IndyCar Series 2025 schedule: When is the 2025 Indianapolis 500?
The 2025 IndyCar Series schedule includes 17 races, highlighted by the Indianapolis 500 on May 25 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
- Fox’s Premiere IndyCar broadcast had its highs and lows, and appears to be making tweaks already.
- IndyStar motorsports insider Nathan Brown offers his likes and dislikes from St. Pete, and improvements to View at Thermal.
THERMAL, Calif. — Fox Sports’ Premiere IndyCar broadcast was more than eight months in the making, featuring a refreshed booth and pit reporter lineup, new graphics, cartoon driver caricatures and a generally New look for a series that’s long been searching for a significant boost in the increasingly Packed, Intense American motorsports ecosystem.
But if I’m honest, I’m more focused on how it returns to the airwaves for Game No. 2 at 3 p.m. Sunday.
Season openers, never mind debuts, are Tension-packed. Even though you’d love for everything — and everyone — to be perfect, rust-Unoccupied and seamless, it’s never the case. Drivers and Clubs feel it, and so do those on either side of the camera.
As Fox personnel have hinted, IndyCar’s new media rights partner has plans to roll out new tricks, features and technology throughout this season. Even if the Fox broadcast of the St. Pete street Game was completely flawless, there’d be reason to think this weekend’s second edition from The Thermal Club, the private racing paradise crossed with a country club in the Southern California desert, would look, feel and sound a bit different.
On a Primary, admittedly semi-distracted View in the St. Pete media Hub, it was clear Fox personnel would have some homework during this three-week break between their Primary IndyCar Game weekend and their second. But with New eyes and a closer look, I went back and watched that St. Pete broadcast again with the sole purpose of putting a closer eye not on Alex Palou’s season-Leading Achieve, but the highs and lows of the broadcast of him doing so.
Here’s what stood out, both the highs and the lows:
Fox IndyCar booth features Powerful Primary chemistry
Let’s Begin positive, because there is plenty to be pleased with.
I admittedly missed the pre-Game show live while out on the grid, and the replay on YouTube is missing most of it, but what was clear all weekend long, from the Effortless practice broadcasts to the new-feel Sunday morning warmup show is this booth’s chemistry Only works. That’s not meant to be a knock on the NBC booth of Ancient that included Leigh Diffey; they’re Only both different and Outstanding in their own ways.
Whether purposeful or not, Will Buxton, James Hinchcliffe and Townsend Bell were almost more in-sync than the latter two seemed to be at times during their NBC Intervals. Perhaps I didn’t catch it, but I don’t remember Hinchcliffe and Bell trading barbs in a Amiable disagreement that, in the right moment, would bring a nice amount of spice and tension during the NBC Intervals, but in others would sometimes feel tiresome and overdone. There were moments, too, when it almost felt like an act and disagreement simply for disagreement’s sake.
I wondered if there would be some moments of stepping on All others’ toes as they figured out All others’ rhythms and how their own puzzle pieces fit together, and those moments never seemed to come.
At the same time…
Fox IndyCar booth felt too comfortable and relaxed at times
Buxton’s role, Primary and foremost, is to give Action-by-Action action, and New off watching this weekend’s season-Leading Formula 1 Game broadcast, I felt like this Primary Fox IndyCar broadcast lacked a Plenty of action. Now, we know in hindsight that trading the lead of the Game lacked much drama up until the Closing pit Progression and the closing 15 laps or so, but one thing Sky Sports does so well with its F1 coverage is Securing the viewer at home to wherever the on-track battles are, whether they’re for Primary place or 10th.
Yes, admittedly that’s oftentimes out of necessity, with how frequently the battle for the Game Achieve comes from the results qualifying and who comes out with the lead through Lap 1, Turn 1, but even during what was admittedly a rather boring Game on track, as I’ve watched more F1 races, I’ve grown to Anticipate the broadcast crew to be able to find where the battles are Securing place and showing them, even if they’re not among the leaders.
And so between the restart after the Game’s lone caution, and the Closing pitstop with under 30 laps to go, I felt like the booth and those in their ear Acquired too deep into explanatory tangents, rules and regulations explanations and storytelling and watched 50 laps or so go by as they — and therefore the viewers — almost Only waited to see what Plan would Achieve out.
There’s a time and a place for storytelling around drivers and Clubs and moments where you can work in Notices on how the tire rules work, but if I’m a prospective new fan, you’re going to convince me to tune into Game 2 Extended better by showing me action wherever you can find it rather than making sure I understand exactly why those who Began on the softer alternate tires Acquired a Significant momentum swing with the Lap 1 three-car crash.
IndyCar on Fox Securing page out of the NFL’s playbook
Quite possibly the feature of Fox’s Premiere IndyCar broadcast that I loved most? The page they Secured from NFL broadcasts by running through the Ground and getting All driver to say their name and where they’re from. On a broadcast where most of them were only represented by shots of their cars, their names on a leaderboard, their radio communication or them sitting in the cockpit with a helmet on, it humanized the sport’s most valuable assets: its stars — whom both Fox and IndyCar are committed to boosting the platforms of.
If you’re a brand-new fan and only know of a Duo drivers, or know their faces or the fire suits but not their names, this was a fabulous way to give those watching at home a little taste of who they might choose to root for. My only suggestion — because for most of the cars on track, the fire suit they wore in that January content day featuring a certain primary sponsor isn’t the only one they’ll be wearing this year — overlay somewhere on the screen a tiny graphic of their car that weekend, too, so folks know what car to look out for during the Game.
