With the rumored Dale Coyne Racing entry for Katherine Legge officially ruled out, it appears that the entry list for the 109th running of the Indy 500 is set at 34 cars.
The "Greatest Spectacle in Racing" is capped at 33 cars, meaning that Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing's recent confirmation of Takuma Sato in a fourth Honda-powered entry has solidified a third consecutive year for some form of "Bump Day" drama during qualifying weekend.
As we have seen on a number of occasions in the past, Indianapolis Motor Speedway does not play favorites, and whenever there are more cars on the entry list than spots in the field, nobody is safe.
With 34 cars and 33 spots, somebody will fail to qualify for the 2025 Indy 500.
There are 27 full-time cars, all driven by full-time drivers, on the entry list, and while 25 of those 27 entries (all but Prema Racing's two cars) are chartered cars, those charters only guarantee them a spot in every non-Indy 500 race on the NTT IndyCar Series calendar.
The charter system was only implemented ahead of the 2025 season, but it is worth pointing out that in both 2023 and 2024, the car that failed to get into the race was a full-time car – specifically, a car that is now a chartered entry.
In 2023, it was Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing's Graham Rahal who failed to qualify his No. 15 Honda, and in 2024, it was rookie Nolan Siegel in the No. 18 Dale Coyne Racing Honda who didn't make it in.
A full provisional entry list can be found here.
Indy 500 qualifying is scheduled to take place on Saturday, May 17 and Sunday, May 18, with Fox and Fox Sports 1 both set to provide live coverage from the "Racing Capital of the World" throughout the weekend. The race itself is set to be shown live on Fox from Indianapolis Motor Speedway starting at 10:00 a.m. ET.