrated; they were terrified by the notion of an ‘outsider’ like Liberty Media taking control of their sport. Seeing Liberty’s success with F1, fans are now cheering the Fox ‘merger,’ believing it will create the kind of serious investment and nationwide effort needed to revive what was once America’s favourite form of open-wheel racing.

Hope springs eternal. The Indianapolis 500 will endure and it will likely continue to live up to its moniker as The Greatest Spectacle in Racing. It’s long been the only IndyCar race that mattered to many, but it’s in danger of becoming the only IndyCar race unless Penske Entertainment conjures up an exciting new car and Fox makes a serious financial and philosophical commitment to grow the sport outside of Indianapolis. That must start now, not in 2028.