Written by Archie O’Reilly
“It’s not a maybe, man,” said Alexander Rossi as DIVEBOMB questioned the Ed Carpenter Racing driver about his thoughts on a possible new car for the 2027 IndyCar season.
“It’s happening.”
There has not yet been confirmation that a new formula will certainly be in place following the 2025 and 2026 seasons, but a number of drivers have been shown the initial plans that IndyCar has drawn up for a prospective new chassis intended for 2027.
And on the series’ annual media days, a number of drivers were quizzed about what they believe is the path IndyCar should venture down with its new car…
To “reinvent the wheel” or not?
“Yes,” Rossi responded when asked whether he had seen the renders for the planned 2027 car. But he would not be drawn on any details.
“Probably not [allowed to share]. I’m not going to be that guy.”
But as he heads into his 10th season of IndyCar competition in 2025, the rookie winner of the 2016 100th Running of the Indianapolis 500 did have plenty of thoughts to share on what would make up his ideal new Indy car.
“I’ve actually talked to quite a few people at length about this,” Rossi said. “There’s some people that have the belief that it needs to be this super-futuristic, crazy-looking, ultra-modern car. There’s other people that are like: ‘Okay, it needs to be this super light, high-horsepower thing that does track records everywhere.’
“I don’t think it’s a debate we already have the best product on track that exists globally, so to reinvent the wheel I don’t think is something that needs to be done. I think it needs to be an evolution of the car we’ve had.”
IndyCar’s current Dallara DW12 chassis - through various iterations - has been in circulation since the 2012 season and will have completed 15 campaigns by the time of its planned retirement after the 2026 season.
The DW12 does still provide an exciting product in part, but Rossi believes too many advancements have been made in the engineering world for IndyCar to persist further with an increasingly outdated car.
“Technology has developed, materials have developed,” he said. “We have added a lot onto the DW12. So integrating all of that is going to have benefits from a cost standpoint, from a safety standpoint, from a workability standpoint for the mechanics to have things that fit and flow and work a bit better together.
“But ultimately I don’t think we need to do anything that’s beyond what we already do because I think what we already do is pretty good. It just needs to be an updated version of what we have.”
Less weight, higher horsepower
A continual complaint from drivers about the current iteration of the DW12, featuring the added weight of the hybrid power unit introduced in mid-2024, is that the car is now too heavy.
“Less weight is critical,” said Josef Newgarden. “For me that’s the number one point. I think almost everyone has expressed that.
“I think as you look at the car now, it’s developed into a pretty heavy race car. I’d like us to get the weight down. That’s ideal. Then producing a high-horsepower car - more than we have now - with a stable aero platform, it’s always the ingredients you look to have in this type of series.
“Our racing product has been quite good over the last four or five years, so I don’t think we want to disturb that or completely overhaul it. And they’re working on some new ideas how to even improve that.”
The two-time series champion and two-time defending Indy 500 winner did credit the engineering team behind the effort to produce a new car.
“Certainly the engineering team is very strong,” Team Penske’s Newgarden said. “They’re doing a great job already. We certainly know the direction that they’re headed. They’ve given us a lot of time for feedback and opinion.”
As he enters his 25th year in the top American open-wheel series, Scott Dixon was another to point out that the current car has grown too heavy.
“The weight,” the six-time champion immediately pointed out as the overriding issue.
“I’m sure everybody says that. But that, I think, will make raceability a lot better. This will give the tyre some breathing window as well. The look definitely needs to be updated.
“I think as far as the driver situation, I don’t even know if they’re going to introduce power steering. Those are some things that even junior categories have now where we don’t and that would help, especially with a lot of wrist and hand injuries. So on the safety side I think that would be pretty big.”
Dixon, as pointed out by Rossi and Newgarden among others, is cautious of harming the existing racing product that IndyCar is renowned for. But he also believes there are ways to elevate the spectacle.
“You don’t want to change too much because the fundamentals work really well,” the Chip Ganassi Racing driver added. “It’s a great racing series. I would like to see more power. The car has degraded over the years as far as if you look for a power-to-weight situation.
