ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The green flag drops on a new season of the NTT INDYCAR SERIES, Sunday. With a new season comes changes, in the form of a new series president, a new U.S. broadcast partner and a charter system.
To one of IndyCar’s longtime stalwarts, Chip Ganassi, the charter system “makes these teams be a viable business.”
“If you have strong teams, you’re going to have a strong series,” he said. “It just trickles down from there. You’ll have strong races and you’ll be on solid footing on a worldwide basis.”
In many ways, IndyCar’s charter system the league announced a few weeks after the end of the 2024 season mirrors the charter system used in the NASCAR Cup Series. It guarantees a starting spot for 25 of the 27 entries in each NTT INDYCAR Series race (the last two spots available for “open teams”). This doesn’t apply to the Indianapolis 500, despite some owners wishes to include it.
The reasons for implementing it mirror those on the NASCAR side: It gives teams a means to sell the entire operation rather than bits and pieces, as Michael Waltrip Racing did a decade ago. It also makes attracting sponsors much easier when you’re guaranteed entry to all but one event on the calendar.
“I think it’s a great thing,” Ganassi said. “I’ve said before, I thought — maybe that’s something that doesn’t translate down to fans per se. I don’t know that it’s a fan-centric decision by the series, but it’s something that the team owners badly need, to have a solid — again, this goes back to my earlier comments about being a viable business.”
While it may conjure up bad memories of the infamous 25-8 rule that led to the IRL-CART split in the mid-1990s, it’s highly unlikely to happen again. There’s not a second series in the equation, and the aforementioned Indy 500 is excluded from a guaranteed starting spot.
“The charter agreement, to me, is the single-most important piece for the future of the series,” Michael Shank, team owner of Meyer Shank Racing, told Forbes. “I’m grateful that we all came together on this and thank the Roger Penske group for working with the team owners for getting it done.”
