Fox’s offer 'was too good.' Why IndyCar believes new media rights deal can lift series.

INDIANAPOLIS – Record-setting, history-making days are rare in motorsports, and yet, on an other-wise innocuous June morning with no cars on-track and with teams attempting to take a collective breath, IndyCar and Penske Entertainment wrote the first lines of a brand-new chapter of American open-wheel racing.

The ripple effects of this monumental day remain anyone’s guess, as one faction of the sport’s fan base cheers louder than it has in years and another threatens to turn its collective back on IndyCar for the time being.

Takeaways on new TV deal: IndyCar is moving to Fox. And with it, a new race schedule.

In Penske Entertainment’s decision for its next media rights package, NBC, its six-year incumbency as IndyCar’s exclusive partner and its 16-year stretch of involvement, was always going to be the safer bet. Fox and its sometimes folksy, eccentric, somewhat gimmicky NASCAR broadcasts, laden with commercials that irk a fan base on a weekly basis each spring Sunday? At best, an unknown commodity brimming with potential, and at worst, a risk.

With 19 network windows, including all 17 races in 2025 on the table — far-and-away a record for IndyCar — as the framework for a multi-year deal, Fox Sports CEO and executive producer Eric Shanks put together a package worth rolling the dice on.

“We think this is history and record-breaking for IndyCar,” Penske Entertainment president and CEO Mark Miles told reporters Thursday morning, minutes after IndyCar unveiled the basic details of the series’ new exclusive media rights partnership expected to last through 2027. Of note, the deal:

∎ Represents a 50% increase in IndyCar’s network TV time in 2025, compared to 2024

∎ Makes IndyCar the only major racing series in the country with all its races on network TV

∎ Sets a record for IndyCar’s network TV windows in a single season, with the sport having landed 19 a year through the life of the deal

∎ Makes Fox Sports the first network to air both the Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500 — the two largest, most important races in the U.S. — live in the same year in their collective histories

∎ Puts all Indy NXT races on cable — a majority of them on Fox’s larger FS1 platform – and also brings IndyCar practice and qualifying to cable as well

“This isn’t just IndyCar Inc. that will benefit from the exposure, creativity and production values that Eric and his team will bring to IndyCar,” Miles continued. “This is for the whole paddock, and I think it brings us all more to sell and promote. This can be a great thing for the whole ecosystem.

“We think they’re going to do a great job in telling our stories in a way that will appeal to our fans, be uniquely IndyCar and help us grow the fan base.”

How Fox Sports beat produced deal NBC couldn't beat

According to multiple series sources, Thursday’s news was weeks in the making. Fox's interest in the package became clear this winter, as one of five interested media companies that kept conversations rolling after IndyCar spoke with eight parties during its road show late last year. The network soon stood out as a strong contender that could seriously challenge NBC for the exclusive package it's held the past half-dozen years. Initially, sources believed what Fox may not offer in network TV windows, it could make up for in cash.

Though Miles said all the right things publicly — noting consistently Penske Entertainment’s primary target in negotiations would be ‘reach’ and ‘fan base growth’ — there was a strong inkling among many that, faced with a network-heavy package from NBC that changed very little in financial value, and an offer from Fox with one-third of the season on network but an eight-figure annual pay increase, Roger Penske would be hard pressed not to take the money.

After all, Penske Entertainment has poured nearly $60 million to largely polish the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, while helping IndyCar’s engine manufacturers supercharge the development of the series’ long-awaited, many-times-delayed hybrid system. Add in largely keeping the series afloat for the COVID-19-plagued 2020 campaign and the 500 ticket sales ramifications that continued on years after, and Penske’s stewardship of IndyCar, IMS and the 500 during his first roughly five years of ownership have been anything but by the script.

It's hard to say exactly when, but there appears to have been a sea change behind the scenes at the negotiating table sometime in or around May, where sources believe Fox all but stepped away and nearly left NBC to be the winner by default. At one point, those sources believe, Fox was offering just the 500 on network TV — something that even with exponential growth in the financial value of the deal, would’ve been next to impossible to sell to fans and team owners — the latter of whom have seen annual budgets per entry rise from the $6 million to $8 million range to $8 million to $12 million, due to technological advancement, rising crew and engineer salaries and general cost increases.

The road that led to Thursday isn’t crystal clear, but some see a connection between NASCAR’s surprise announcement of its new-for-2025 in-season tournament stretch that has gone to TNT. Understood to have previously been at odds with NASCAR in the closing stages of putting together the series’ new seven-year, $7.7 billion media rights package split between Fox, Amazon Prime, TNT and NBC, the mid-May news may not have helped. Around the same time Fox Sports confirmed its plans to shutter Race Hub, its one-hour daily NASCAR show that some in the industry believe requires an eight-figure budget, rumblings that Fox again was a player for IndyCar’s exclusive rights started in 2025 again bubbled to the surface in the lead-in to the Detroit Grand Prix.

