2027 IndyCar calendar coming into focus

With a few agreements awaiting signatures for completion, IndyCar expects to release its 2027 schedule in multiple steps.

“I think you'll see a phased approach to it,” Penske Corporation President Bud Denker told RACER. “We already know when Arlington is happening. We already know Detroit. We already know Indy. We already know the (Indy) GP. St. Peterburg's already been determined, so a lot of the first half of the year is figured out. So I think you'll see a phased approach to it. But our goal would be to have all of it out as quickly as we can.”

Next year, St. Petersburg will run one week later across March 5-7 and NASCAR Trucks return as the weekend's Saturday feature. Arlington is set for March 19-21 on the same weekend as IMSA’s 12 Hours of Sebring. Long Beach is in its traditional mid-April spot on April 16-18. The Indianapolis GP is May 14-15. The Indy 500 is on May 30. Detroit is on June 4-6. Laguna Seca will be the final race of the season on a date to be determined.

NASCAR and Phoenix Raceway expressed a desire for IndyCar to return in 2027, and provided it happens, the date announcement would come in the stock car organization’s calendar release. In 2026, Phoenix fell between St. Petersburg and Arlington, and with a one-week break for Sebring, IndyCar closed March with a fourth race held at Barber Motorsports Park.

A 17-race calendar was announced for 2026, which was expanded to 18 with the creation of August’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C. According to Denker, who serves as the chairman of Penske Entertainment’s Detroit and Washington events, the next IndyCar schedule will revert to a more familiar number.

“We've put together most of our calendar for 2027 knowing we're going to keep things at 17 races, not 18,” he said.

A long-held desire to add the short oval in Richmond, Va., which was once an IndyCar staple, won’t be achieved next year.

“It doesn't include Richmond. But we’re always open. We want to race in the Southeast. We want to race in the Mid-Atlantic. I consider Richmond probably more Mid-Atlantic than I do Southeast. We need to be up here racing,” Denker added while speaking from Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. “We do, and if we're not going to be on the East Coast somewhere with a street course race, Richmond would be an ideal target, but right now we don't have that on the schedule for this following year.”

The first Washington, D.C. IndyCar race is part of the country’s 250th birthday celebrations and was originally presented as a one-time-only event. As Denker shared with RACER in June, requests have been received from the White House and the city’s mayor to sign a multi-year agreement.

“President Trump asked if we would have this event for multiple years, and Roger (Penske) and I told him, ‘Let's see how it goes this year, first,’ and that's a true statement,” Denker said. “Mayor Muriel Bowser asked me the same question, ‘Can you do a three-year deal?’ And I said, ‘Madam Mayor, let's look at a one-year deal here first, see how things go.’

“With this location, this has never been done before, so now, we're at a one-year period of time for D.C., and after that, we'll gauge what we do because then we’ll know the demands there from a customer perspective. How much does the free admission weigh into the response we’ve received? It’s an interesting point to understand before thinking of doing more of these races.”

Significant costs are being shouldered by Penske Entertainment to put on the Freedom 250 race, and if it were to continue, it would likely need to convert to a traditional business model with ticket sales to offset production expenses.

“Never say never,” Denker said. “But there's only one 250th anniversary in our country, and would we get the kind of support we're getting this year in year two? The good news is, right now, there's nobody standing in my way, administratively, agency-wise, at the mayor's office, and all of the agencies I deal with, to say we couldn't do it again.”

In speaking with an array of team owners last weekend, they expect the 2027 schedule to be nearly identical to the current calendar, with the Freedom 250 as the obvious outlier in a wait-and-see category while Nashville Superspeedway and a few others are subject to confirmation to complete the 17.

While the series is happy with Nashville as a venue, its return is not yet certain. Brandon Badraoui/Lumen via Getty Images

Asked if sticking with Nashville’s oval set 30 minutes away in the rural town of Lebanon, or if a return to downtown Nashville for a resumption of street racing was a possibility in the coming years, Denker said it’s a topic of interest within the organization.

“I don't think we've resolved that in our minds as well,” he surmised. “We do want to race ovals and it's a hell of a racetrack for ovals. Once that track is clean, boy, it's a great race for ovals. And how much do we continue to build it? Is it Nashville or is it Lebanon? We like racing there because it's a good product for us. But we want the stands full with energy, and what we created this year with the bands out there and the EDM with Deadmau5 was pretty cool.

“The weather forecast wasn’t favorable the whole weekend, which takes away from your walk-up (ticket sales). So we hope to go back there racing again. There's nothing to say we wouldn't do it right now. And we’d like to go back to downtown, but that couldn’t happen until probably around the same time the (new Tennessee Titans) stadium is completed because the one stadium still has to come down as the other one is obviously being built. So it's not dead at all, and I think we would take the opportunity to go back to downtown in a heartbeat.”

IndyCar will head to Ontario for the inaugural Markham Grand Prix street race which replaces the longstanding Toronto Grand Prix. The Markham event will be the new home for IndyCar’s annual visit to Canada – a return to Toronto’s Exhibition Place isn’t planned – and in response, significant investment has been made by the city of Markham with all-new paving done especially for the first-time race.

“The town put in $12 million Canadian [$8.5 million USD] to do it,” Denker said. “We issued them a bond to ensure that we don't leave there because the mayor needed some assurances that we're not going to be leaving in five years. So, we got a nice long five-year deal there to be there for a long period of time, and they put their money in. They really did. [Team Penske driver] Scott McLaughlin said he was on the simulator today, and did Markham for the first time. He goes, ‘Man, this is going to be a fun track.’ I said, ‘I told you so.’

“They had a 1.6-mile track originally, and I made it 2.1 by going left on the straightaway down under the viaduct and a hairpin turn coming back up the straightaway. I think it's going to be one of our best street races of the year. We're getting so much notoriety because of Washington, D.C., but the week before, you watch. This is going to be a very cool racetrack.”