IndyCar, NTT agree to new multi-year title sponsor extension to begin in 2024

Mark Miles walked into his new role as CEO of Hulman & Co. and was tasked to search for IndyCar’s next title sponsor. A fashion and apparel company (IZOD) left four years into its six-year deal – wasn’t a match. Neither was another consumer-facing brand (Verizon) that, five years into a 10-year deal, decided it hadn’t seen enough to execute an option on the latter half.

But Miles knows now he’s found a long-term, sensible fit with NTT – a partnership that, with Monday’s news, will hit six years in 2024 in Year 1 of a new multi-year title sponsor extension. It makes the Japanese-based global technology and business solutions provider IndyCar’s longest-tenured title sponsor since PPG’s nearly two-decade deal with CART from 1980-97.

After spinning its wheels on a number of consumer brands that also included FedEx during the CART days, Miles says it doesn’t take long sitting in a room with the execs of Shell, Bridgestone, Penske Corp., NTT and other series partners to understand why what was once a little-known telecommunications company from halfway around the world has found an eager partner in IndyCar for the foreseeable future.

Both sides crave innovation and both will continue to use each other to get it.

First renewal:IndyCar, Penske announce renewal of NTT title sponsorship after initial 3-year deal

“It’s the perfect company, the perfect partnership for us,” Miles told reporters Monday. “Fundamentally, they’re about technology, and everybody who knows the series knows that whether it’s IndyCar or IMS, technology is hugely important.

“And to be able to say, ‘We have this thought, this problem, this opportunity,’ and (NTT Data CEO) Bob (Pryor) and his team will just start working on it, that’s enormously important for us. We certainly don’t feel like we’re making any kind of concessions by not having a fundamental consumer brand (as our title sponsor). This is a valued relationship.”

Pryor was adamant to correct the record multiple times Monday that NTT (and its subsidiary NTT Data) aren’t, at their simplest forms, consumer-driven companies. Though they may not directly interact with everyday people in their business model, the technologies they envision, create, tinker with and perfect have everything to do with how – in this case, avid racing fans – consume and interact with something they love.

They’ve been at the core of IndyCar’s various mobile app overhauls in recent years – the latest one earlier this month that features exclusive livestream videos, the ability to watch at least 11 in-car cameras during the race, a live time and scoring leaderboard and the integration of the IndyCar Fantasy Challenge. Miles told IndyStar that the offseason project cost Penske Entertainment Corp. $700,000, and it integrates 140 data points that teams are using to vie for wins into consumable media and easy-to-understand data for the brand-new fan and the diehard alike.

It’s the newest iteration of NTT and IndyCar’s desire to put more data in fans’ hands after IMS converted a 100-foot video board in Pagoda Plaza into a tech hub for Indy 500 race day as part of Roger Penske’s tens of millions of dollars of investments into IMS’s infrastructure since he finalized the purchase of the facility and the series in January 2020.

The pair’s other major cornerstone project, IMS’s Smart Venue technology, will continue to see updates in 2023 and beyond after first rolling out in 2022 as the track welcomed back 325,000 fans. Last year on the IMS app, fans making decisions on where to enter the track could see each gate with different live color designations – green, yellow and red – to showcase which ones would allow the smoothest ingress and egress experience.

As Miles explained Monday, IMS plans to roll that technology into a select number of the track’s concession stands this May – closer to six than 60, he said – where fans can monitor general congestion points from their seats before they get up and head to get a beer or a hot dog. Alongside that, he expects the ingress and egress portions of the app to give fans exact wait times this May – a technology that, ideally in a few years, could be rolled out to each of IMS’s more than 60 concession stands too.

“What is the best way to get into the track? What is the fastest line? At some point, can we do online ordering? Where’s the bathroom with the shortest line?” said Pryor, rattling off future uses of the technology for IMS. “Those are the aspects of that smart entertainment platform that we want to build on.”

And it’s in that same vein why Pryor feels NTT is at home in its role within the IndyCar ecosystem. Twice during Monday’s call, he referenced Firestone’s ‘green’ alternate tire – made from the more sustainable guayule desert shrub – as a way in which he sees the series’ partners inventing next-level technology to test out in the sport that one day could be in everyday use by the average consumer. NTT alone spends $3.5 billion in research and development, he said, and he estimated that IndyCar’s highest-level partners (including Shell and Bridgestone) together top more than $10 billion in that department together.

“I’ve been in these meetings with the leadership of NTT, Shell, Bridgestone and Penske Corp., and it’s magical to see,” Miles said. “Bridgestone will say, ‘We see these tires as a service. We don’t want you to just go buy a tire for your car or truck. It’s going to be a ‘smart’ tire, and we’ve got to figure out how to develop that to serve our customers.

“And oh by the way, Roger has a pretty significant fleet of trucks. If you wanted a lab to work on the development of something, you have it. These are hugely important companies that all the time are finding ways to do business together – on things we’re not even reading about yet. It’s really exciting for us, IndyCar and IMS, to have a role in that sort of future thinking. It’s gratifying.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar, NTT announce second title sponsor extension to begin in 2024