As if running the world’s most famous racetrack wasn’t enough to keep him busy, it’s been almost a year since Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Doug Boles added the presidency of IndyCar to his job description.

And what a year it has been since Boles took over the series’ guidance, with an impressive first season of prime time race broadcasts on FOX Sports, FOX becoming a part owner of IndyCar’s parent company (Penske Entertainment), the announcement of a new race coming in 2026 to Arlington, Texas, as well as the relocation of the annual Toronto street race to a nearby suburb, and so much more.

Boles was a guest on Wednesday on Epartrade’s four-day Race Industry Week. Here are some of the highlights of Boles’ discussion:

Q) What has the experience been like since succeeding Jay Frye (now president of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing) as IndyCar president?

A) It’s definitely been a different experience, a little bit of juggling for me. To keep the job at the Speedway, inherit the job at IndyCar, and really just trying to elevate the teams that really execute and make sure that both those organizations are functioning, and just trying to be the person that can be there to help them when they’ve got issues, but really giving them the runway to operate the organization.

I think the biggest thing is to start thinking about what are some of the high-level things we need to do to grow the series. What are some of the things we need to do to really set forth a two-, three-, five-, ten-year plan of how are we going to grow the series? So I spent a lot of time through the year really trying to write out that path forward. How are we going to grow the series as we continue to move forward?

Obviously, working with the partnership at Fox, really trying to build that first year with Fox in 2025 was outstanding, but we can’t take our foot off the accelerator. We can’t let that just be, ‘Hey, let’s introduce IndyCar and Fox together.’ That just has to be sort of the bar. We just have to now figure out how we continue to build on it every year. … The drivers and the teams have really stepped up to help us grow the sport, bring in new sponsors and new partners and the competitive product that we have on track continues to be really strong.

Q) Did your relationships with some people change after also becoming president of IndyCar, as well as (IMS)?

A) It is a different relationship that you have with the drivers, the teams, the manufacturers, the partners that are involved. And then when you take on the IndyCar series side, there are so many constituents who are really dependent upon the IndyCar series growing to make sure that their organizations are growing, and everybody has their own idea of how to get there, and not everybody’s idea is exactly the same.

So kind of juggling through those differing ideas, you might have a partner that needs something different from a team, that wants something different from a driver, that needs something different from a promoter at a different one of the series events that we run. So really trying to work through those relationships is really the biggest and then saying, ‘Okay, what are the key things that we really need to do to move forward?’

You’re not going to make everybody happy, I’m not going to be able to address everybody’s concerns, but what are the key ones to that organization we have to address so that we can continue to elevate the series and continue to give all of those different constituents a platform that allows them to be successful in their businesses?

And we need them to be successful in their businesses because that’s really the heart and soul of what makes IndyCar work outside of our fans. Our fans are really the heart and soul, but then you’ve got this meat of teams and partners and others that you have to make sure that they can be successful.

Balancing the needs of stakeholders and partners, sponsors, teams, drivers, etc.

A) You could have a great conversation one day with a constituent and then the next week have an absolutely difficult conversation with them on a completely different issue. So they are relationships that need to be managed over time and that they’re not always going to be positive or happy conversations.

The one thing that’s been the biggest challenge for me over the course of the last 10 months has been how focused (I’ve) gotten on the competition and upside of the business. You want the competition to be good, you want the operations to be good, you want it to be fair. We’ve gone through some challenges there that we’ve had to work through and we continue to be prepared so we don’t have to deal with those in 2026. And I think in 2026, I’ve learned a lot from 2025 that I can be better at that as we go forward.

Q) FOX this year purchased a 30% share of Penske Entertainment, thus becoming a shareholder and having a vested interest in growing IndyCar and making it more successful.

A) FOX really believes in this product and in the direction we’re going and the leadership and the teams and the drivers and personalities that they invested in us. So they aren’t just our TV partner, but they’re invested in making sure that our series continues to grow. So I think you’ll just see that even better next year. Are we perfect? No, we have a long way to go. We have a lot of ways that we can continue to grow. I think you’re going to see us be a little bit more aggressive in 2026 in terms of how we’re going to grow the brand and grow the personalities and hopefully grow the audience.

