Key pieces still in play regarding 2026 IndyCar calendar

04/01/2025 03:45 PM

Should the IndyCar Series return to race at The Thermal Club? What influence will the 2026 World Cup, which is set to air on FOX, have on event placement? Where does Portland's future lie as an ongoing stop on the IndyCar calendar? Penske Entertainment CEO Mark Miles provided insights for some of those questions and more in a conversation that spanned a range of schedule-related topics, starting with the desired number of races for next year's calendar.

Having settled into running 17 races since 2022, Miles says the aim is to continue the trend in 2026.

"It is the objective," Miles told RACER. "It’s likely to be the number more likely than not. But we’ve always said that if it was 16 or 18, those results are conceivable. It just depends on the opportunities. So I think it’s more likely than not to be 17."

With the new Arlington Grand Prix scheduled for March 13-15, holding firm at 17 would involve dropping one of the current races, or deleting one of the Iowa doubleheader races, to accommodate the series' upcoming return to Texas while keeping all of 2025's venues in place.

"It’s in the conversation," Miles said of returning to Thermal. "But it is not something we’ve decided. I think it met or exceeded our expectations. They’re excellent people to do business with. They’re very good at taking care of their customers, whomever they are. Certainly the paddock likes being there; they're well treated. And I think the view is the racing was good. There are ideas about improving it just by changes to the track.

"We didn’t love the audience numbers that we got. And we certainly were disappointed with losing the signal for the time that we did, so that sucks on us, but they’re good hosts. It is, to say the least, different to have a race where we’ve got 3000-ish fans there to watch the race. And so that’s something that either wears well over time or doesn’t. It's one of the reasons that we’re still thinking about what the optimal use of Thermal is for the future."

If it isn't as a championship race, IndyCar could continue the relationship with Thermal as it originally started in 2023 as a venue for the series’ pre-season testing.

"I think something like that is definitely possible," Miles acknowledged. "We again, we value relationship with Tim Rogers and his team and that place. We would love to find some way to continue."

With St. Petersburg in position as IndyCar's opening race at the beginning of March and Arlington taking the middle of the month, Miles hopes fans will enjoy a faster pacing to begin next year's championship run.

"I think the St. Pete start will be about the same early March," he said. "Then I don’t think we’ll have a three-week gap. It’ll be less than that before the next race and the scheduling of races from there through May with Indianapolis, fans will like because we’ll have some opportunities to close some of those gaps. It's still a tough time. You got the Players and Augusta — The Masters. You’ve got March Madness and the Final Four, and you’ve got Cup races, and Easter, so there’s a lot going on, but we think we can have an improved schedule next year in that time frame."

Similar to how last year's Summer Olympics led IndyCar's former broadcaster NBC to create a blackout window for other sports on its network, FIFA's World Cup is expected to have a similar effect for non-soccer sports properties that air on FOX.

The June 11-19 tournament could knock out two weekends of racing for IndyCar; it visits World Wide Technology Raceway and Road America over that span in 2025 and like the Olympics, IndyCar is readying for the need to move some races to one-off positions before and after the World Cup to assist FOX's complex scheduling requirements.

"It’s obviously a huge sporting event, and FOX is the domestic broadcaster," Miles said. "We have started the discussions with them about a ’26 calendar, and that is really to try to begin to draw them out on what their issues are. We’ve had one 'all the way through the calendar' conversation about it to identify things we need to look at and work on. But they are confident that, if anything, some of their World Cup promotions and their World Cup programming might be an opportunity to cross promote IndyCar to an audience in a different sport."

The biggest breakthrough for IndyCar with its new FOX relationship is the move of every race to network broadcasts. Despite the uncertainty of how the World Cup will alter some of IndyCar's race dates and times, Miles says the network-only standard should hold.

"It’s meant to be the model and something that continues," he added. "I believe we’ll end up with an all-network model again."

Depending on who was speaking at Thermal about the proposed event in Denver, Colorado, the street race was positioned as something that could happen as soon as 2026 or no sooner than ’27. Miles wasn't willing to provide clarity, but with the 17-race schedule in mind for next year, 2027 is a better fit.

"The work on it continues and it's too early to say whether it will be successful, or whether it would be ’26 or '27," he said.

The longstanding ambition to race in Mexico at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez was the next item covered by Miles. If it comes to fruition, it would land towards the front of a future IndyCar season and would not be a non-points exhibition event.

"We're making good progress," he said. "I believe it will become a thing. If it became a thing, it has the potential to help us in that time of year. It would be like Toronto; it’s part of the championship."

Sorting out contract extensions for some events that have reached their final years — with Portland and Monterey believed to be in that conversation — is where Miles closed the discussion.

" Michael Montri is starting the process to talk to the ones you just mentioned, and frankly, all the rest that are on the calendar to look at," Miles explained. "All those things have to come together at the same time, whether it's FOX about the dates that work for network TV windows and the dates, it’s times. All that has to be got to have a good handle on to really move forward with earnest on the extensions with existing events. I will say this is with the phones ringing a little bit, I think in part, because of FOX. We just had a call from a person who'd love to help us find something on the East Coast. So I think that FOX is going to end up being a great impact in developing more options for the races."