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 world’s 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 IndyCar’s immediate borders in Canada or Mexico, Miles says Penske Entertainment is contemplating going bigger with a multi-race global tour during the series’ six-month offseason.
“First of all, if it were to happen, Mexico would be part of the NTT IndyCar championship points race – a drive to there from somewhere like Long Beach, or vice versa; part of the championship in the regular season,” Miles told RACER.
“So 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 ‘IndyCar International Series.’”
Penske Entertainment’s 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 FOX’s biggest sporting property. As a result, Penske Entertainment heads into a future where its series will fall silent at home from September through March.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” Miles said. “You 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 ‘go get one.’ 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?”
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 partner’s programming.
Separate from whatever financial windfall Penske Entertainment hopes to create for itself and its entrants, establishing a broadcast solution that delivers value for teams’ 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 owners’ meeting earlier this year and isn’t 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.