Big changes to the 2026 schedule

Q) The 2026 schedule has a new marquee event that will take place in Arlington, Texas, plus relocating the Toronto race to one of its suburbs, plus a doubleheader with NASCAR in Phoenix. Those are some exciting changes, aren’t they?

A) I’m excited about the changes we’ve made to the schedule. One of the biggest challenges we’ve had, and we had certainly in 2025, is you have this great kickoff at St. Petersburg, and then we go dark for three weeks, and nobody knows where we are. You just lose that momentum. So to be able to have the momentum of three weekends in a row in March 1 (St. Pete), 7th (Phoenix), and then go into Arlington (March 15), that’s going to be a really great way to kick the series off.

Arlington is going to be an outstanding facility. It’s a really cool location going around the two stadiums there with the Cowboys and the Rangers. But just how open it’s going to be? You think of street racing often times, and it’s really tight quarters, and maybe doesn’t feel quite as fan-friendly in terms of the ability to see things. I think it’s going to be a really, really great venue. It’s going to race well, it’s going to have really high speeds in it.

We’ve had a lot of great momentum in terms of ticket sales and hospitality sales. It’s going to be a spectacular event. And then the Nashville race after the World Cup final on FOX is going to be a big deal for us. I think it’ll drive a lot of viewers, new viewers to our sport, and hopefully that’ll have some carryover as we continue to grow the sport. So a lot of cool things in the schedule.

Q) Phoenix will be an IndyCar-NASCAR doubleheader weekend in early March. How much are you looking forward to that? And how do you like the variety of tracks on the circuit, street and road courses, ovals, etc.?

A) Phoenix is a racetrack that, like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, is not quite as long, but its history really is rooted in IndyCar racing. You think about all of our iconic names in our sport, competed and won at the Phoenix Mile. So, going back to Phoenix, historically, it used to be the race right before you came to Indianapolis. And if you could run well at Phoenix, you were probably going to run well at Indianapolis.

We have a couple races in between Phoenix and Indy, but I think it will be another one of those great events that we could have leading into May. I am excited about doing a double-header with NASCAR again. So having an opportunity to be part of the Cup weekend and be back in Phoenix is going to be another interesting experiment. I think that should definitely be a fun one.

In terms of the mix, I think the mix is really important. It’s one of the things that makes IndyCar unique. The ability to have short oval, super speedways, road courses, natural terrain road courses and street circuits, I think is what makes our series unique and we need to stay that way.

Q) Are there blank spots on the country where IndyCar isn’t racing?

A) We often hear from fans in the Northeast is probably the obvious one. The Northeast is our primary goal in terms of if you said pick one place that you need to go to, our priority would be to get out to the Northeast. We’ve had a couple of opportunities to go visit some potential venues in the Northeast over the last few months, and we’ll continue to focus on that. We’d love to definitely have a Northeast race on the schedule sometime in the next couple of years. But building a race from scratch, especially if it’s a street race, takes some time, and we’ll continue to work on that.

The Northeast would be our priority, and then you start looking at the middle of the country. There’s some places in that area of the country where you can put a race together. We get an awful lot of calls from people who’d love to have us race at different places. And the Midwest tends to be one of those places we hear from folks a lot. We feel like we’re pretty strong in the Midwest right now, and right now the focus is we’ve got to figure out how to get back to the Northeast, and then after that we’ll figure out what the next locations should be.

Will there soon be a race in Mexico City or other foreign venues?

Q) Will there be an international race soon, perhaps Mexico City or overseas in Spain or even Silverstone to broaden the audience similar to the NFL strategy of playing games in foreign markets? 

