IndyCar will no longer let non-chartered teams race outside of the Indy 500

The IndyCar charter system hasn’t really amounted to anything so far, unless you count causing Prema’s non-chartered two-car team to fold after one year despite putting a car on pole at the Indy 500.

IndyCar does not currently have a problem filling a grid, but the industry — not to mention the race car — has been quite stagnant for a long time, and there is near universal agreement that it’s too financially strapped to move much. Something must be done to reward the investment of going IndyCar racing, and charters are working wonders in NASCAR (now that the lawsuit is over). Now the key is that IndyCar charters actually have to become valuable.

IndyCar has a cultural tension it will never be able to resolve, so it should stop trying. It has always been an elite sport — motor racing in general and open-wheel racing in particular always have been and always will be — but IndyCar comes from a region that is culturally humble, the sport has always valued getting covered in grease wrenching on your own car, and it has had a tendency — which has waxed and waned over decades of industry evolution — to let upstarts into the field to see how they stack up against the big guys. Even though it costs millions of dollars and millions of engineering hours to be any kind of serious IndyCar team nowadays, the culture does not want to give up those affectations.

Nevertheless, IndyCar has buried the news ahead of the Month of May Deluge that it will no longer allow unchartered entries in races other than the Indianapolis 500. People I know are pissed about this. I’m not sure why. I don’t see any evidence that anybody even wants to race in IndyCar outside the 500 except massive global race teams like Prema, and from all appearances, they just misunderstood or mistimed their ability to get charters by showing up first with a couple IndyCars and going racing.

The teams who are in the series now — plus the two manufacturers who will be granted charters when the new car comes online in 2028 — have made unspeakably massive investments in keeping the IndyCar Series going into the 21st century, when it was by no means clear that it would. I see the argument that if someone new wants to get into the championship, they should do it by paying back one of the teams that’s in it now. It’s not like there isn’t an abundance of chartered cars that are only entered because doofuses like Sting Ray Robb have people willing to pay for them. Surely Wright Motorsports or somebody like that will someday be able to convince one of these teams to part ways with a charter or two.

It would be a different story, though, if this arrangement included the 500. You have to let people come take a swing at the Indy 500. That’s the one event where it is even theoretically financially possible for them to find sponsorship to do so, and it’s part of the grand tradition of the greatest race in the world. That’s why the series is called IndyCar. It’s not called PortlandCar.