IndyCar: Andretti Autosport, EVO form major driver development partnership

By Asher Fair | Oct 22, 2020

Colton Herta, Andretti Harding Steinbrenner Autosport, IndyCar (Photo by Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images) /

Andretti Autosport and EVO are excited to announce a partnership to bolster the former’s IndyCar driver selection program for many years to come.

IndyCar team Andretti Autosport has formed a strategic partnership to bolster the team’s driver selection program with EVO, an athletic development company that intends to turn top-contenders in individual professional sports into tomorrow’s champions through investment from fans.

EVO plans to provide management, training, promotion, nutrition and more for the drivers who have been scouted by Andretti Autosport and EVO as potential champions who need the extra support to help them succeed in racing.

“The biggest problem with racing is that it’s very expensive to race. You can have all the talent in the world and love it more than anything, but if you don’t have the backing, you’re probably not going to make it,” said Andretti Autosport Chairman and CEO Michael Andretti in a release. “There’s a lot of talent sitting on the sidelines that could have been champions. To have a platform like EVO, it’s huge for a young, true talent.”

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Andretti’s team has taken an equity stake in EVO as a part of this deal, a deal that will allow the average person to invest in the company and get a cut of the earnings of all of EVO’s athletes, including athletes in sports other than motorsports, beginning in January.

Due to a lack of funding or training, many drivers, no matter how talented they are, don’t make the cut in racing due to how expensive it has become. EVO’s team of successful veteran coaches, trainers, managers, nutritionists and more opens up Andretti’s team to work with an even greater pool of drivers.

“EVO is solving a problem for Andretti Autosport by further developing drivers that otherwise may be left behind because they lack the resources to become tomorrow’s champions, but not the talent,” added EVO CEO John Norman. “EVO plans to offer athletes everything they need to reach their goals, and the Andretti Autosport partnership is the first step in building future athletes.”

Having the extra opportunities to hone their skills, get more seat time and improve their diet and exercise — as well as the opportunity to gain additional funding — are a few of the many advantages that this partnership offers.

We had the chance to speak to both Andretti and Norman about this exciting new partnership earlier this week.

We asked Andretti how this partnership started.

“It actually started with John Norman, whose son Ryan Norman raced for a few years with us in Indy Lights, and he came up with this great idea,” he told Beyond the Flag. “He’s the one who’s been working flat-out to get it to this point. When he came to us with the idea, we thought it was a fantastic idea. With our sport of racing, it’s a difficult one to get involved in because it costs so much money to participate in it.

“So I think there’s been a lot of talent that has been overlooked because they haven’t had the means to get to the next level, and with EVO now you’re going to hopefully find the next superstar and bring him up all the way through the ranks.

“I think it’s a cool program, I think it’s a great one to also get more fans involved because now a fan can invest in a kid’s career and hopefully they can follow the kid all the way through his career all the way to big time racing, and then if he does really well, they can actually reap some benefits off of it by sharing in his winnings, so I think it’s a very, very cool program.”

Norman shared the same sentiment.

“Essentially what we’re trying to accomplish is to create another opportunity here for solving one of the major problems in racing, which always seems to be budget,” he added. “Regardless of the talent level, it always comes down to that. So with EVO, together with Andretti, we’re going to scout and support some very talented drivers who we feel have the best chance at competing for the championship.”

Andretti and Norman both agreed that this partnership is a part of a long-term goal and that results won’t happen overnight. But both are very optimistic that it will really start to pay off within a few years.

“I’d say probably, as soon as we find the kids say this year in Go-Karts, he’s going to have three levels to go through before he gets to IndyCar, so it could be four or five years before that driver would have a shot at IndyCar,” Andretti stated.

Norman backed up those thoughts.

“It is longer-term,” he said. “Like any business, you have to have a business plan and grow into that business plan. But we anticipate, once we launch the offering to the public in January, that we’ll immediately start having some EVO drivers competing in next year’s series.”

As Andretti noted, Ryan Norman, John Norman’s son, drove for his Indy Lights team for three years from 2017 to 2019, so the two sides have been quite familiar with one another before this partnership was established. What ultimately led them to take this next step, both from the team perspective (Andretti) and the business perspective (Norman)?