“The first car I drove in CART was 1000 horsepower and probably several pounds lighter. So I think to get back to a faster car would be cool. A lot of circuits we go to are only a couple seconds quicker than the Indy NXT car.”
Protecting the current racing product
The universal sentiment is that the DW12 has simply been around for too long. Its predecessor, the Dallara IR-05, which started as the Dallara IR-03, was suggested to have been outdated after nine seasons of use - six fewer than the DW12 is likely to be used for.
“We’ve had this car a long time,” said Ed Carpenter, speaking from the perspective of both a team owner and veteran driver. “I’ve been around long enough that we thought we had the previous generation car a long time and this one has gone on further.
“It’s definitely time for something new.”
But Carpenter raises the recurring concern: what if you make the racing product that you pride yourself on worse with a new car?
“Our racing over the past handful of years is really strong,” Carpenter said. “I think it’s critical that we don’t make any mistakes in the new car process that get us away from the style of racing we have right now because I think it’s the best product in the world.
“But it does need a bit of a refresh and a reset to make sure we’re staying in front of technology and everything else. It’s something that needs to happen. But we’re all still learning a lot about it.
“We’ve seen some of the preliminary stuff. But even what we’ve seen I think is still not near a finished product. We’re all excited to see how this project develops, which I’m sure we’ll see more and more as we get into this year.”
Marcus Armstrong, who enters his third season in IndyCar after moving from Chip Ganassi Racing to new technical allies Meyer Shank Racing, suggests the racing product and car is a big reason behind himself and others moving to IndyCar from series such as Formula 2.
“I think there’s an attraction to this championship because of how brutally difficult it is from a driving standpoint,” the 2023 Rookie of the Year said. “The car is an animal. It moves around and you really have to grab it by the scruff of the neck. All the drivers in Europe watch it on TV and wish they were doing it.”
Armstrong also weighed in on what changes he would make.
“I think just by virtue of the tracks - the circuits are generally quite slippery and bumpy - you’re going to have to drive with an aggressive style,” he said. “I feel like we have tonnes of power at the moment, especially with the hybrid unit. There’s a lot of torque down low.
“The power unit side is okay from my point of view. But I’d love the car to be lighter, a bit more downforce, maximise the ground effect, bigger diffuser, and lower center of gravity, maybe a bit further forward weight distribution.”
“Authentic, fast and loud”
Graham Rahal provided a succinct checklist for the new car, aligning with what he says are the beliefs of IndyCar president Jay Frye.
“Authentic, fast and loud,” said the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing veteran.
“I think we’ve got to stick with that. I don’t think we need to fall into the trap of electrification too much.
"To me, I think IndyCar, if you continue to buck the trend of the pattern of conservative thinking when it comes to electrification - like has been pushed over the years - I’m not sure that’s the pattern of the future. Hybrid certainly is.”
Rahal, a keen businessman away from the track, acknowledges the demand for and attraction of hybridisation from his own car dealerships.
“I think if you stay true to that, you can make a lot of horsepower,” he said. “You can make a very efficient race car and you can make a sexy-looking race car.
“Ultimately with horsepower comes noise. I wouldn’t be afraid of being loud. When I was a kid, that was what it was all about;, the sights, the sounds, the smells of racing are something most other sports don’t have. We’ve got to keep to that.”
Ryan Hunter-Reay, featuring for the Indy 500-only Dreyer & Reinbold Racing team for the third successive season in 2025, harks back to the early days of the DW12 - before modifications such as the aero kit and later the aeroscreen - as being a success.
“The way the cars were in 2012, ‘13, ‘14, they were absolutely phenomenal,” he said. They were lighter, more aero dependent. Then we had this whole experiment with manufacturer aero kits; the cars looked horrible, didn’t make the racing any better.
“Then we got back to an esthetically pleasing car, the 2018 car, and that was another car that was good and fun to drive: lighter, very aero dependent.
"But then with all the weight we’ve added to it, it’s become a much different open-wheel racing car. We need to get back to that.”
