IndyCar shifts timeline for new car further back, creating complicated future. Here's why

Indianapolis Star

12-06-2025

IndyCar's new car to replace the DW12 that has been in use for 14 seasons won't debut until 2028 at the earliest, a Penske Entertainment spokesperson confirmed to IndyStar on Thursday, the latest pivotal project to be delayed for a paddock that has frequently seen deadlines and expectations on various major developments shift in recent years.
It was as recent as two months ago that series owner Roger Penske told reporters that Penske Entertainment had a designed car running in the wind tunnel, 'and our plan is to bring in that car in 2027.' When asked by IndyStar at the IMS Museum's ribbon-cutting ceremony that he meant a fully revamped new car, rather than a piecemeal update, Penske said, 'That's the plan, yeah.'
Just a couple weeks prior, Penske Entertainment president and CEO Mark Miles told IndyStar during a lengthy exclusive sit-down at St. Pete in March regarding the process and timeline of IndyCar's pursuit of a new car that at a minimum, teams and drivers would without a doubt see some form of an update by 2027, even if it wasn't the entire completed project that Penske would later say was 'the plan' to roll out in two years' time.
The day prior during a news conference with Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks and new IndyCar president Doug Boles, Miles had referred to the series rolling out a new car 'in the 2027-28 time frame.'
"But that doesn't mean we'll have nothing in 2027 and everything in 2028, and it also doesn't mean everything in 2027, and then we're off and rolling,' Miles told IndyStar the next day of the fluid new car timeline. 'It could be staged, but you'll see a difference in 2027.
'Whether it's everything we intend to do over the next few years is what's still on the table.'
Exactly what changed over the last three months since those comments is unclear.
In an email exchange with IndyStar on Thursday, a Penske Entertainment spokesperson merely noted that, 'IndyCar has confirmed a timeline shift to 2028' for its new car rollout. Requests to speak with Boles and Miles regarding recent shifts in those plans were turned down, stating that, 'We anticipate supplying media a broader and official update in the near future.'
Hopes for a new Indy car as early as 2027 sprouted out of comments from Miles days ahead of the 2024 IndyCar season where he told reporters that such an endeavor could be ready as early as 2027, but that key decisions would need to be made in a matter of months for a new car to debut in three years' time.
'We're not to the point of fully establishing (2027) as a deadline or goal, but I think that is the focus, and we're hopeful we'll be able to roll out the next powertrain, along with major developments (to it), and a new chassis by 2027,' Miles said in March 2024. 'We want to improve our ability to attract additional OEMs by lowering the cost barriers to entry, but we also want to make sure we do it in a way that's even more relevant to the auto industry.'
With little updates on that project throughout the 2024 season that finally saw the debut of the several-times delayed hybrid system in July, Penske Entertainment leadership held a frequently referenced October meeting with team owners that many in the paddock have said they believed would be a collaborative brainstorming session about the direction of the new car.
Instead, to many team owners' and managers' surprise, they were shown a prototype that was already far down the line in the idea phase and which would spend time in the wind tunnel just weeks later, giving those team reps the sense that the process had started without them. Miles, on the other hand, characterized this spring that paddock stakeholders were shown an image meant to mark Penske Entertainment's progress in its own brainstorming, rather than something meant to exude a finished product.
Roger Penske: IndyCar planning to introduce new car in 2027
'I would just say, the conversation (on the new car with teams) is only about to start,' Miles told IndyStar in March of this year, five months after that controversial meeting with team representatives. 'A ton of work has been done, and we're not going to start the conversation with a conclusion, but a lot of work was needed to be done before we could have an intelligent dialogue with the paddock and other stakeholders.
'Whatever we showed in October was (meant to be seen as) options and current status. We've never ever put something out there and said, 'What do you think of this? Because this is what we want to do?''
From March: IndyCar CEO Mark Miles details new car development process
Miles would go on to say that that mock-up had 'evolved' since October and at that point involved 'cool thinking that will make it a better result.' According to the series CEO, a group of no fewer than two dozen people from at least six countries met for weekly conference calls to discuss findings and chart out research and design assignments for various directions of the new car to ultimately be able to come back to the table with teams this year and lay out the project's potential directions.