“I think it was all the work from John Norman,” said Andretti without hesitation. “He worked his butt off to get it to this point. When he came to us with the concept, we said we will absolutely endorse it and get behind it because we think it’s a great program. Just, ‘You go and put it all together, and then we’re here to help support it,’ and that’s where we are right now.”

Norman added to that thought.

“It was being able to participate, like you said, in three years in open-wheel racing and watching many talented drivers having to leave after one year because they didn’t win the championship and they weren’t able to move up to the next level,” he stated.

“It really made me, it started the whole…it was the genesis of EVO. And when I realized that not only in racing is this a major obstacle, but it actually goes across most individual sports like golf and tennis and MMA fighting. EVO is a sports athlete development company that is going to feature many individual sports.

“So it’s not unique. The problem of not being able to compete because of financial reasons falls across the board with all these other individual sports as well. It’s quite different than if you’re a team sport, where you’ve already got a support system and typically a team that’s providing all of that for their athletes.

“We found that if you’re just an individual and trying to pursue yourself in individual sports, you run into the fact that you’re responsible for covering all of your own costs associated with it. And a lot of times athletes spend more time trying to make ends meet and finding their budget, things like that, rather than focus on training.

“And that’s where EVO comes in and will relieve those additional pressures and we’ll be able to put together a training and development program that will be able to give an athlete the ability to focus all their time on becoming the best they can be.”

Norman noted that being able to have his son drive for Andretti Autosport’s Indy Lights program for three years, two years with EVO as a primary sponsor, also played a huge role in the exposure that allowed this partnership to even become an option.

“That was a great opportunity to help promote EVO when we had EVO on the car the last two years of racing with Andretti,” he stated. “So it brought some awareness also to the racing community and people started asking ‘what’s EVO?’ and I kept saying ‘Don’t worry, we’re developing it!’, so eventually it happened, so it’s time now.

“So we certainly greatly appreciate your helping us bring awareness to the world, especially the racing world, and we hope it’s going to be very exciting and fun for all of the fans that can now be investors. They’re going to have a financial stake in the success of all of the EVO athletes across all the sports.”

While the kinds of obstacles which EVO is attempting to help its athletes overcome are not unique to racing, as Norman noted, this partnership model is the first of its kind.

“That’s what’s so exciting about what we’re doing here,” he said. “This concept has never been done before, and it is something that you talk to almost any athlete or any individual athlete, it doesn’t matter what sport it is, they’re all saying ‘Oh my gosh, this is such a great new opportunity for a real talent to be able to pursue their dreams and become the best they can be.’

“It was really just combining the opportunity now that you can offer shares to the general public so the general fans can invest in EVO. And then, as you saw in the press release, we then go out and find that talent, and then the investors or the fans essentially have a stake in the success of all of our athletes.

“So they’re not investing or helping just one individual person. They’re essentially investing in EVO; they’re benefitting from the successes of all of our athletes, whether it’s in golf or in fighting or in racing. So it’s very exciting also for the investors because now they can watch and be interested in maybe some other sports that they weren’t involved in or interested in before.

“But now they know that if one of our golfers on the PGA Tour wins, then at the end of the year, we’re going to distribute a portion of those winnings back to all the shareholders. So like you said at the beginning, have we modeled this after anything existing? The answer is no. This is a completely new business model that I think is very timely and very appropriate for the modern time where social media is so important.”

While this is a new kind of partnership and Andretti Autosport will naturally be the first to reap the benefits of it, Andretti knows that it may end up playing to the advantage of other organizations down the road because of the level of talent that exists in the world of motorsports.

“I think it could help other organizations because there may be a point where there’s no room in our stable,” he noted. “Like in Indy Lights, for instance, we’ve already had guys signed up, and there’d be an opportunity then for them, if there’s no room, to go to another team. We hope that that won’t happen because if the kid’s a real star we’re going to do whatever to try to keep him in our family.”

Norman noted that the search for new drivers has already begun.

“Actually yes we have [begun searching],” he said. “Obviously from partnering with Andretti, everybody is always out looking for who’s the next great talent coming up, and sometimes it’s not always just the person who wins the championship. Sometimes, as you know, luck and crashes and things like that can mess up your points and things like that. So essentially we’re looking for the best talented drivers out there, regardless of where they fall in the point standings.”

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Learn more about EVO by visiting their website and watching this video. Learn more about this new partnership by watching this video.