Chip Ganassi is 68, has six Indy 500 wins and 17 IndyCar championships, and spent 36 years declining to talk about any of it.
“I come from a part of the country here in western Pennsylvania,” he told us. “People here are not known for blowing their own horn. They do their work and let their work do the talking for them. That’s pretty much how I’ve approached things for such a long period of time.”
But Chip is a smart man. He sees the shift coming.
On July 30, he launched CGR Media, an in-house editorial division inside the race team, and hired Jenna Fryer to run it as Director of Media. Fryer spent roughly thirty years at the Associated Press and took a buyout in May, after the AP changed how it covers auto racing.
A PR person told him something years ago that he has never let go of. “If you don’t tell your story, somebody else will.”
Everybody with a phone is a reporter now, which raised the volume and nothing else. “What we look to do is improve the quality of what’s out there about us,” he said. “I’m not interested in a puddle that looks very big and is not very deep.”
Sponsorship Hangs in the Balance
Sponsorship has been priced against earned media for forty years. A logo on a sidepod gets valued in broadcast seconds and impressions, run through a media-value multiplier calculated by an agency that nobody in the room fully trusts, and the whole exercise rests on the assumption that a working press corps exists to generate the earned half. That assumption is expiring.
A team-owned newsroom changes what a partner is buying. First-party audience data replaces an estimate. Placement is guaranteed rather than hoped for. The format belongs to the team. The crew has access no outside outlet will ever be granted. Ganassi’s announcement puts it plainly. The division exists to “create meaningful value for our partners through premium, owned content.”
Access is the moat, and it is underexploited. Only the team has the Sunday morning debrief, the transporter at four in the morning, the engineer explaining why the car was three tenths off. That is the highest-value footage in motorsport, and it is sitting unshot in most of the garages on the grid. Formula 1 already ran the experiment. Drive to Survive proved what narrative does to a demand curve, and the teams handed most of the upside to Netflix.
The Tradeoff
Owned coverage is not independent coverage. CGR Media may never publish the piece about the bad year, the driver dispute, or the partner who walked.
Asked to his face about Fryer being a polarizing figure, Ganassi did not flinch. He pointed out that writing for the AP means writing about everybody, and that the new job is narrower. “Hopefully this is gonna be a little different where she’s not really opining about other teams,” he said. “It’s just about us.”
Every Team is a Media Company
I’ve been beating this drum for over a decade: every company should be a media company.
I do believe that within the next few years, every American team with a real fanbase employs at least one full-time journalist, and the teams that skip it could find nobody covering them at all.
Watch the second-order effect. As teams absorb the writers, the independent outlets that supply pricing credibility get thinner, and the number a sponsor uses to justify the spend starts arriving from the organization selling the spend.
Ganassi will tell you he is not thinking about any of it. “We’re about the show, not the sideshow,” he said, and he has been saying a version of that for thirty-six years.
The media company conversation is one segment of an hour conversation we had with the legend. He walks through the Scott Dixon conversation and says the search for a replacement is down to the short strokes. He explains why he hires on values and teaches the rest, what Mario Andretti told him in 1994 that changed how he ran the team, why he had zero involvement in bringing the Freedom 250 to Washington, what Alex Palou told him about the IR-28 after driving it, and who he considers the most naturally gifted driver he has ever been around. Enjoy!
Business of Speed covers the business, technology, and lifestyle of racing: Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, NASCAR and more. From Vincenzo Landino, entrepreneur and creator featured in Bloomberg, TBPN, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Adweek, and Front Office Sports. You can find us on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn.
