Let’s say you run a three-car IndyCar team with a fourth car scheduled to run at the Indy 500, like, say McLaren or Andretti. How much do you think you’d have to budget for a season’s worth of wheels? Each car is going to need around 12 sets of pricey aero-optimized lightweight magnesium wheels from one of the few series-approved suppliers (most teams buy from OZ Racing), and each set of those wheels costs an astronomical $6,600 according to reporting from Racer. That totals up to an incredible $316,800. Just for wheels.
Magnesium is a great material for making racing wheels, because it’s lighter than aluminum, but the benefits end there. Magnesium has a lower thermal conductivity than aluminum, so it doesn’t dissipate heat from the brakes as well. It’s also effectively impossible to repair and much more prone to cracking, so a minor scuff that aluminum would brush off could be a race-ending incident. It’s also a really expensive material to work with and adds up to a ridiculously expensive wheel budget for a season of IndyCar.
The series is working with suppliers to reduce those costs by around 15 percent for the 2026 or 2027 season, simply by switching to aluminum. IndyCar, as you may know, is a spec series with every team working with an almost identical race car package. So long as everyone is forced to use the same wheel, the racing isn’t going to be materially changed by a marginally heavier wheel. Wheel suppliers are working on new designs that will provide a stronger and similar weight aluminum wheel to the current mags, while reducing production costs.
In moving to aluminum, a price reduction in the range of $750 or more for each set is possible.
Multiply that by 48 sets per team, or more if they’re involved in any crashes over the course of the rigorous 17-round season, and you’ve got potential savings of at least $36,000 or the cost of a mid-sized sedan. Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for the series to do something to help curb runaway parts costs. Inflation is a silent killer, even in racing.