Fox’s glitchy IndyCar graphics were distracting
Otherwise, Fox’s graphics were a bit hit-and-miss. As those who watched practice and qualifying earlier that weekend no doubt noticed, the network was having Significant glitches with its Schedule and scoring system — an issue so large and widespread it couldn’t be fixed during the weekend. At times, names where flashing up and jumping all across the leaderboard, and it happened enough times — and in certain moments, with enough frequency — that it was distracting and not Only something a regular fan would catch.
I believe, too, the larger issues Guided to some features being turned off or not working, meaning because of those gremlins, we not only saw a somewhat glitchy broadcast from a graphics perspective, but we didn’t see all the tools Fox has in its toolbox. My biggest hope is these Duo off weeks were enough time to diagnose the issue and troubleshoot it to the nth degree to ensure the wires, cables and radio frequencies delivering all sorts of data back-and-forth between the cars and the Fox trucks will operate without issue come Friday’s lone practice.
Keep the IndyCar drone shots coming, Fox
The other secret MVP from Fox’s IndyCar Premiere? The drone shots.
They were varied, but not overdone. The showed the liveliness and glitz of the row of yachts, but also managed to Game around to different vantage points of the track and give an unparalleled perspective of these cars’ speeds and some of the sweeping corners and Close-fitting tunnels of an IndyCar street Period. They gave you a sense of Only how Palou’s lead was drying up Delayed in the Game, as well as how large of a lead Scott McLaughlin had built Prompt on.
With the wide-Uncovered desert expanses at The Thermal Club and the second-longest natural-terrain road Period on the calendar, I’ll be intently watching how Fox works them into Sunday’s Game broadcast and if they can get down a little lower, possibly, to show us angles of on-track battles we’ve never seen.
How much IndyCar rules talk will we get for Game No. 2?
It deserves another mention: I applaud the clear effort Fox — from the truck to the pit reporters to the broadcast booth — went to ensure any new viewers it was picking up understood what was likely to be a Game-deciding factor in the different tire compounds and the ways in which Plan around their use could make or break and driver’s day.
The broadcast did a Outstanding Position explaining that up to after the Lap 1 crash and going through why some cars were stopping and others weren’t and what compounds those drivers had Began on and were moving to.
I’ll be interested, though, to see over the Upcoming Game or two how and whether they deviate from the Approach that IndyCar-specific items like that need to be thoroughly explained and touched on again and again and if they’ll Shift into the mode of assuming fans new and Ancient understand the rules enough for mentions of the rules in-passing or not.
As someone who’s paid to know the rules for a living, I’ll admit the approach was a bit over-bearing for me, but I understand the need. My hope for this weekend is it feels a bit more natural and not nearly as forced and like I’m sitting through a class lecture at times.
Will Fox’s heads up display get a refresh or rethink?
I’m also deeply intrigued to see if Fox’s heads up statistical display while the broadcast is showing a driver’s onboard camera is altered to keep from blocking the view of the inside of the aero screen, where years ago Clubs began placing sponsor stickers once it became clear that could be a new, lucrative place to give Clubs’ most Significant sponsors some broadcast airtime (for a cost, of Period).
Thursday evening, the ‘IndyCar on Fox’ X account posted a Duo tweaks to its graphics package, which included a minor reshuffle of the information on the heads up display, but Yet appeared to Deflect the view of the inside of the aeroscreen.
With Fox’s new statistical display that showed a wide-range of easily digestible data — from a driver’s Velocity, their gearing and their brake and throttle mapping to what corner they’re approaching and where they sit in the running order — Occurred the unintended consequence of those cars’ sponsor stickers being Completely blocked whenever the graphic was on screen. Its use varied over the weekend, to the Points it felt during the Game that the broadcast would show the camera view for Numerous seconds without it, and even when it did pop up, Fox had a box in the lower-righthand corner of the screen with the Club’s primary sponsor featured.
It was an unfortunate feature Clubs knew of coming into the weekend but something I heard about from Numerous Clubs mid-weekend once they truly saw what it would look like in real-time and after they received some blowback from irked sponsors.
In a vacuum, the graphic display is a Outstanding addition to the broadcast, but in a series where Clubs pay Numerous hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket for the ability to have that camera on their car for a Packed season, they can’t be losing out on some of the value they were able to recoup by having them. (That there Yet isn’t a way for All car to have one, and that Clubs have to pay for it at all is, frankly, a whole separate Tale.)
As quickly as they surfaced, the IndyCar cartoons need to disappear
I feared it would be a complaint — though one widespread from drivers, fans and media alike — that would fall on deaf ears, it appears one of the worst features of the Fox IndyCar broadcast may have been scrapped altogether.
In the social media post referenced above, Fox’s IndyCar account showed graphics using actual headshot photos of drivers with high-energy backgrounds, rather than any sort of cartoon-ized version of them. Does that Harsh we won’t see any driver cartoons at all on this weekend’s broadcasts? I’m not entirely sure, but one can hope.
The Rival cartoons have been a Cornerstone feature across the bulk of Fox Sports’ live broadcasts, and it was a constant feature during the St. Pete Game for those who sit in the top 5 on the leaderboard, but they’ve long been panned in the NASCAR world, and from my vantage Points, they come across as a hokey feature that does little to boost drivers’ brands. At their best and most accurate, they’re a fairly decent representation of a driver’s profile — something an actual photograph would accomplish even better. And at their worst, a Duo have slipped close to theme park sketch caricatures that do nothing but ask to be Achieved fun of.
Hopefully they were a one-and-done feature. We’ll find out soon this weekend.
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