OpenAI spent this IndyCar season doing more than putting its logo on a race car: its researchers worked with Chip Ganassi Racing and its champion driver, Álex Palou, on optimizing car setups, a collaboration now the subject of a YouTube documentary series whose second episode went live on Wednesday morning.
The money in motor racing has changed hands over the years. It used to come from tobacco, and to a lesser degree alcohol, but those sponsors are mostly banned now. The logos on today’s cars tend to belong to crypto, cybersecurity or artificial intelligence companies, Jonathan M. Gitlin wrote in Ars Technica, because that is where the money is, and racing takes money.
At the amateur level, tech executives have replaced dentists as the privateer racers of choice. This past weekend’s Petit Le Mans fielded co-founders of GitHub, CrowdStrike and Shopify, along with the creator of the Ruby on Rails programming framework.
Ganassi may not be the best-resourced team on the IndyCar grid, but it is the most dominant. Its drivers have won the championship 13 times in the past two decades, first Dario Franchitti, then Scott Dixon, and now Palou, who this year clinched his fifth title in six seasons. At some races, his car wore OpenAI’s colors.
The 2026 season was harder for Palou than some others. He won a third of the 18 races IndyCar held — still twice as many as any other driver — and took eight pole positions, far more than anyone else managed.
The partnership shows what a sponsor can offer a racing team beyond a bank transfer. The first, longer episode of the documentary series is already on YouTube.