Six things IndyCar needs to do to meet Will Buxton’s ‘bigger than NASCAR’ claim

The Indy 500 is the peak of every IndyCar season — but how do we make fans care about the rest of the year?
A new day is dawning for IndyCar, America’s premiere open-wheel racing series. A swap to FOX and the signing of Formula 1’s Will Buxton to the commentary team signals a shift in how the sport intends to promote itself — but can it be “bigger than NASCAR”?
That’s what Will Buxton is hoping, as he told The Race. But growing IndyCar is a daunting task — and if it wants to be bigger than NASCAR, it’s going to take several big steps forward in several different departments. Today, we’re digging into what IndyCar needs to do to match — and possibly exceed — NASCAR.
Improve the IndyCar broadcast
Thankfully, this seems set to change.
In 2025, IndyCar is swapping broadcast partners from NBC to FOX, the latter of which is known for pushing the boundaries in broadcasting. In almost three decades of NFL coverage, FOX is responsible for introducing the pre-game show, the big-production feel of events, a scorebox, incredible audio, and so much more that transformed the way every sport considered its broadcasts.
And FOX has already introduced a fun advertising campaign centering on highlighting the cool factor of IndyCar’s drivers — which is a great step in the right direction.
The past several years on NBC, though, have made for challenging viewing. The graphics packages seem to lag behind other race series, making IndyCar feel like an afterthought. Things only got worse with the introduction of hybrid engines midway through 2024; the broadcast seemed totally unequipped to explain how battery power could be used and deployed during an event. If hardcore IndyCar fans were turned off by the lack of attention paid to broadcast quality, how could a new fan be expected to get engaged?
The FOX move promises to be a step in the right direction, but it’ll take a while for those benefits to compound into increased viewership.
Celebrate the Indy 500 — and the rest of the championship, too
The only culturally relevant part of the IndyCar schedule is the Indianapolis 500, and that’s a shame.
Buxton is one of many people to praise the quality of racing in IndyCar, which can be extremely exciting due to the restricted nature of tech development in the sport. But most folks will never know that; they only have eyes for the 500.
The Indy 500, first staged in 1911, has been the organizing principle around which various series have centered (to the extent that it was even added to the Formula 1 calendar between 1950 and 1960). There truly is no other race in the world with the layers of tradition and meaning provided by the 500 — but IndyCar does itself a disservice by only focusing on that single race.
Consider, for example, IndyCar’s attempt at replicating Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive. Rather than produce a season-long show, IndyCar and The CW created 100 Days to Indy, which only focuses on the five races that take place before the Indianapolis 500.
And that’s it. If you only tuned into 100 Days to Indy, you’d be forgiven for failing to realize there are 11 races after the 500 that all count toward a championship.
If IndyCar wants to rival the popularity of a series like NASCAR, it has to prioritize the whole season. It simply cannot rely on a single race — even if it is one of the most prestigious races in the world — to buoy its popularity for the duration of the season.
Take a good, hard look at the calendar, then expand it
IndyCar’s calendar is organized on one defining principle: That it cannot compete with football. It would be foolish to argue against that, but it has also resulted in a very narrow understanding of what the IndyCar calendar could be, and how it could begin to challenge other sports for airtime.
Compare the season calendars between 2024 and 2025: There are no changes. In the past six years, there have been only a handful of changes that included the removal of Texas Motor Speedway and Pocono, the revival of tracks like Milwaukee and Nashville Superspeedway, the removal of Circuit of The Americas, and the addition of a widely-panned exhibition race at Thermal Club.
None of these tracks break the mold. None are unexpected. As a result, none are exciting. IndyCar instead had decided to appeal to its own echo chamber of existing fans, which inherently limits the number of people it can appeal to.
The arrival of popular drivers like Pato O’Ward have seen an uptick in fans from Latin American countries — an audience still widely ignored by IndyCar. The series could organize a race or two in countries like Mexico or Argentina to capitalize on existing fanbases in those countries while also encouraging new fans to tune into the sport for the first time.
Instead, IndyCar has regularly shown that it would rather stick to its tried-and-true season schedule — one that hasn’t done much to grow the fanbase year after year.
Compare that to NASCAR, which has both returned to heritage tracks while also trying out totally new events, like the Chicago street race (the first street race in the series’ history) and the move to Mexico (the first points-paying NASCAR race held outside of America in decades). NASCAR is attempting to engage both its new and its old audiences. IndyCar has stuck with the old.
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Consider a management shake-up
When Roger Penske purchased IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway back in 2020, it seemed like a massive move. It lifted the series from the grasp of the Hulman Family and seemed to promise a brighter future for the sport.
Sadly, that hasn’t quite turned out to be the case. While IMS has undergone some truly impressive renovations to bring the track up to modern standards, that same mindset has not spread to the entirety of the series. The result is a championship that feels like an afterthought to its own management.
It’s time to consider a management shake-up — to bring in a team of forward-thinking marketers and advisors who understand that every aspect of the sport needs improvement, and that every angle should be considered.
Innovate, don’t emulate
Take a quick look at IndyCar’s growth strategy over the past few years. When it was clear that Netflix’s Drive to Survive had a tangible impact on Formula 1 viewership, IndyCar set out to replicate that formula with its own docuseries on The CW — one that didn’t make the same splash as DTS.
Or, look at the sport’s push for growing its calendar. Much like NASCAR has done by reintroducting tracks like North Wilkesboro and Bowman Gray, IndyCar orchestrated a return to the Milwaukee Mile as a way to revitalize nostalgia in a similar way to the Cup Series.
Further, IndyCar firmly rejected the idea of a race in Mexico City until NASCAR announced its intention to race there; as the stock car series received ample praise for its expansion, IndyCar had to walk back its previous statements about its Mexican driver being unable to secure an audience and begin trying to schedule a race itself.
Oh, and IndyCar’s new charters? Its introduction of a “$1 million” race? Both are concepts that came straight from NASCAR.
Rather than embracing the things that makes the series unique, IndyCar has been trying to copy successful moves from other series without understanding why those moves worked — and why it may not be possible to map those moves directly onto IndyCar.
The resulting sentiment is that IndyCar is on the back foot, reacting instead of simply acting. If it wants to be bigger than NASCAR, it has to prove it has good, innovative ideas that aren’t pulled right from NASCAR’s playbook.
Understand the bad blood still simmering in IndyCar
The history of American open-wheel racing is laden with in-fighting, drama, and a whole lot of bad blood. Since the late 1970s, different championships have fractured off from that was once a unified front, and the only reason those rival factions joined back together in 2008 was to prevent bankruptcy on both sides.
This means that for three decades, American open-wheel racing did itself more harm than good, and for a lot of folks, those tensions still linger today. In 2024, for example, they manifested in spats about the conversion to hybrid powertrains, the introduction of a charter system, the lack of international races, and so much more. The drivers, teams, management, and fans are all butting heads, even as we approach the 2025 season.
While the ongoing charter lawsuit in NASCAR proves that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, NASCAR critically has remained a unified series that has consistently grown over time. There’s an overall confidence in the stock car body’s ability to consistently provide a racing product that is still missing from IndyCar.
All of the aforementioned suggestions really don’t work until IndyCar sufficiently reckons with its own tense history and identifies the way those tensions are holding it back.
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