Chip Ganassi Racing · History

Chip Ganassi Racing was founded in 1990, when former driver and Pittsburgh businessman Chip Ganassi, whose driving career had been cut short by a crash at Michigan in 1984, set up his own team using the assets of Patrick Racing, Pat Patrick’s operation he had partnered with in 1989. The team made its CART debut that year with a Penske chassis carried over from the previous partnership and set up its base in Indianapolis. Over time it branched out into NASCAR, endurance racing and other series, but open-wheel racing remained its core.

The CART years

The first major results came in the mid-1990s. In 1996 Jimmy Vasser won the CART championship, the team’s first title. Italian Alex Zanardi won the next two, in 1997 and 1998, and in 1999 Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya took the title as a series rookie. That made four straight championships with three different drivers. In 2000, after the split between CART and the IRL, Ganassi returned to the Indianapolis 500 and Montoya won the race on his first attempt.

Dixon, Franchitti and the move to IndyCar

The team switched to the IRL, which later became the IndyCar Series, and in 2003 New Zealander Scott Dixon won his first championship with Ganassi. Dixon was champion again in 2008, the same year he won the Indianapolis 500. Scotland’s Dario Franchitti won three straight titles in 2009, 2010 and 2011 and won at Indianapolis in 2010 and 2012. Dixon then added the 2013, 2015, 2018 and 2020 championships, bringing his IndyCar tally with the team to six. In 2022 Sweden’s Marcus Ericsson won the Indianapolis 500.

The NASCAR years

In 2001 Ganassi bought a majority stake in Team SABCO, the NASCAR outfit Felix Sabates had run since 1989, creating Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates. In 2009 the operation merged with Dale Earnhardt, Inc. to become Earnhardt Ganassi Racing; the Earnhardt name was dropped in 2014. In 2010 Jamie McMurray won both the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400, and with Franchitti winning at Indianapolis that May, Ganassi became the first owner to win all three races in the same season. Kyle Larson and Kurt Busch also drove for the team. In 2021 Ganassi accepted an offer from Justin Marks and sold the NASCAR operation to Trackhouse Racing, with the deal completed at the end of that season.

Endurance racing

In Grand-Am, Ganassi won the Rolex 24 at Daytona in 2006, 2007 and 2008, becoming the first team to take the overall win three years in a row; Scott Pruett and Juan Pablo Montoya were part of those crews. The team won the race again in 2011, 2013 and 2015. It also ran Ford’s GT program, and in 2016 the No. 68 car of Joey Hand, Dirk Müller and Sébastien Bourdais won the GTE Pro class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, fifty years after Ford’s first victory there. In 2023 and 2024 the team ran the Cadillac V-Series.R in IMSA’s GTP class and in the Hypercar category of the World Endurance Championship, with a base in Germany for the world championship effort. Its wins included the 2024 Petit Le Mans. Cadillac and Ganassi ended their partnership after that season.

The Álex Palou era

Spaniard Álex Palou joined the team in 2021 and won the IndyCar championship in his first year with Ganassi. He took the title again in 2023 and 2024. In 2025 Palou won the Indianapolis 500, the team’s sixth victory in the race, and claimed his fourth IndyCar championship. The six Indianapolis 500 wins came in 2000, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2022 and 2025, with five different drivers. In 2026 Palou won the IndyCar title again, his fourth in a row and fifth overall, sealing it at the Milwaukee Mile at the end of August. It was Chip Ganassi Racing’s 18th open-wheel championship, four in CART and fourteen in IndyCar, which broke the tie with Team Penske for the most in the series’ history and took the team to 25 titles across all of its programs.