IndyCar brass have put in place multiple rules and systems changes new for the start of the 2025 season after going through the cadence of offseason meetings with its drivers and multiple sit-downs and calls with team owners and managers.
Some changes will go into effect as soon as the season-opening weekend on the streets of St. Pete, where practice begins Feb. 28.
Here are the most impactful updates fans will notice.
Six IndyCar races lengthened to improve on-track excitement
In an attempt to maximize drivers and teams racing all-out for a race win down the stretch and potentially open up multiple strategy options, IndyCar officials have lengthened six races for 2025, in some cases altering long-observed race distances.
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The first noticeable change will come in April at Long Beach, which has had five laps added for 90 total, one year after Scott Dixon wowed the field with an almost unthinkable fuel save win for No. 57 of his career. Other race distance changes for the 2025 IndyCar season will take place at Mid-Ohio (adding 10 for 90 laps), Iowa Speedway doubleheader (adding 25 for 275 laps each), Toronto (adding five for 90 laps) and Nashville Superspeedway (adding 19 for 225 laps).
The changes to add race time and distance come at an interesting time, as all of IndyCar’s race broadcasts on Fox are set for a standardized 2½-hour window. In years past with NBC, windows could range from two to three hours, and toward the end of the pair’s tenure, NBC often added a streaming-only post-race show to allow further flesh out post-race storylines as long as necessary.
Without a streaming platform to throw to, Fox producers will essentially have to decide whether to have a substantive pre- OR post-race show, and longer races will only further shrink that off-track content window. For example, Fox’s post-race show for the season opener is scheduled to last just four minutes.
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IndyCar responds to oval start and restart controversies
Following multiple messy (and sometimes waved off) restarts on ovals in recent years — including notable ones that sparked multi-car pileups in 2024 — IndyCar has instituted a mandatory “pair-up” location for cars to line up through the field still with one lap to go before the green flag.
Doing so, in theory, should help the middle and rear of the pack from getting strung out and then speeding to try and catch up, creating the potential for cars to run into the back of each other with some cars slowed but getting ready to accelerate and others accelerating but preparing to slow.
Additionally on ovals, IndyCar has worked to extend the beginning of restart zones to give the lead-car more discretion on where they choose to accelerate.
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IndyCar road and street practice formats, tire allotments updated
IndyCar will expand its split practice format to nearly every road or street course (minus Road America) for 2025 for the first practice of the weekend on Friday afternoon. The format should allow for more purposeful running during that pair of 10-minute segments that will each feature half of the field, allowing for fewer cars on track so teams and drivers more easily find windows to run by themselves.
Those practices will begin with 45-minute full-field segements, followed by two 10-minute ones, where the field will be split by odd their odd or even pit box numbers.
Also at select road and street courses (all by The Thermal Club and the IMS road course), IndyCar will supply teams with one more set of alternate tires for the weekend (up to five from four) while giving them one less set of primaries for the weekend (down to five from six).
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IndyCar drivers allowed to use hybrid to restart car on pitlane
After the midseason launch of the new hybrid technology last summer at Mid-Ohio, drivers were barred from using the system’s unique feature of being able to start or restart the car in case of a stall while on pitlane. At the time with the system so new, IndyCar viewed such a use as potentially dangerous, in case crew members might be scrambling to try and restart the car outside the cockpit, only for the driver to spark it themselves and attempt to take off suddenly.
With teams and drivers more accustomed to the technological advancement, IndyCar will now allow drivers to start and restart the car from inside the cockpit, a move that up until now has required starters be plugged into the rear of the car by a crew member.
IndyCar drivers to be alerted to local yellows with new cockpit notifications
In hopes of avoiding the massive multi-car pileup that sent one car airborne during last summer’s Toronto race, IndyCar has tinkered with teams’ in-cockpit alert systems so that drivers will be notified of a local yellow flag by a notification on their steering wheel dashboards. Without those notifications that will now be guaranteed to be within a driver’s sightlines, IndyCar only used corner workers waving flags and light panels hanging from the fencing — both of which, depending on location, may not be easily seen by drivers in situations that might include blind corners and where fractions of a second of additional reaction time can make all the difference.
Late in the race at Toronto, Pato O’Ward spun entering Turn 1, a move that would collect nearly a half-dozen cars, including Santino Ferrucci, whose No. 14 Chevy launched into the air, rode the concrete barriers and fencing sideways and came to a stop on the pavement upside down.
In the aftermath of the crash, the series received stern criticism from teams and drivers alike that the lack of visibility to that part of a track for spotters and the length of time its safety alert systems took to properly alert drivers of an incident.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar 2025 rules changes: Race lengths, oval restarts, practice