In that St. Pete sit-down, Miles told IndyStar he was aiming to be able to discuss more openly IndyCar's new car plans by the Indy 500, but said that wasn't meant to be a firm expectation. Thursday morning, multiple team owners told IndyStar they'd received virtually no update on the new car project's direction or timeline since the start of the season. By the afternoon, some told IndyStar they'd begun to receive phone calls from series leadership regarding the firmly stated intentions for a 2028 rollout.
The development poses a serious conundrum for a series that signed its current pair of engine manufacturers to an extension in October 2020 through the completion of the 2026 IndyCar season but have yet to ink a new deal with either side that would kick off in 2027.
It's long been assumed that Chevrolet, whose engines are manufactured by Ilmor Engineering — which Penske long ago co-founded and still co-owns — will return to IndyCar as an OEM for the foreseeable future. What remains to be seen is whether Honda, which 18 months ago stated very plainly its concerns over the ability to achieve viable return on investment while continuing to compete in the sport beyond its current deal, will re-up. A Honda Racing Corp. USA spokesperson has repeated multiple times this spring to IndyStar that the manufacturer remains in positive, productive talks over its future in IndyCar with Penske Entertainment officials, but that a decision had yet to be reached.
Should both sign for new deals, it seems reasonable to assume that the life of IndyCar's current 2.2-liter twin-turbocharged V6 engines and their paired hybrid systems would remain in use for an additional gap season in 2027 before a new car and engine formula would be launched the following season. Tasking the manufacturers to manufacture, track test and mass produce a new engine when future regulations have not been ironed out and the OEMs' commitment to the future of the sport hasn't yet been secured, would be a stretch.
'Why do we need one?' IndyCar team owners divided on direction in pursuit of new car
This added season allows for ample buffer room for delays or testing setbacks and also aligns the new engine formula with the rollout of the new car, rather than attempting to retrofit yet another major key component to a decade-plus-old car.
But the prospect of Honda's potential exit from the sport after more than 30 consecutive years of competition could leave the entire sport in a bind for 2027. Such a development would force Ilmor (presuming it sticks around) to manufacture and ready double the number of 2.2-liter twin-turbo V6s they've long been used to in order to outfit the entire grid — with a powertrain that would be in its final year of use, no less. Even if new manufacturers sign on for IndyCar's future technical regulations, none would consider joining for 2027 under one set of regulations, only to have to produce a wholly new engine for the following season as the formula evolved.
Though Penske Entertainment has long professed to be actively searching for manufacturers to add to the sport in its more than five years of series ownership, Miles said this spring that the pool series reps have spoken to aren't uniformly aligned in the direction they'd like to see the regulations travel down. Though Miles promised this spring that the use of hybrid technology would continue in IndyCar's next set of regulations, given the series' run of consistent backtracking on promises and altering timelines of late, it seems reasonable to question whether that promise, too, will be kept.
Back in 2018, IndyCar and its manufacturer partners initially promised the rollout of a new 2.4-liter engine formula for the 2021 season, though that project's debut would shift to 2022 with the announcement in 2019 that IndyCar would be going hybrid a couple years down the road. At that point, just a couple months before Tony George announced the sale of Hulman & Co.'s racing assets to Penske Corp., both a new hybrid engine formula and a next-generation chassis was set to debut in 2022.
By the completion of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic-altered IndyCar season, series leadership announced in concert with Honda and Chevy's most recent extension that the debut of a new engine would be pushed back to 2023. In March of 2022, IndyCar announced another new engine formula delay, pushing the project to 2024, citing significant global supply chain issues.
In December of that year, series officials announced that Honda and Chevy had been forced to take a more hands-on role in developing the hybrid system, requiring a change to the plans for the internal combustion engine that would remain the long-used 2.2-liter instead of an upgrade to the 2.4 — so as to allow IndyCar's engine manufacturers to spearhead the hybrid project and not simultaneously have to worry about the development of an entirely new engine, too.
In December 2023, IndyStar broke the news that the debut of the hybrid had once again been shifted backwards, this time into the middle of the 2024 season — the paddock's most recent delay-related saga in a span of a couple years that has seen the series abandon plans to close the season on a much-ballyhooed Nashville street race, pause its pursuit of a new video game for the first time in decades and temporarily leave the iRacing platform.