This could be the summer of IndyCar.

Formula One fatigue is beginning to set in, both globally and among the American audiences who helped fuel the sport’s recent boom. Nascar, for all its national reach in the US and lingering cultural import, remains a largely regional attraction. IndyCar, on the other hand, boasts a wealth of personalities, is anchored in real structural parity and delivers wheel-to-wheel action time and again. But as the buildup begins for the 110th running of this year’s Indianapolis 500 – still the sport’s commercial, spiritual centerpiece and Memorial Day weekend staple – IndyCar is at risk of tripping over itself in its rush to return to prominence.

As part of its promotional push for the Freedom 250, a Washington DC street race sanctioned by a Donald Trump executive order, IndyCar unveiled a licensed T-shirt that quickly drew attention online, and not just for its $50 price tag. The design featured a helmeted racing driver rendered entirely in white, posed in a manner that appeared to echo the Lincoln Memorial statue, set against a red-striped backdrop, with the words “One Nation, One Race”.

“It was so nice of IndyCar to let Stephen Miller design a shirt,” one Reddit commenter wrote. Ryan Erik King, a writer for the automotive culture site Jalopnik, slammed the shirt on X as “incredibly insensitive and inflammatory”. And while some online commentators hastened to note that the shirt made no direct reference to skin color, the broader imagery – especially the Roman fasces the driver’s arms rest on (iconography later adopted by fascist movements) – carried unmistakable implications. That reading was sharpened by the stark white racing driver set against Lincoln’s seat, and by the Freedom 250’s direct association with Trump, who effectively branded the event as a Maga spectacle with his executive order – a far cry from the Emancipation Proclamation, to be sure.

Ultimately, the shirt – described as a “fun graphic tee” – was pulled from IndyCar’s online store “following feedback from customers”, the series said in a statement, adding: “We understand that some individuals found its phrasing concerning.” Last week, a spokesperson said that it is “reviewing its approval process related to event apparel.” And yet a week later, it still has not explained who signed off on the design or how it was approved in the first place. Taken in isolation, one may dismiss the shirt as a clumsy promotional misfire. But for those who have watched IndyCar closely in recent years, it fits a more curious pattern – a distinctly rightward tack.

For most of its existence, IndyCar had been steered by the Hulman-George family – an old-money baking powder dynasty known around Indiana for slapping the family name on universities and hospitals. They bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway shortly after the second world war and, over decades, transformed what was once a dormant relic into one of the world’s most renowned racing circuits – re-establishing the Indy 500, the world’s largest single-day sporting event, as a crown jewel of motor racing. They maintained control over US open-wheel racing, holding strong through a brutal civil war that ended with Nascar emerging as the country’s most popular racing series.

The Hulman-George family treated the Indy 500 as a national institution – one that functioned less as a site of overt political signaling than as a showcase for apple-pie Americana, defined by military flyovers, red-white-and-blue pageantry and the traditional bottle of milk in the victory lane. Meanwhile, the politics were not merely looming over the Speedway’s sanitized vision of postwar America; they were physically reinforced by the track’s surrounding walls and fencing, barriers that have long intimidated locals outside Indy’s mostly white racing community.

But whatever coded nationalism existed under the Hulman-George family has become far more explicit in the seven years since the family sold its heirloom to Roger Penske, the 89-year-old transportation magnate and owner of the most successful team in IndyCar history – what some see as a conflict of interest compounded by Penske’s controlling stake in a top-tier Nascar Cup franchise. Imagine the outrage if Jerry Jones owned the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys and the NBA’s Boston Celtics. (Penske acknowledged his competing loyalties when took over control of IndyCar and tried to allay concerns by foregoing his weekend habit of sitting on his entries’ pit boxes during races.)

But it is only since his multibillion-dollar purchase of IndyCar and its related assets that Penske has become more openly aligned with Trump, his longtime friend. Penske’s drivers and teams have appeared at the White House after major wins: Simon Pagenaud’s 2019 Indy 500 triumph, Joey Logano’s 2024 Nascar Cup championship, Team Penske’s endurance racing victory at the 2025 Rolex 24. In 2019, Trump awarded Penske the Presidential Medal of Freedom, hailing him as a business titan and motorsport hero.

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Penske Corp – the parent company of Penske Entertainment, the motorsports-holding subsidiary in which Fox Corp recently bought a 33% stake – reportedly made more than $4m in political contributions, including $1.1m to Maga Inc.

Penske himself emerged as a prominent figure in Trump’s orbit. “We’re celebrating ‘Greatness with American Motor Racing’; that’s going to be the name of the event,” Trump declared, with Penske flanking him in the Oval Office while signing the executive order for the Freedom 250 race – part of the president’s celebration of America’s 250th birthday, which will culminate with a UFC fight at the White House. “I don’t have a lot of time to watch it, but I love the racing.”

Penske has been similarly effusive toward Trump. “Thank you for all that you and your administration are doing to put ‘America First’, to protect our borders, and return investment to our great country,” he wrote in a February letter thanking the president for green-lighting the Freedom 250, later shared on the White House’s official account. It formed a stark complement to a government post last August, when the Department of Homeland Security used an image of an IndyCar to promote a proposed immigration detention facility in Indiana dubbed the “Speedway Slammer”.

Although IndyCar later challenged DHS’s use of its intellectual property – not least the image of a car with the same number as the only Mexican driver in the series – the episode suggested how easily its visual language could be repurposed in a political context, and how much closer it now sits alongside Nascar in conservatives’ cultural imagination. “I was just a little bit shocked at the coincidences of that and, you know, of what it means,” Pato O’Ward, the Mexican driver in question, said in reaction to the DHS post. “I don’t think it made a lot of people proud, to say the least.”

It doesn’t seem as if Penske much cares how his public endorsement of Trump echoes across a racing league where nearly 70% of full-time drivers race under foreign flags – including one-third of the Penske IndyCar franchise. (And then of course there are the drivers who helped build the Penske team heritage: the Frenchman Pagenaud, Australia’s Will Power, and Brazilians Hélio Castroneves, Gil de Ferran and Emerson Fittipaldi).

Motorsport has become an increasingly fraught political spectacle. Formula One does business with autocratic states and global sovereign wealth. Nascar leans into American jingoism and conservative cultural signaling. IndyCar has long stood apart as the motorsport most likely to at least make the effort to manage its political neutrality. Two years ago, it rejected a Trump/RFK Jr car livery for the 500, citing its longstanding policy against sponsorships tied to politics. That stands in marked contrast to Nascar, which has only recently restricted the extent to which cars can be used as political billboards.

But as Penske continues to cozy up to Trump, his bid to close the gap on Nascar and Formula One looks less like a turning point than a brief opening that could close almost as quickly as it has appeared, leaving IndyCar where it has so often been – flailing for cultural purchase, ruing lost momentum and achingly oblivious to its own self-sabotage.