In confirming Fox had not always been at the negotiating table with a 19 network window offer in-hand, Shanks told IndyStar on Thursday one element that helped get it to the finish line was a recent decision to air sports programming on the broadcast network on Friday nights. In moving some United Football League games from the weekend to Fridays, among other things, Fox managed to free up space that could help guarantee IndyCar the network windows it craved — one that some in the Penske Entertainment orbit admit they didn’t think was possible when the sport went to market eight months ago.

From there, as many as 20 iterations of a potential 2025 schedule were drafted that left the series still with a slow-paced spring. Generally speaking, next spring’s slate ushers in a more even flow leading into the Indianapolis 500, before a rip-roaring pace to the finish line that will see 14 races over the final 18 weekends of the schedule.

As part of the multi-dimensional puzzle, both sides also had to get sign-off to shift World Wide Technology Raceway two months earlier, dock the Milwaukee Mile down to a single race and slot Laguna Seca into its third spot on the calendar in as many seasons, among other changes.

“It was a lot of work between both parties,” Shanks said. “There were a lot of moving pieces to make this a reality.

"I had a good catch-up with (NASCAR chairman and CEO) Jim France yesterday, walking him through this, and I think there's going to be a great halo effect for all of motorsports."

Said Miles: “(NBC executives) said (Fox’s offer) was too good. They couldn’t come up with the network windows that Eric and his team at Fox Sports have made available to us. We’ve still got half a season to work with them, and I do want to express my thanks to them for the years of collaboration that has helped us grow so far.”

Fox's impact on IndyCar too soon to tell

What makes Thursday an uneasy day for some is the uncertainty of what’s to come. Though it never seemed to grow nearly as fast as many fans, drivers and team owners liked, NBC over the years has offered IndyCar a solid foundation from which to build from. At a time in which the series was seemingly stuck in neutral for the bulk of the 2010s while splitting its rights between ABC’s handful of network races and the cable slate of Versus/NBCSN, NBC executives championed the sport enough to be willing to both pay the price of hosting the 500 and attempt to infuse energy into a somewhat unknown sporting commodity: the rest of the IndyCar schedule.

Though this stat exaggerates reality, when you consider IndyCar had just five network race windows in 2018 and boasted 13 a year ago, NBC nonetheless helped drive 37% growth in IndyCar’s average TV audience from 2018 (925,000) to 2023 (1.269 million). Regardless of the growth, it offered a larger platform, and IndyCar blossomed because of it. Last year, IndyCar stood as the only motorsports series in the U.S. to increase its average viewership year-over-year in 2023 — albeit a 2% step-up — and the season’s average audience ranked as its largest since 2011.

Since Penske took the series, series officials estimate the number of those who identify as ‘IndyCar fans’ has grown by 20%.

Where those TV audiences will be in 15 months with the 2025 champion crowned is unclear. IndyCar’s network audiences in 2024 with NBC have been a mixed bag, and its average annual non-500 network audiences have grown less than 5% from 2019 to 2023, according to IndyStar’s calculations.

With Fox, IndyCar becomes a larger fish in a smaller pond, when looking at the annual in-season sports it will be up against. There’s reason NBC carries its ‘Championship Season’ slogan through so much of its annual sports programming that soon will include several major golf tournaments, the Olympics, Kentucky Derby, Premier League soccer, NASCAR, IMSA, NBA, NFL Sunday Night Football and college football, among others.

And yet, whereas some of NBC’s best promotional tools are "The Today Show" and "The Tonight Show," Fox will host both the 2025 Super Bowl and 2026 World Cup.

But where this deal will in so many ways hinge — and what has so many fans up-in-arms with Fox’s selection — will be the network’s ability (or lack of) to shed a rather poor reputation among a wide swath of vocal fans on social media that hate its commercial-heavy NASCAR broadcasts and the way it often comes off as corny and unsophisticated. In response, Shanks — whether honest or not — claimed not to be "in the know" of so many fans’ sentiments, before being given specifics by the Associated Press.

“All I can say is we celebrate and try to make every broadcast as approachable, informative and entertaining as possible,” he said. “We do the biggest events on TV and take each one of them in conjunction with our partners to make the best broadcast possible.”

At the same time, Shanks promised not to shy away from using its entertainment assets to help cross-promote its newest sports property, from finding new, creative ways to champion IndyCar on NASCAR broadcasts to envisioning Gordon Ramsay hosting a massive 500 tailgate to be featured in the pre-race show.

“We’re going to work with (Miles) and the team to make sure we have the right tone and star power (in the booth), in a way in which we can celebrate (IndyCar) as a series — not just the Indy 500, but all the races,” Shanks said. “We want to try and make individual races feel bigger.

“We are looking to use the tools at Fox Sports and work hand-in-hand with IndyCar on strategic scheduling to be able to put races in the right places to reach the broadest audience possible. (IndyCar) and the Indy 500 are truly a crown jewel — not only in motorsports, but sports in general. It truly captures the nation’s attention, and under the leadership and ownership of the Penskes, there’s incredible momentum if you’re around Indy in May.”

Follow IndyStar motor sports Insider Nathan Brown on X at @By_NathanBrown.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Inside how Fox Sports landed IndyCar deal, vision for growth