For Arlington, IndyCar Grand Prix in 2026 Will Spotlight Sports Venues

This year’s IndyCar Series schedule has been a bit of a slow burn. After the season started on the first weekend of March, this past weekend’s event in Birmingham, Alabama, was only the fourth race in two months.

But next year’s schedule will have an added weekend of racing in March when the IndyCar Grand Prix of Arlington debuts through a partnership between Roger Penske, the Texas Rangers and Dallas Cowboys with the Arlington entertainment district of Texas Live! as a centerpiece.

“It’s something that we’ve never hosted before,” said Matt Wilson, senior vice president, sports and events at the Arlington Sports Commission. “It’ll be a race in our entertainment district, going between all of our different stadiums and a really cool way to showcase the city.”

The Cowboys, the Rangers and REV Entertainment will partner with Penske Entertainment on the new street race, which will run on a 2.73-mile temporary street course around AT&T Stadium, the home of the Cowboys, and Globe Life Field, home of the Rangers. A key part of the footprint will be Texas Live!, an entertainment district shared by both stadiums.

“This is such a great way to showcase the things that the citizens of Arlington have built and I say that very purposefully in that this wasn’t one person doing this, this was an entire community being purposeful about creating this walkable, entertainment district where we can show off Arlington,” Wilson said. “This is a postcard to the world to show the things that we built here and by the way, we’re going to do a race around it. So it is just a really cool way to showcase all these things.”

The Streets of Arlington circuit will be the longest street course on the schedule featuring the longest straightaway (0.9-mile) of the season. A key piece of preparation will be making sure there are no variances in the road surface, akin to how Las Vegas prepared its streets for Formula 1.

“We’re not going to interrupt your sleep,” Wilson said. “That was a question that people had immediately. We’re doing (preparations) during the day and then the early evening, but not late at night. There’s a lot of sensitivities to that to make sure that everybody walks away from it feeling really good, because this isn’t a one-year deal. This is something that we plan on doing every year for the foreseeable future.”

The 14-turn layout also features two areas where the track goes underneath circuit hospitality and suites plus two coliseum-like atmospheres featuring a double-sided pit lane and a “horseshoe” like carousel for Turn 6.

“IndyCar and F1 are international sports that have a following all over the world,” Wilson said. “Kind of like (hosting) MLB All-Star game in that we’re introducing ourselves to a global audience. This race puts us on a different level whenever we’re talking global communities watching this.”

The race will mark the first IndyCar event in the region since 2023 at Texas Motor Speedway, which had hosted the series every year since June 1996. For the local bureau, having the Arlington name in the race is also a point of pride.

“Penske was so great about that,” Wilson said. “They understood from the very beginning that the citizens of Arlington have built these things and so we want to make sure that’s reflected in this. That’s why it’s the Arlington Grand Prix — to where the citizens of our city can take ownership of it and be really proud about it when people are coming to visit, they know they’re coming to Arlington.”