IndyCar Season Review Sneak Peek - Prema

A small peek at Part 1 of my IndyCar Season Review that's out on the website tomorrow. Enjoy. - Dre

Prema Racing

Season Highlight: IndyCar’s first Rookie 500 Pole Since 1983  

Season Lowlight: …They’re broke?!

I’d open this by saying that Prema knew what they signed up for, but I’m not entirely sure that was the case in hindsight. Remember that, it becomes important later. It was a big shock when the news dropped that out of all the teams that umm’d and ah'd about entering IndyCar, Prema, the giants of European junior racing, would be the ones to step into the ring, funded by Debroah Mayer of Iron Dames fame. 

Given much of the end of the 2024 IndyCar season centered around the charter system, the deck was always going to be stacked against the Italian team. Prema came into 2025 without charters, which already had a value estimated around $80m, given ECR sold half of theirs to raise funding at that rate. It also made the team ineligible from the Leader’s Circle payouts for getting their cars in the Top 22. So with no in series income, a brand new team, and a new rookie in Robert Shwartzman, I wasn’t exactly optimistic about Prema.

It didn’t help when in January, star engineer Michael Cannon, known as the Indy 500 whisperer for his oval knowledge, quit the team before a wheel had even turned citing differences in opinion that made his position untenable. That “good start”, was followed up with a highest finish of 18th in the first five weekends and an embarrassing teammate crash at The Thermal Club. 

Then the Indy 500 happened. Out of nowhere, Robert Shwartzman not only makes the Fast 12, he only goes and sticks it on pole position, the first for a new team since 1982 and the first rookie polesitter since Teo Fabi a year later. A shame that Shwartzy’s car wasn’t anywhere near as competitive in race trim, followed up by the Israeli crashing into his crew in pitlane, while teammate Callum Illot was disqualified for an illegal front wing endplate. 

The back half of the season was a lot more promising. Their first Top 10 came at Gateway amidst the strategic chaos and Shwartzman holding his nerve. And Illot finally clicked down the stretch, closing out the year with five Top 10 finishes in the final six races, and taking Prema’s best result down to 6th at Laguna Seca and Portland. Turns out, copying Scott Dixon’s strategies tend to work out most of the time!

There was genuine optimism to Prema off the back end of the season, but now, their future only looks more uncertain than ever. Marshall Pruett reported back in August that Prema now needs more outside funding for 2026, and that Mayer’s role within the team has been questioned after initially dropping $40m of capital getting the team off the ground. That in-season lack of income concern has seemingly bit back hard. Personally, I find it incredibly confusing that Prema dropped that much funding into the team, got it going and actually made progress once they figured out the car like Prema had done back in Europe… only to potentially bail after Year 1?

It makes me wonder what the hell the plan was here. And with rumblings on IndyCar’s subreddit that the team had been living hand-to-mouth since May, it makes me wonder if the team knew that and went all in for the $100,000 polesitter bonus… Tinfoil on hat boils over. In the time since I started this piece, Iron Lynx, their parent racing team, is selling off their 2021 Ferrari that won the 24 Hours of Spa. This might be the IndyCar team, and Iron Dames going the way of the dodo. 

It would be a crying shame after all of this if the team quit after just a single season, with genuine scope for improvement and good late-season results. Callum Illot has become a very solid IndyCar driver and might be out of a job again, and Shwartzman? Well, there’s already murmurs he wants to go back to Europe. Who knows.

In any case, Prema earned its crust in IndyCar, and I hope they can return. If not, I hope someone else at least can come in and use the infrastructure to get a headstart on a new entry for 2026. But if this doesn’t work, it probably sends out a poor message about how uninvestable IndyCar is at this point.