IndyCar's 2028 IR-28 chassis makes its first oval laps at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
On Wednesday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Alexander Rossi became the first driver to turn a wheel in oval trim in IndyCar’s new-for-2028 Dallara IR-28, and by his own account, nothing about it was dramatic. Rossi said the car did everything an IndyCar should do at IMS, adding, “There was no surprise. It was really pretty standard.” For a completely new race car making its first laps on the most consequential 2.5 miles in American motorsport, that’s not a shrug. That’s the headline.
IndyCar’s current superspeedway package is the product of more than a decade of refinement on the Dallara DW12 platform and the aero kit that followed it. Replacing that car without a step backward at the one track where a bad-handling car can end a month, a race, or a career is a genuinely hard engineering problem. A brand-new chassis rolling out and behaving like a known quantity on its very first oval outing is close to the best-case scenario IndyCar could have asked for.
Mike O’Gara, IndyCar’s vice president of competition and race engineering, said afterward that Dallara had distilled everything it learned from more than a decade of DW12 development into the new car, and that Rossi went out on the car’s first oval setup and was immediately comfortable running flat-out. That’s the entire point of what IndyCar is calling a “crawl, walk, run” test plan: establish a clean baseline before anyone starts chasing lap time. Wednesday’s session was the IR-28’s second on-track validation test overall and its first anywhere near a banked oval, following a rain-interrupted, three-day debut on the IMS road course last month that Rossi shared with Alex Palou. Oval loads, sustained yaw, and drafting behavior simply can’t be replicated on a road course, so this week is the first real look at how the car handles the demands that actually define an Indy car.
The specifics IndyCar has already detailed about the IR-28 explain why an uneventful oval debut counts as good news. The chassis is up to 100 pounds lighter than the current car, and the weight coming out is concentrated in useful places: a lighter hybrid unit and a lighter gearbox shift the balance toward the front axle, addressing the rearward creep that has made the current car feel unstable under braking as it has gained weight over its production life. New aerodynamic surfaces behind the front wheels are aimed directly at cleaning up the wake left for a trailing car, which matters because how drafting actually works on IndyCar’s superspeedway ovals depends on exactly how much dirty air a pursuing driver has to fight through. A new center-inerter damper setup, linking the two front shocks to each other and the two rear shocks to each other, is designed to make the car handle more consistently whether it’s running in clean air up front or buried in traffic further back, something no other major open-wheel or sports car series currently allows on both axles at once.
None of that shows up in a highlight reel. It shows up in whether cars can run side by side at 220 mph without one of them falling off the moment it gets shuffled backward in the running order, which has been a recurring complaint about the current package as it has aged well past the debut of the universal aero kit that defines it today. If the IR-28 genuinely drives the same whether it’s running first or fifteenth, that’s a bigger deal for the product on track than anything measured by a stopwatch this week.
The manufacturer split was deliberate, too. Rossi, who drives for Chevrolet, took Wednesday; Alex Palou, who just wrapped up a fifth series championship for Honda-powered Chip Ganassi Racing, takes over Thursday. Splitting the workload that way keeps both engine partners looking at the same chassis and the same data as IndyCar works toward a 2028 debut that will also bring an entirely new powertrain, a 2.4-liter twin-turbo V6 replacing the long-serving 2.2-liter formula, plus the series’ first battery-based hybrid energy storage system. That program is running on its own separate timeline. This week was about the chassis alone, right down to the lighter, sleeker version of the aeroscreen that will carry over into the new car’s wider tub.
It’s worth remembering how rarely IndyCar actually does this. The DW12 went through its own preseason validation running in 2011 before debuting in 2012, which makes this the series’ first clean-sheet chassis test in roughly a decade and a half. Palou’s turn in the car Thursday adds a Honda-specific data point and the perspective of a five-time champion driving a car with none of the current one’s decade of accumulated setup knowledge behind it. Neither day will produce a lap time anyone remembers. But if IndyCar wants the IR-28 racing side by side at Indianapolis in 2028 the way the current car does today, an uneventful first oval test in September 2026 is exactly the result it needed.
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