Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, one of the Indianapolis area's own teams, is returning to full-time NTT INDYCAR SERIES competition in 2027.
Every offseason, IndyCar fans want to argue about the same handful of names: can anyone dethrone Alex Palou, does Arrow McLaren’s new lineup actually work, who inherits Scott Dixon’s old seat at Chip Ganassi Racing. Those are all fair questions, and all still open. But the move that says the most about where this series is headed in 2027 came from a team that hasn’t run a full-time car since Barack Obama’s first term.
On September 5, Dreyer & Reinbold Racing announced that Conor Daly will drive its new, full-time No. 24 Honda entry beginning in 2027. It’s DRR’s first full-season commitment since 2012, when Oriol Servia carried the team’s lone entry that year. The signing itself is straightforward. The mechanics behind it are the more interesting story.
Start with the charter. On July 22, DRR announced it had purchased an NTT INDYCAR SERIES charter from Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing to fund the return. Charters are IndyCar’s version of a franchise slot: a guaranteed entry with a cut of the points fund attached, and they don’t change hands often. RLL wasn’t obviously desperate to sell one, since Louis Foster and Graham Rahal both ran full seasons in 2026. But the timing lines up neatly with Mick Schumacher’s departure after one season with the team to take over Meyer Shank Racing’s No. 66 for 2027, as Marcus Armstrong moves into the lead role vacated by Felix Rosenqvist. Put those two facts together and a tidy explanation appears: RLL trims from three full-time cars to two as Schumacher exits, and the freed-up charter lands with a team that had been running Indianapolis 500-only entries for over a decade. Nobody at either team framed it that way publicly, but the arithmetic fits.
There’s a human timeline running underneath the business one, too. Dennis Reinbold, the team’s longtime owner, passed away on June 13. The full-time return was announced with his son, Derek Reinbold, speaking as CEO. The Reinbold and Dreyer families go back a century in open-wheel racing, Dennis’s grandfather, Floyd “Pop” Dreyer, built cars for the entire front row of the 1931 Indianapolis 500, and a full-time entry with a new engine partner, arriving three months after a change atop the organization, reads like a statement about which direction the next generation wants to take it.
Honda supplied DRR from 2005 through 2011, and the brand is returning to the team for 2027 at the same moment it’s coming off winning its 12th manufacturers’ title in the series. Picking up a new full-time customer the offseason after topping the manufacturer standings is a quiet vote of confidence in Honda’s engine program, and one more Honda-badged car on a grid that already includes Chip Ganassi Racing, Andretti Global and Meyer Shank Racing.
None of this works if Daly can’t drive, and the record says he can. He’s made 133 NTT INDYCAR SERIES starts since his debut at the 2013 Indianapolis 500, with a best finish of second at Detroit in 2016 and a pole at Iowa Speedway in 2020. More relevant to DRR specifically: in his last two Indy 500 starts with the team, in 2024 and 2026, he finished 10th and 12th and led 26 laps combined. Handing him a full, 2026-length championship campaign instead of one race a year is a bet that the speed he’s flashed in spot duty holds up away from Indianapolis, too.
Zoom out and the 2027 grid is being rebuilt from the back as much as the front. While the big storylines chase what a fifth Palou title means for a Ganassi lineup that no longer includes Dixon, and what two Indy 500 winners walking into Arrow McLaren in place of Christian Lundgaard means for that team’s chemistry, DRR’s return adds a fully funded chartered entry and a proven American driver to a series that has spent years fighting to keep its car count healthy. It’s a smaller headline than the championship fight, but it’s a more useful one if you’re trying to understand how this series actually replenishes itself between seasons.
What to watch next: DRR still has to build an engineering group and sponsorship package worthy of a full-time effort before the 2027 season opener, and Daly’s Indy 500 speed won’t count for much if the No. 24 can’t qualify well on ovals it hasn’t tested much. Meanwhile, Alexander Rossi is already turning laps in the 2028-spec IR-28 chassis at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a reminder that the current car, and the current grid shakeup, has a shelf life of its own. This could be the last full season on the current chassis, which makes DRR’s timing either very good or a little bittersweet, depending on how you look at it.
About the Author
