IndyCar Leaders Circle contracts increased by $100K
Yesterday at 09:29 AM
Penske Entertainment has added $2.2 million to its overall expenditure on Leaders Circle (LC) contracts for the 2025 season.
According to multiple sources, the parent company of the IndyCar Series issued 22 new LC agreements to the teams who placed inside the top 22 of last season's entrants' championship with an added $100,000 included, taking each contract to a value of $1.2 million.
Established in the mid-2000s by the Hulman George family, the former owners of IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the LC program was created to ensure its smaller teams who finished behind the bigger teams were not left out in the sizable per-race prize money earnings.
Through the LC, IndyCar pools the majority of its season-long prize money fund and divides that sum equally across a set number of entrants who in turn commit to participate in every race.
The increase comes at a time when IndyCar teams are facing the highest annual operating budgets in nearly 25 years, with the average cost per entry ranging between $8-10 million, up from an average of $6-8 million as recently as 2023.
The increase of $100,000 will be useful for the 22 (of the 27) full-time entries with LCs as IndyCar's engine manufacturers have been permitted to elevate their annual engine leases by $150,000 per entry, rising from $1.45 million in 2024 to a new standard rate of $1,600,000.
Team owners also continue to wait for the lease agreement paperwork to arrive for IndyCar's spec energy recovery system (ERS). Overseen by Ilmor Engineering, maker of Chevrolet's IndyCar engines and Penske Entertainment's chosen vendor to facilitate the ERS program, teams paid $90,000 per entry last season to cover the eight races — from Mid-Ohio through Nashville — featuring the series' midseason move to hybridization.
As of the time of publishing, the full-season price to cover the 17 upcoming races had not been communicated to IndyCar's paddock, but multiple teams told RACER they were anticipating an annual outlay of $225,000-$250,000 for each car, which would account for an increase of $135,000-$160,000 per entry.