Hunter-Reay, the 2012 series champion and 2014 Indy 500 winner, acknowledges the need to prioritise safety while also trying to lessen the weight of the car and make it better to drive.
“You’re adding a lot of weight to the car through the aeroscreen,” Hunter-Reay said. “Very, very thankful for the aeroscreen, the side intrusion panels we’ve added over the years after different accidents, different scenarios that caused those upgrades to be needed.
“When you look at the hybrid being added and where it’s being placed and the weight of it, in order to have similar performance out of the car and the overall grip, you would need to really rework the tyre basically. But it is a very similar tyre.
“It’s just sliding around a lot more. It’s like whipping a rubber band around with a lead weight on the end; if you just keep adding and adding more and more weight to that, at some point that band is going to snap. That’s where we are on the edge of right now.”
Improvement needed on superspeedways
While the racing product is generally of a very high standard, there is some concern about how well the DW12 races deeper in the pack on ovals.
There is often a lot of action up front in the Indy 500, but this does diminish once you get further back in the order and in traffic.
“Indianapolis is probably one of the places that could be mixed up the most [with a new car],” Newgarden said. “We have a great racing product there but maybe it’s not completely what we want.
“Having more competition throughout the field and ease of passing throughout the field is something we’re lacking at the moment.
"You can pass up front between two cars but not five deep. So improving those types of things is top of mind for the development group and what they’re going to put in front of us for ‘27.”
Having seen the mock-up of the 2027 car plans, Colton Herta is also in agreement that the oval package needs to improve.
“The racing at the front is great at Indy,” said the Andretti Global driver. “And that’s where the cameras are most of the time so people don’t notice it. But a little bit further back it gets really hard to overtake. I think that can be a little bit better.
“Ideally, I don’t think the road and street courses need to be fixed. But ideally on the short ovals you have it where we don’t need tyre deg to make the racing a factor that way. Make it where the racing is good either way.
“For me as a driver, it’s more oval-focused. Because I don’t think we have a problem overtaking on road and street courses but some of the ovals can be a little difficult.”
Herta believes one step that could be taken is adding more downforce.
“The efficiency is somewhat of a problem but I think it also kind of works in some ways,” he said. “The more downforce you add to a car, especially over the top, the better the slipstreaming and the better the passing is going to be and you’ll be able to follow a little bit closer.
“We [added downforce] at Gateway and look how good the racing was [in 2024]. It was a lot better - I drove from 25th to fourth; I wasn’t going to be able to do that the year before but the second lane opened up.
“Something that’s more efficient over the top of the car with the wings is better than more efficient underneath. And a lot of people say the dirty air is going to be worse and whatnot, and it might be a little bit, but the more downforce we have, the more that’s going to open up the second lane.”
In terms of aero efficiency, Dixon says there is “not much adjustability” at present.
“The extreme was the aero kit, where you had a lot of pieces that you could put on or take off,” he said. “And I think that made the variables much bigger between where you started the race to where cars finished at the end.
“I remember a Texas race and everybody was laughing at us starting in the middle of the pack with a loaded downforce and we nearly lapped the whole field. They were like: ‘Oh, you got way too much downforce. Going to be so slow.’
“But that was pretty cool because everybody was on a different kind of strategy as far as downforce versus drag. I think some changeability would be nice, some areas for a little bit of development. At the minute, you can’t really do anything apart from dampers and stuff like that.”
Some drivers yet to see the plans
Dixon is one of the drivers not to have seen the plans that the series provisionally has in place, likewise with Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward.
“Nobody has even asked me about it so I have no idea,” Dixon said. “I wouldn’t know if it’s going to have two wheels or three wheels.”
O’Ward has not had the opportunity to see any plans given his work as a reserve driver for the McLaren Formula One team overseas. There is a dinner planned soon for some drivers to meet with leadership so they can also see the plans, O’Ward says.
“I have no idea what it looks like, how heavy it is, how much power it’s going to have,” O’Ward said. “I haven’t seen anything. But I hope that it’s just as good as Jay [Frye] and everybody tells us. We want to be low, fat, loud… just badass.”
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