Andretti Global racing makes progress on new HQ building

Andretti Global’s new headquarters in Fishers is a steel skeleton in the middle of a dusty field, but the motorsports giant’s future home is starting to come into focus.

The sound of construction work fills the 55,000-square-foot open space in the middle of the building that will serve as the heart of the 400,000-square-foot structure when it opens next year. By then, the racing shop will be a hub of activity, with 32 service bays where technicians will prepare and perfect cars for their next race.

Another area on the first floor will serve as an auditorium for team gatherings, meetings and race watch parties, and the location of CEO Michael Andretti’s office can be pinpointed on the second floor.

“I think that this place is going to be able to provide a lot of really wonderful opportunities to all of our employees and be able to give our talent the best of the best to help them perform at the optimal level,” Andretti Global Vice President Marissa Andretti told IBJ on a tour of the facility.

The headquarters will also feature indoor and outdoor pit-stop practice areas, a fitness center, dining space, employee gathering areas and walking trails with access to the Nickel Plate trail and Ritchey Woods Nature Preserve.

“That building will be filled with a lot of very competitive individuals,” said Andretti, daughter of Michael Andretti. “When we’re not at a racetrack, we’re kind of bouncing off the walls.” The campus will offer a lot of amenities tailored to the company’s “very active” employees, she said.

Cardinal XLIII LLC, a development firm associated with Andretti Global, also has options to purchase two parcels totaling 67 acres on Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport property, one northwest of its campus and a second along East 96th Street, where Indianapolis-based Scannell Properties once planned to build a distribution facility.

Fishers officials said Cardinal XLIII has indicated to the Indianapolis Airport Authority, owner of Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport, that it plans to execute on the purchase options.

Andretti would not confirm that to IBJ, but she said there are “wonderful plans and opportunities for the additional parcels.”

“Right now, we’re fully focused on that Phase 1 and honing in on quite a massive project that is right in front of us, and that’s our key focus,” she said.

Indianapolis-based Ratio Architects is designing the Andretti headquarters, while Bethesda, Maryland-based Clark Construction is general contractor and Chicago-based Bradford Allen is master developer of the site.

Andretti Global currently employs about 150 people at 7615 Zionsville Road in an 80,000-square-foot facility. The team plans to hire up to 500 new employees in coming years.

“Right now, we’re bursting at the seams,” Andretti said. “Any closet we have is an office now for maybe even multiple people.”

Construction resumed in March on a slightly downsized first phase following almost a year of legal delays after Indianapolis-based Dillon Construction Group, the project’s original contractor, filed suit against Cardinal XLIII. Initial plans for the $200 million campus called for a 575,000-square-foot complex.

Now, the team is focusing on getting the basics in place at a 400,000-square-foot facility on just under 100 acres near the northwest corner of East 96th Street and Hague Road. Additional components at the campus—like the Andretti Experience, a family racing museum with interactive experiences, memorabilia and museum exhibits that initially was planned for the first phase of construction—will be built in a future phase.

‘Under one roof’

The Andretti Global headquarters will compare in size to other major U.S. racing facilities. Mooresville, North Carolina-based Team Penske has a 424,000-square-foot facility at a 105-acre campus, while Concord, North Carolina-based Hendrick Motorsports operates out of a 430,000-square-foot headquarters on 140 acres.

Andretti said the team looked globally for inspiration on how to build the facility.

“Michael’s vision is wanting to have our different racing series under one roof and work together and be stronger in that way, because our goal is to be in every major racing series in the world and not just be there to compete but be there to win,” she said.

Mayor Scott Fadness said Andretti Global’s move to Fishers will “add a sense of pride” for residents.

“[It adds] one more component of vibrancy to our community so that, when they’re watching on race day, whether it’s the Indy 500 or any of the IndyCar series that [Andretti races] in all around the world, [they’ll] know that that is happening right here in our own community,” he said.

Andretti Global plans to move its NTT IndyCar, Indy NXT and IMSA racing programs to the facility after it receives its certificate of occupancy in March.

“We’re just pumped,” Andretti said. “All the puzzle pieces are coming together.”

Andretti Global is also involved in other racing series that will be housed in Fishers. including Extreme E, an off-road series; and Formula E, an all-electric, open-wheel series. The Indiana Economic Development Corp. is a sponsor of Andretti’s Formula E car. The team also races in Supercopa in Mexico and Australia-based Repco Supercars Championship.

Andretti Global is still working to gain entry to FIA Formula One World Championship, a major racing circuit that runs events in Europe, Asia and North America. This year, the team opened a 48,000-square-foot facility in the United Kingdom as part of its preparations to join F1.

In January, F1 rejected Andretti Global’s application following a six-month review. And last week, Meridian, Colorado-based Liberty Media, owner of Formula One Group, confirmed it is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for denying Andretti Global entry into F1.

Andretti said there would be enough space in the Fishers facility to house an F1 team until the campus is expanded later.

“There’s room in the first couple of years or whatever it may be in our current phase, but there’s a lot of opportunity beyond that that we have planned out,” she said.

Adding a partner

The impending move to Fishers and the plan to establish an F1 program coincided with the addition of Zionsville-based Group 1001 CEO Dan Towriss to the team’s ownership group. Towriss—who oversees Andretti Global’s business operations and works to establish partnerships—was not available for an interview and did not respond to emailed questions submitted through a spokesperson.

Gainbridge, presenting sponsor of the Indianapolis 500, is under the umbrella of parent company Group 1001, a financial services company.

In a 2023 interview published on IndyCar’s official website, Towriss said he and Michael Andretti are “partners in the truest sense.” He added that he spends about 30% of his work time each week focused on motorsports.

