Quality Over Quantity: The Harsh Future Facing IndyCar’s Midfield

Cost optimizationRevenue optimization
Written By David Vaucher

In the past twelve months, four IndyCar teams (one third of the 12 running in 2025) publicly admitted they were seeking to bridge financial gaps in their racing operations:

Timing and perception matter

Ed Carpenter Racing was the first to go public in their search for funding. This must have been tough, but it allowed them to get ahead of a narrative that is easy to tell with hindsight.

Investors see patterns. Seeing three “please fund us” headlines in less than a year would reframe the issue as systemic fragility in IndyCar’s midfield.

Who would want to invest in that?

However, in Ted Gelov of Heartland Food Products Group, ECR found someone who, crucially, was also based in Indianapolis, and whose consumer-facing brands are perfect for putting in front of race fans via eye-catching liveries.

Surely there was some luck involved in having so much line up to make this deal happen, but nevertheless it was apparently worth it because it was announced in July 2025 that the team was moving to a state-of-the-art facility in Westfield, Indiana.

All this likely did not go unnoticed, because in the subsequent wave of teams seeking investment, most of them are looking for the same source.

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In less than 500 words.


These teams are looking for benefactors, not sponsors

Here’s the curious part: IndyCar teams on the financial bubble aren’t just chasing sponsors. They’re chasing equity investors, personal backers who step in for identity, prestige, and emotional return, not corporate ROI.

The fourth team, Prema? Well, at one point they were apparently partly owned by Lawrence Stroll, current owner of the Aston Martin F1 team (though, to be fair, they have success in other series so some of that money could be diverted to developing their IndyCar program).

Dayle Coyne was explicit about this when the announcement regarding seeking investment was released:

“Buying into the team itself...It brings a few things to the table. If you have an investor who has the passion for the sport, if you have a billionaire investor, like a lot of teams have a billionaire investor, this is a game of golf to them, and to me, it’s everything I do. But they can backstop the budget. They have relationships and a network to find sponsors that I don’t have. That’s valued. The charter has opened the door for all this, big time.”
— Dayle Coyne

What is the dynamic underpinning the chase for a “billionaire investor”?

Quite simply, as much as this represents a financial “Hail Mary”, it could be about the only option left for teams that don’t win consistently:

  • Sponsorship is fragile in IndyCar’s midfield. A Penske-type team can spend millions per year per car because sponsors trust they’ll get visibility, ROI, and a platform that feels inevitable. Low-tier teams scraping by at much lower spending levels don’t look stable or credible enough to justify that spend.

  • Sponsors want winners or safe bets. PREMA and JHR are new to the field

  • Equity backers don’t care about spreadsheets. Hollinger at JHR, Gelov at ECR, these aren’t sponsor checks. They’re people saying: “I want to be part of this, and I can afford to write the check.” In that sense, they require less work to satisfy; so long as they feel “part of the team”, they’re on board.

If you look up pictures of PREMA’s two IndyCars on track, you’ll notice that the sidepods are blank, implying there were no sponsors willing to pay for that space.

Is this because they have so much money to spare that they preferred to keep a “cleaner” looking car devoid of additional logos, or perhaps is simply that they just could not find an organization interested in filling those spaces?

The bottom line is that in today’s IndyCar, the sponsor model applies to winners. The survival model for everyone else is finding a benefactor. ECR succeeded because they found one who was also a sponsor. That dual ROI is the ideal win-win scenario.

Should every team survive?

McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown has been blunt, on several occasions: IndyCar may be stronger with fewer cars.

“I don’t think the fans would miss three or four cars from the grid that aren’t going to win races and don’t add much value. Scarcity could raise the overall product — fewer yellow flags, more competitiveness, and a stronger sponsor pool.”
— Zak Brown, CEO McLaren Racing

That’s upsetting if you’re a fan of any of those teams, but it cuts to the core. PREMA, DCR, and JHR are all caught in the money-performance death loop:

  • Not competitive enough to attract serious sponsors.

  • Not funded enough to get competitive.

Keeping those cars alive may not be IndyCar’s salvation, and this all happening against a backdrop of a new chassis coming in 2028 which is going to be an inflection point from a cost perspective.

It’s no wonder these teams are trying to find equity backing now, but what if they fail?

Letting the weak fall out could raise the floor of the series and concentrate resources among the teams that matter to fans and sponsors.

What happens next?

Though Dale Coyne has yet to land the billionaire backer he openly courted, the team did recently secure a primary sponsor in Ault Blockchain, a reminder that the traditional model isn’t dead, just harder to sustain at the midfield. For Juncos Hollinger and PREMA, the questions remain. I’ve already written a high-level playbook for JHR’s equity search, but the real challenge, for them and for Coyne alike, is moving beyond the idea of an investor as a mere budget backstop.

Because the bigger picture isn’t about one team’s survival.

It’s about whether IndyCar itself can create an ecosystem where mid-pack programs are more than fragile projects hunting for benefactors. Formula 1’s backmarkers are valued in the billions because the platform lifts them. If IndyCar wants its midfield to do more than hang on, it needs to create the same rising tide.

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Main image source: Sara Ruffoni via Unsplash

David Vaucher
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