Every May, the iRacing Indy 500 special event turns Indianapolis into the busiest oval on the sim calendar, with open and fixed setup splits and the full 200 laps in the Dallara IR18. It remains a PC affair. As this site reported, iRacing has no plans for an IndyCar console game anytime soon, so console racers have watched that corner of the hobby from outside. This year, though, one of the more eye catching cars on the real grid at Indianapolis had nothing to do with a sim brand at all.
It was the No. 31 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet driven by Ryan Hunter-Reay, painted in purple for PrizePicks, the daily fantasy and picks app best known for NFL Sundays. Football fans who follow PrizePicks projections every week would have recognized the color scheme instantly. For racing fans it raised a reasonable question: why is a company built on quarterback passing yards paying for an Indy 500 entry, and what does that change for people who care more about tire temperatures than touchdowns?
Before: a football app with racing on the side
For most of its life PrizePicks has been a stick and ball product. Its core game, Player Picks, asks you to choose More or Less on a projected stat for two to six athletes, and the volume has always come from football Sundays and Saturdays. Motorsport existed on the board, but as a side menu. Until this season, users who wanted to mix in a game result could add just one game line pick to a lineup of two to five players.
Racing never fit that model neatly. A quarterback has a dozen measurable stats every week. A driver has a result, and that result often depends on things nobody outside the garage can see, from a setup gamble to a pit call made on lap 140.
The Indy 500 deal, and how it actually went
The partnership with Arrow McLaren was announced on April 29 in Miami during Formula 1 race week, with the purple car unveiled at the team's fan event at Regatta Harbor. PrizePicks became primary partner on that Indy 500 entry. Its logo also appeared on the inner halo of the McLaren F1 cars at the Miami Grand Prix, and it stayed on the rear tire ramps of all three full time Arrow McLaren cars for the whole 2026 IndyCar season.
The race itself was brutal for the No. 31. The 2014 Indy 500 winner started 22nd and was out after 17 laps with contact, classified 32nd. His explanation will sound familiar to anyone who has stared at a telemetry overlay: the car was extremely loose from the start, and the team could see the right rear tire pressure and temperature climbing with nothing they could do about it from the stand. Up front, Felix Rosenqvist beat David Malukas by 0.0233 seconds, the closest finish in Indy 500 history, after a record 70 lead changes. Alex Palou, who started on pole and went on to clinch his fifth IndyCar title before the September 6 finale at Laguna Seca, was the app's favorite going in at a 3.7x payout to win.
After: combos, and where racing fits in them
The bigger product change came in September, aimed squarely at football. On September 8 the app began letting users combine up to four Team Picks, meaning game lines such as a winner or a spread, with two Player Picks in a single lineup, or stack as many as six Team Picks with no players at all. Every pick has to hit for a payout. The sports eligible for those Team Picks are NFL, college football, MLB, WNBA, NBA, tennis and UFC. Racing is not on that list.
That detail matters. You cannot put "Palou to win" next to a Packers spread in one of the new combos. What you can do is use racing on the Player Picks side, because Player Picks from every sport are eligible. For Formula 1, that board includes markets that read like a sim racer's debrief: finishing position, starting position before qualifying, overtake points and first pit stop time. NASCAR gets weekly coverage too, down to this past Sunday's South Point 400 in Las Vegas.
What racing fans should know before trying it
Racing projections reward the same knowledge sim racers use every night. The app's own F1 guide points out that at tracks like Suzuka the grid nearly mirrors the finishing order, which makes qualifying data far more useful than reputation. Anyone who has run a stint on worn tires in Le Mans Ultimate understands why a pit stop time line can swing on one slow wheel change, and why that unpredictability cuts both ways.
Availability is the other thing to check. Player Picks runs in 36 states plus Washington, D.C., while Team Picks are event contracts offered through PrizePicks Predict, a CFTC registered entity, in about 35 states, with minimum ages that run from 18 to 21 depending on where you live. Treat any entry as paid entertainment with a budget you set before the lights go out, not a way to fund your next wheelbase. If it stops being fun, 1.800.GAMBLER is free and confidential.
For the sim community, the more interesting part may be what comes next. A picks app paid to put a purple car on the most famous oval in the world and kept its logo on McLaren hardware all season. When the iRacing Indy 500 rolls around again next May, it will be worth watching whether that money reaches the virtual grid too.