“My [strength] is business, not racing, so I don’t offer opinions on setups and drivers and tire strategy, those kind of things,” Towriss told IndyCar.com. “I’m very involved in the business side, and Michael and I talk multiple times a week. There’s never a week that goes by that we don’t speak on the phone. It’s definitely a lot of collaboration back and forth. It’s been fun; we’ve learned a lot from each other.”

Fadness said he is eager to see what the future holds for the entire property, though discussions about future phases, including the two purchase-option parcels, are “very early.”

“Right now, I think [Andretti is] focused on building really kind of a world-class, probably one of the nicest corporate headquarters for racing anywhere in the world in Fishers, Indiana, and they’re really doubling down and trying to focus on that,” Fadness said.

Ken Ungar, principal at Indianapolis-based sports marketing firm Charge, said Andretti Global’s pursuit of options on adjacent real estate is consistent with what he knows as an organization that is “absolutely in growth mode.” Ungar also worked as chief of staff at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from 1997 to 2001.

“Any organization in growth mode is thinking about expansion because the worst thing you could have is to have a 400,000-square-foot facility that you actually need to expand, but you’re landlocked,” he said.

The team’s location adjacent to Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport will be “extremely important,” he added. Andretti Global team executives and members currently use Indianapolis Regional Airport in Greenfield for private flights. Its race teams use Indianapolis International Airport for charter flights on large-scale regional jets.

“Proximity to an airport, with as much as a team travels, both nationally and internationally, to the extent that a runway of an airport can support most of the private aircraft that they fly out of there, it makes an enormous difference in terms of moving executives and team personnel around the world,” Ungar said.

Building at the airport

The path to bringing Andretti Global to Fishers was one Fadness did not envision a decade ago.

In fact, Fishers had spent years trying to close the airport so it could develop the land underneath it. Fishers officials unsuccessfully attempted to move the airport, first to Noblesville in 2005 and later to Anderson in 2008.

Even further back, Hamilton County Commissioner Steve Dillinger said officials from Fishers and the Indianapolis Airport Authority disagreed in the early 1990s over plans to extend the airport’s runway to allow larger planes to land. The Airport Authority dropped the plans in 1994.

“It was unproductive land, [and] it was land we couldn’t use for anything,” said Dillinger, who is also vice president of the Indianapolis Airport Authority. “We wanted to get it back on the tax rolls. We worked with Fishers very closely.”

Fadness, Dillinger and City Council members Pete Peterson and John Weingardt worked to mend fences with the airport authority and find “an opportunity where we all can win,”

Fadness said.

They formulated a plan to make 211 of Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport’s 445 acres available for development. The city and airport authority reached an agreement in 2015. Approximately 30 acres remain on the market.

“That was a really exciting opportunity for the city of Fishers, because it’s not very often that you get hundreds of acres of land with a development partner that has the patience that the airport authority had to say, ‘Hey, let us know when you find the right fit,’” Fadness said.

He said the original idea for development at the airport was for large companies that wanted to have lots of space for corporate-style campuses. Development took longer than expected in part due to a lack of utilities at the site.

Megan Baumgartner, the director of economic and community development in Fishers, said the area surrounding the airport also lacked amenities, such as the Nickel Plate Trail, needed to attract companies.

“We had so many other areas where there was existing vibrancy,” she said. “And really at the beginning of all that development and the branding of it, we didn’t know that the Nickel Plate Trail would be in existence. It was all railroad. So it was kind of on an island separate from this activity.”

Rare opportunity

But Fadness said the Andretti Global campus made it worth the wait.

“This idea is kind of an outlier. We have lots of other developments where you just put lots of pieces together. That’s not what this is, really,” Fadness said. “This is really trying to find that one-in-a-million opportunity, and that’s what Andretti brought to the table.”

In 2021, Fishers-based Patch Development announced plans to purchase 24 acres from the airport authority along East 96th Street to build 143,000 square feet of flex space in four buildings and move its headquarters from Westfield. Two buildings have been constructed, and two more have yet to be built.

“It’s kind of a collaboration between us and the city and the airport and the market and all coming together for the right product along this corridor,” Patch Development CEO Pat Chittenden said.

Pure Pharmacy LLC, founded in 2018 in Carmel, is spending $4.5 million to lease and equip 21,000 square feet in a 30,000-square-foot building it will share with Patch Development.

And later this year, Italy-based Prema Racing will move into Patch’s 95,000-square-foot building next door at the northeast corner of East 96th Street and Willow View Road. Prema plans to join the NTT IndyCar Series in 2025 with two drivers. The team is currently outfitting the building into a racing shop.

“It was the perfect fit for us, to be honest, and I must have looked at 30 or 40 buildings right across the Indy area,” Prema Racing CEO Piers Phillips said. “And it was one of those situations where I literally walked through the door one cold and wet Monday morning in November, and it just instantly ticked the box with me. It instantly felt right.”

Fadness said having Andretti and Prema as neighbors provides Fishers with a racing sector to go along with its life sciences and tech sectors.

“To have that today and to see that it’s starting to grow and develop is really, really exciting,” he said. “It diversifies our economic base, and that’s what any city strives for.”

Development at the airport is helping to reinvigorate the East 96th Street corridor, he said—a major goal. The city’s plans along East 96th Street include the 120-acre Fishers White River Park, a $135 million development by Carmel-based CRG Residential called River Place and a pedestrian bridge connecting the Fishers and Indianapolis sections of the Nickel Plate Trail.

“Fishers is really making a concerted effort to bring some exciting new life in the 96th Street corridor,” Fadness said. “And I think in the coming years, you’re going to see some really dynamic change in large part because of the Andretti investment out there at the airport.”•