A) (There was) obviously a lot of disappointment that we weren’t able to secure the Mexico City race for the 2026 schedule. It was something that (Penske Entertainment CEO Mark Miles) and the team ahead of me had been working on for quite some time, and I think they felt like it was really close to being a done deal. In fact, we had what amounted to an agreement to run there, and ultimately it didn’t get put on the schedule. We still do have conversations (about) going there. Mexico City, especially with Pato (O’Ward) and the excitement that folks have around Pato, it would be a great location for us to go, so it’s still something that we’re looking at.

If we were thinking about international locations, Mexico City is probably the most likely next one. It doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be others, but that would be the one that because we’re farther along in terms of conversations. And then in terms of looking at an international schedule, I think there’s some internal debate here as to how would that fit? Could you fit in an international race inside our current schedule? Would it set outside as an exhibition, which might be an option? It’s just really challenging trying to figure that and fit that into the schedule and where we might go, but it’s definitely something that we’re looking at.

New car and new engine due in 2028

Q) How is the work on the next generation Indy car coming?

A) So I obviously inherited a car that was pretty far down the road when I took on this job. First of all, the folks at Dallara (chassis makers) are fantastic partners to work with. I think the biggest challenge for us is a couple. One, you want to make sure the racing continues to be the racing that we’re used to. And then secondly, safety is so important to us, especially when we’re racing on ovals. You need to make sure that whatever the next generation of your car looks like that you don’t just maintain the safety standards that you have, but you find a way to increase them. So the car has come along a long way.

Hopefully, we will have an announcement early next year and hopefully have a rollout of that car and begin to start testing it sometime in early next year as well as we prepare for bringing it out in 2028. So the progress continues to be there. We’re trying to finalize what the engine format will look like for 2028 so that we can get all of that stuff rolled out and get ready to go leading into 2028. We need it to be lighter, we need it to be more nimble.

We want it to be, frankly, I want it to break a track record at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. But in order for that to happen, we have to think about safety and there’s a whole bunch of other things that go into that. So there’s a lot of things coming. We’ll be pretty excited to get it in everybody’s hands and let everybody see it.

Q) Will we eventually see a third engine manufacturer in the series?

A) I’d love to have three manufacturers as part of the IndyCar series. The nice thing about it is that that’s a 2028 rollout, so we still have a little bit of time to get that done. I know that the series has talked for a long time about, ‘Hey, we need another manufacturer. ‘ How do we get one? And the longer we went with sort of the same engine package, the harder it was for an outside engine manufacturer to say I want to get in because I’m hundreds of millions of dollars behind Chevrolet and behind Honda. And so you’re going to bring your brand in and struggle for a while.

So the idea that we’re going to reset the playing field in 2028, I think it’s one of the best opportunities we have to engage in manufacturers. The FOX momentum, for sure, has changed the way a lot of our conversations have been going with manufacturers as well, so I think that’s a positive. We just have to double down and do everything we can over the course of the next six months to try and get all our manufacturers to stay and be in, but also to add to that.

Looking at IndyCar’s long-range future over the next 5-10 years

Q) What are the main challenges or opportunities that you’re seeing over the next five to ten years?

A) Obviously, the thing we have to do over the next five to ten years is become what a lot of us remember: open-wheel racing, especially IndyCar, Champ Car, CART, whatever you want to call it back in the day. We want to be the racing series that everybody in North America and at some level globally that people think of when they think of motorsport. I don’t think it’s something that is a goal that we can’t reach, and I spent a lot of this summer really kind of mapping out what I thought was a good beginning point to have a conversation about building that plan.

We’ve worked on that internally here, and I feel like hopefully in the next several weeks, we’ll be able to roll that out in a way that our fans can get behind, in a way that our stakeholders, whether it’s team owners, drivers, others can get behind, and we can have some metrics to say, okay, here’s the beginning of the path to move forward. We all know these paths. You might have a direction that gets you ten years. You may have to pivot and move because something might work and something might not, and we’ll be prepared to do that. But we definitely need to share something that all of us in the IndyCar community can get our arms around and say, ‘Okay, this is the direction we’re going, and here’s how we’re going to get there and we can all roll in the same direction.’