You cannot buy an IndyCar in one piece, and that alone says a lot about its price. The chassis, the same for everyone, is bought from Dallara: when it debuted in 2012 it cost $349,000, a price agreed by the series. The engine, on the other hand, is not bought at all but leased from Chevrolet or Honda, and in 2025 the lease was worth $1.6 million per car per season. Then there is everything else, which is the biggest part: running an IndyCar for a full championship costs a team, on average, between $8 million and $10 million per car.

Put like that, it sounds like a lot. Set next to Formula 1, it is almost a bargain. Let’s break the bill down, item by item.

The chassis: $349,000, in 2012

Since 2012 every IndyCar team has raced with the same chassis, the Dallara DW12. It was a choice that changed the economics of the series: nobody designs their own car, everybody buys the same base from the same constructor, at a price negotiated by IndyCar. When it was presented, the chassis cost $349,000 and the complete car, engine excluded, $385,000: around 45% less than the previous generation.

An updated official price list is not public, but according to the team owners interviewed by RACER at the end of 2025 a new DW12 now costs between $800,000 and $1 million, more than twice its launch price. In the meantime the car has gained the universal aero kit in 2018 and the aeroscreen in 2020. And a team never buys just one chassis: it needs spare cars, spare parts and the different aero packages for ovals and road courses. This is where the cost of the car starts turning into the cost of a season.

The engine is not bought, it is leased

The heart of an IndyCar is a 2.2-litre twin-turbo V6, built by Chevrolet or Honda. No team owns it: it leases it from the manufacturer for the whole championship. In 2024 the lease cost $1.45 million per car; for 2025 the manufacturers were allowed to raise it by $150,000, taking it to $1.6 million.

Every season of leasing costs more than a new chassis. The engine is also the series’ bottleneck: Chevrolet and Honda are the only suppliers, every extra car on the grid is one more engine to build and support at the track, and the number of engines available has been one of IndyCar’s hot topics for years.

The hybrid comes from a shared pool

Since July 2024 IndyCars have been hybrids, and here too the series chose the single-supplier route. The hybrid unit is supplied by Ilmor and owned by IndyCar: it is sealed before installation and randomly assigned to the teams from a pool of units that Ilmor makes available for each event, as the rulebook requires. No team can develop or modify it.

That has not made it free. Asked about 2024, three team owners out of five spoke of budgets up 20 to 25% on the previous year, mainly because of hybrid-related costs; for Michael Shank of Meyer Shank Racing the increase went beyond 40%. More horsepower, but also more weight to offset, as we explained when looking at how much an IndyCar weighs.

What a season costs

Chassis and engine are only the start. A team has to pay drivers, mechanics and engineers, travel from one coast of the United States to the other, tyres, spare parts, testing and all the work that never makes it onto television. Up to 2023 a car cost on average between $6 million and $8 million a season; with the hybrid the average rose to $8-10 million per car.

Some of that money comes back. The series hands out Leaders Circle contracts to the top 22 cars in the previous year’s entrants’ standings: in 2025 they were worth $1.2 million each, and for 2026 Penske Entertainment raised them to around $1.7 million, the biggest increase since the programme began. The rest has to be covered by the owners, by drivers who bring a budget and, above all, by sponsors.

IndyCar and Formula 1: another scale of spending

The comparison with Formula 1 helps put things in proportion. In 2026 the F1 cost cap rose to $215 million for a two-car team, and the cap excludes, among other things, the salaries of the drivers and of the three highest-paid staff, marketing and travel. Even divided by two cars, and even though an IndyCar budget includes drivers and travel, the gap remains more than tenfold. In F1 every team designs its own car; in IndyCar it buys it ready-made. A large part of the cost difference comes from there rather than from performance, which still differs, as we explain in our comparison of IndyCar and Formula 1.

For a company this gap is valuable information. In a series where a whole season costs a small fraction of a Formula 1 team’s cost cap, a sponsor’s contribution weighs far more on the books of whoever receives it, and you can see it on track. What you actually buy, with which packages and at what prices, we have laid out in our guide to IndyCar sponsorship; if you are looking at Formula 1 instead, you can start from our page on how to sponsor in Formula 1.

The 2028 bill

IndyCar is getting ready to change cars. The IR-28, unveiled in July 2026, will debut in 2028 with a new Dallara chassis, a 2.4-litre twin-turbo V6 and a battery hybrid in place of the supercapacitors. It will be the first all-new car since 2012, and therefore also the first major investment for the teams after sixteen seasons with the same chassis. The price has not yet been officially announced: the series has told owners it wants to stay in line with the cost of a new DW12, which they put at between $800,000 and $1 million. More than twice the $385,000 of 2012, and still far less than what the season costs, year after year, which remains the real expense.