Penske Entertainment CEO Mark Miles says the organization that owns the NTT IndyCar Series is looking into the formation of an international barnstorming tour that would run during the downtime between championship seasons.
For Miles, who has tried to land a new international event for the series since joining IndyCar more than a decade ago, the efforts to bring the series back to the worldโs stage have been consistently unsuccessful, including recent attempts to bring the American open-wheel championship to Argentina. Other international options have also failed to bear fruit since his arrival late in 2012, but the 71-year-old executive remains undeterred.
And rather than continuing to focus on finding a single international race outside of IndyCarโs immediate borders in Canada or Mexico, Miles says Penske Entertainment is contemplating going bigger with a multi-race global tour during the seriesโ six-month offseason.
โFirst of all, if it were to happen, Mexico would be part of the NTT IndyCar championship points race โ a drive to there from somewhere like Long Beach, or vice versa; part of the championship in the regular season,โ Miles told RACER.
โSo I don’t even think of it as ‘international’ in that context. I do think ending at the end of August, we’ve got an opportunity to have a productive period of time for IndyCar teams and our promotion of an โIndyCar International Series.โโ
Penske Entertainmentโs upcoming change in IndyCar broadcasters from NBC to FOX has produced a calendar for 2025 that pins the series into ending its regular season on August 31, prior to the start of the NFL season, which serves as FOXโs biggest sporting property. As a result, Penske Entertainment heads into a future where its series will fall silent at home from September through March.
โI’ve been thinking about it for a long time,โ Miles said. โYou have to get a green flag to go see what you can do, but the concept we’re giving some time to is an international series, and it’s not about โgo get one.โ We don’t want to look like we just went to chase some bucks. But could you put three or four together, and connect them, because is the title sponsor of the International Series? And there’s a bunch of money, not a little money, and it’s connected? There’s a points competition or a money competition between them, and that it would be international?โ
With live FOX broadcasts dedicated to college football on Saturdays and the NFL on Sundays during the regular NFL season, which runs from September through January, IndyCar would not have the kind of network presence it seeks if it were to hold championship or non-championship events while football dominates its TV partnerโs programming.
Separate from whatever financial windfall Penske Entertainment hopes to create for itself and its entrants, establishing a broadcast solution that delivers value for teamsโ sponsors during an International IndyCar Series calendar would be a sizable challenge to resolve.
The IndyCar International Series concept was presented by Penske Entertainment to the paddock in a team ownersโ meeting earlier this year and isnโt too far removed from an in-season model used by the former CART and Champ Car series in the 2000s, where large jets were rented to haul cars and equipment around the globe for quick back-to-back stops in Germany and the U.K., and Belgium and the Netherlands.
According to Miles, series owner Roger Penske (and his senior leadership team above Miles) who work from the Penske Corporation headquarters in Michigan, is supportive of the initiative.
Champ Car had a brief presence in Europe in the 2000s, with stops including Assen in The Netherlands (above). Mike Weston, Motorsport Images
โWe have to be in places where we know we’re going to have good events,โ he said. โWe have to make sure that the economics work for the teams and us. It’s not easy. It’s hard to do one, let alone three or four races. But I like the idea, and I think now internally in Detroit, there’s more of a consensus that if you could do it, we could see the advantages.โ
RACER understands the new charter system Penske Entertainment is readying to introduce only covers the standard in-season championship events. If any pre- or post-season international races are added that arenโt part of the normal calendar, an addendum would likely be required to revise the charter, which would involve buy-in from the charter teams before it could be implemented.
And how soon could an IndyCar International Series be ready to launch?
โIt’s a few years off,โ Miles said.
The series heads into next season with 17 championship races on the docket and Miles hopes to add at least one new venue to the schedule for 2026.
โWe think the number of races is about right,โ he said. โWe don’t have an objective to increase them. We’ve said that our strategy is to try to, in the U.S., add more hot urban markets and Mexico. So I would say for โ26, I think we’ll have at least one new U.S. race that fits that description, and we’ll see about Mexico. It’s a priority.โ
Amid the decade-long effort to land and launch a new international IndyCar race, Miles and his Penske Entertainment compatriots must be thankful for one that fell through: A proposed street race in Wuhan, China, during what became the height of the global coronavirus lockdown.
Cited as the city where COVID-19 originated, RACER has learned the seriesโ former head of events held talks with a highly interested promoter in 2019 about taking IndyCar overseas to compete in a Wuhan Grand Prix, which was the second proposed Chinese IndyCar race of the decade.
Milesโ predecessor, IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard, led a team that developed a plan that was announced to bring IndyCar to race on the streets of Qingdao, China, in 2013, which ultimately unraveled when the Qingdao promoter did not make the necessary payments to the series.
RACER has also learned a Wuhan Grand Prix track map was created and financial terms were discussed in 2019, and when asked for details, Miles denied talks were held.
โI started right then , so let’s say 2013 I probably touched some familiar bases from my other experiences in Shanghai and other provinces,โ he said. โAnd there’s been zero since then. It’s a decade-old rumor.โ
