PREMA to join IndyCar in 2025
Motorsports is currently booming in growth and popularity. Hundreds of young drivers are trying to climb the ranks to reach the pinnacle of these elite series. There are only twenty driver spots in Formula 1, and unless another team is added to the grid in the next few years (Andretti), there will still only be twenty-two driver spots. That's not much compared to many pro sports with 10-20 teams in a league with 20+ players. One of the significant downfalls of F1 racing for a driver is the competitiveness of those coveted grid spots. F1 tends to chew up and spit out great talent. You can have an extremely young and talented driver have a less-than-stellar year in F1 or be replaced by the next big up-and-coming talent, and they are retired by the age of 25; it's brutal. There is abundant talent coming through the junior ranks, but there need to be more driver seats to accommodate them all. What happens to the excess talent who cannot find a seat for no reason?
Teams like Andretti, Penske, and McLaren compete in multiple series spanning Formula, NASCAR, WEC, and Electric. As these series grow and more teams fill up more grid spots, a cascade of growth in the motorsports business also starts. You need drivers, crew, techs, management, marketing, etc. These teams hire thousands of people to grow the companies and strengthen the spanning business of motorsports.
Now and then, a formal team will branch out into a new racing category, bridging two racing worlds. PREMA Racing, an Italy-based racing team traditionally known for its formula series teams in Europe and Asia (F2, F3, F4, WEC), is branching out into the world of the American Indycar. Prema has played an intricate part in the European Formula Series for forty years, developing some of the biggest and brightest names in recent Formula 1 racing (Leclerc, Gasly, Piastri, Sargeant, Zhou, Schumacher, Ocon, Bottas, Kubica, Villeneuve--the roster is deep). Adding the IndyCar team in the 2025 season will add just another chance for young and talented drivers to show their skills on the global level.
There was once a time when Indycar and F1 were very closely related; the overlap of drivers was consistent, and many of the big names raced in both series during their careers. Drivers like Mansell, Fittipaldi, Andretti, and Cheever; recent drivers like Juan Pablo Montoya, Takuma Sato, Fernando Alonso, Alexander Rossi, Romain Grosjean, and Marcus Ericsson have all competed in both series. The F1/Indy crossover is healthy as it has been for a while; Prema's addition of a team will only continue to strengthen the F1/Indy pipeline of drivers.
