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- We’ve heard this before: IndyCar and Penske Entertainment are committed to making a race in Mexico City work.
- But it won’t be in 2026 as the IndyCar schedule was released Tuesday. Penske Entertainment president and CEO Mark Miles explained why.
- Race dates, a crowded client market and the FIFA World Cup were among issues that popped up during negotiations, Miles said.
Penske Entertainment president and CEO Mark Miles was steadfast in his assertion that it was the complications of next summer’s men’s FIFA World Cup — and that alone — that prevented IndyCar from racing at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, the permanent road course in Mexico City that has been a target of the series for a decade or more.
American open-wheel racing last ran at the venue, which will continue to host annual stops for Formula 1 and Formula E and that in 2025 hosted the NASCAR Cup and Xfinity series, back in 2007 as Champ Car’s season finale.
“We worked hard at it, and we really regret that we aren’t there in 2026,” Miles, the longtime series executive who has been behind IndyCar’s push over the past decade to get back to Mexico. “We were quite close on getting it done (for 2026). The World Cup and its effect on the economy and the business environment there for the summer next year really caused us to be more cautious.
“We’re going to stay on it. I’ll be in Mexico in the next month, and we’ll be dealing with the folks at OCESA and CIE (the track promoters) to look for the opportunity. We want to be back there as soon as we can.”
As Miles hinted at multiple times Tuesday, Penske Entertainment has not yet decided the way in which it will continue to pursue a future race in Mexico City — meaning either with or without a promoter on the ground serving as a middleman between Penske Entertainment and the track operators of Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. For more than a year, Penske Entertainment has leaned on Ricardo Escotto, the Mexican businessman whose billboard business is one of the largest in the country, positioning Escotto as the race promoter for an IndyCar race that might’ve taken place next year — meaning he had been charged with renting the track, securing sponsorship and selling tickets, among other responsibilities. Moving forward, Penske Entertainment will first regroup with OCESA and CIE and then ultimately explore the dynamic that best suits everyone’s interests — whether that might mean keeping Escotto as the promoter, or either Penske Entertainment or the track group itself serving in that role in the way in which it has for NASCAR and F1.
Why the FIFA World Cup kept IndyCar from Mexico City in 2026
Returning to Mexico City has long been a target of Miles, with quotes of his resurfacing recently from September 2015 when Miles, then the Hulman & Co. CEO, stated that the city and track were “still looking good” to host a 2016 IndyCar race — plans which never came to fruition.
Though he said he’s continued to have annual dialogue with the track’s promoters and operators since then, the topic became a battleground just over a year ago, as NASCAR announced it had jumped IndyCar in the virtual line to land a race at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez and would race via a track-promoted race weekend in 2025. At the time, numerous IndyCar drivers were emphatic in their belief that Penske Entertainment’s lack of urgency in landing a race there at a time when the popularity of Mexican driver Pato O’Ward had skyrocketed in recent years was sorely underwhelming.
Miles responded that he continued to be told by those on the ground there that the brands of IndyCar and O’Ward were not yet large enough for the track to be willing to stick its neck out there and put on the race itself. Because of that, Penske Entertainment had named Escotto its representative in the area to pursue a date for a race as soon as 2026.
And at that point in August 2024, IndyCar had pursued April 12, 2026, to hold such a race. As Miles said Tuesday, that was the plan until a couple months ago.
“We thought (that date) was feasible, and then we signed an agreement with a prospective promoter (Escotto), but then we learned at the beginning of June that the date was no longer available,” said Miles of the date that IndyStar previously reported could have helped support a NASCAR-IndyCar crossover weekend in Mexico City — an idea that Penske Entertainment is said to have swatted down.
Miles went on to confirm IndyStar’s previous reporting that July 26 — one week after the end of the World Cup festivities that will be split across 16 sites in North America, including Mexico City — was the revamped target race date, but effects from the World Cup lingered in Penske Entertainment officials’ eyes that made landing a race a difficult endeavor to greenlight.
“It’s not that there’s a head-to-head scheduling conflict, but if you’re trying to cut through a large city like Mexico City and make sure the fans there know we’re coming, the World Cup makes that difficult from a communication point of view,” Miles said. “Commercially, huge amounts of money were invested (locally in the World Cup) by the kinds of companies that we want to buy suites and sponsorships and to be commercially engaged in our race, and therefore it made it difficult to know that we’d have the kind of support that we otherwise would have.”
Ultimately, Miles said, the decision was made by Penske Entertainment officials ahead of this year’s season finale weekend at Nashville Superspeedway (Aug. 30-31) to put those Mexico City plans on hold and refocus with an eye for 2027, calling that “the prudent thing to do.”
“We care about being in Mexico City, and everyone we’ve dealt with there believes we’ll have a phenomenal event when we get there, but we want to do it right,” Miles said.
That reasoning doesn’t quite explain the mindset shift — or at minimum the uber-positive public messaging he and others across Penske Entertainment spoke of a prospective 2026 Mexico City IndyCar race weekend with as recently as a month ago.
“We’re very confident we’ll race in Mexico City in 2026,” a Penske Entertainment executive told IndyStar on Aug. 13, 18 months after the World Cup schedule had been announced.
Mark Miles denies idea Liberty Media kept IndyCar from Mexico City
IndyStar had previously reported that the track promotion group had significantly ratcheted up the asking price for a track rental from Escotto’s promoter group in recent negotiations, more than doubling that fee, according to a series source with direct knowledge of the negotiations, while also asking for more than 10% of ticketing revenue. As of IndyCar’s Toronto race weekend in July, Penske Entertainment officials privately told paddock members they were eyeing announcing their plans to race in Mexico City in just over a week, sometime around or immediately after the Laguna Seca race weekend.
At that same time, too, Live Nation, the major player in the entertainment business, took an additional 24% ownership stake in the promotional group that ultimately negotiates deals for the track, taking it from 51% to 75%. The fact that Live Nation’s parent company, Liberty Media — the owner of Formula 1’s marketing rights — seemed to advance from only barely a majority stake to holding an overwhelming majority interest in the track’s direction moving forward led many in the paddock to believe Liberty Media may have been the direct proponents of making a near-future return to Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez increasingly difficult.
Miles denied Tuesday there to be any such negative influence.
“I’ve read that theory, but it’s rubbish,” Miles said. “(Live Nation) are supporters of having (and IndyCar race) there, and we’re dealing directly with the management of the track and the promoter arm of the track, and they’re big IndyCar fans.”
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