INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — As an Indiana native, Eric Shanks can’t remember exactly when the rite of passage began of traveling to Indianapolis Motor Speedway. His first Indianapolis 500 memory is of the 1985 race, Danny Sullivan’s “Spin and Win” 1985 victory, when Shanks was around 14 and had fully embraced the way his home state played such a role in American culture.
“I think everybody takes pride in there being a spotlight on this part of the country,” Shanks said. “The Pacers are only in the playoffs when they are in the playoffs, the Colts aren’t always in. But this is a guarantee every year.”
When he became CEO of Fox Sports in 2010, Shanks had a wish list of events he wanted for the network. Always at the top was the Indianapolis 500, a property Fox Sports finally landed this year. The network is in its first year of a new broadcast deal with IndyCar and on Sunday televises its first Indy 500.
Shanks from the start has vowed the production will be the biggest of the year for Fox Sports — a lofty promise for a network that also carries the Super Bowl and the World Series, among other major sporting events.
“We are going to blow the doors off of Indy. We’re going to bring everything that Fox has to bear,” he said.
He’s been relentless in pursuing his promise and has spent the first five IndyCar races of the year working out early-season glitches that ranged from an unstable graphics package, issues delivering timing and scoring, a mid-race loss of transmission, and enough bumps to drive Shanks nuts as he strives for a perfect production. The work has gone on at the same time Fox Sports televised the first 16 races of the NASCAR season, a run that culminated last Sunday night with the All-Star race.
Only four of the NASCAR races were on Fox, and even with the rain-effected season-opening Daytona 500, that quartet averaged 4,986,000 viewers.
Fox promised IndyCar its entire 17-race slate will be aired on broadcast — including both days of last weekend’s qualifying — but the numbers have been sporadic and unable to keep pace with NASCAR.
The IndyCar ratings don’t bother Shanks.
“I think you just want to be constantly showing growth in a lot of areas,” he said. “You want to be showing growth in attendance. I’m happy to hear merchandise sales are up — you’ve got new sponsors coming in — you just want to show growth.”
Fox Sports last week made several changes to races later this season (mainly start times) to ensure IndyCar and NASCAR do not go directly head-to-hear, something that happened several times earlier this year when the network juggled both racing series. But Shanks told The Associated Press he is not considering moving IndyCar off of Fox to Fox Sports or another property if the ratings don’t improve over the next few weeks.
Instead, his focus is on ensuring the glitches through the first five races don’t happen during the 109th running of “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” or the rest of the season.
“In each race, it actually has been something different,” Shanks said. “You fix one thing and then there’s something else to fix. There’s a lot of different systems talking to each other and we’re on the receiving end of a lot of it. So we’re figure it out and we’re trying to do more.”
Fox Sports is compensating through new innovation, including the image of a “ghost car” graphic used in qualifying that showed how a car making a run tracked against the current leader. And he’s bringing in major talent for Sunday, including Tom Brady for the ceremonial “Fastest Seat in Sports” car, which will be driven by Jimmie Johnson; Michael Strahan, Danica Patrick, Tony Stewart and Super Bowl-winning tight end Rob Gronkowski as the Snake Pit grand marshal.
Fox Sports has a ton of material to work with, including a race-consuming cheating scandal involving Team Penske, the marquee team in IndyCar. It involves two-time defending winner Josef Newgarden, who is seeking to become the first driver in history to win three consecutive 500s.
The first Israeli is in the field as Robert Shwartzman stunned 33 other drivers by becoming the first rookie since 1983 to win the pole. Kyle Larson is attempting to complete the Indy 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 for 1,100-miles of racing in one day. Two-time reigning series champion Alex Palou, who has won four of the first five races this season, is trying to finally add the 500 to his resume and Pato O'Ward, the most popular driver in the series, is trying to bounce back from last year's heartbreaking last-lap defeat.
Shanks has used crossover since the start of the year — Fox produced three movie-production-quality commercials to introduce three IndyCar stars and all aired during the Super Bowl, one with a Brady cameo — and is using most of its network programming to promote Sunday's race.
He also achieved a goal in adding a gambling element to Sunday, something he's wanted to do for months.
“I really want to turn the Indy 500 into more of a Kentucky Derby day from a wagering standpoint. It’s hard to understand how to wager on motorsports,” he said. “On Kentucky Derby day, even if you don’t know anything about horse racing, you put down an exacta or a trifecta, you got win, place, show. How can we figure out how to get that type of broad attention around an event that honestly kind of feels a lot like horse racing that day?”
The solution was a partnership with DraftKings, which will have 20 or more trifectas that people can pick from. Fox Sports analyst James Hinchcliffe will pick one trifecta that will be promoted by Fox.
“I think that's element to this event, and motorsports in general, that if we can start to kind of like add that layer of interest for people, I think it can only be helpful to viewership,” Shanks said."
AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
FOX Sports CEO & Executive Producer Eric Shanks poses in a T-shirt he designed to promote the IndyCar auto racing season on March 4, 2025, in St. Petersburg, Fla. (AP Photo/Jenna Fryer)
NEW YORK (AP) — Reviving a campaign pledge, President Donald Trump wants a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a move that could save Americans tens of billions of dollars but drew immediate opposition from an industry that has been in his corner.
Trump was not clear in his social media post Friday night whether a cap might take effect through executive action or legislation, though one Republican senator said he had spoken with the president and would work on a bill with his “full support.” Trump said he hoped it would be in place Jan. 20, one year after he took office.
Strong opposition is certain from Wall Street in addition to the credit card companies, which donated heavily to his 2024 campaign and have supported Trump's second-term agenda. Banks are making the argument that such a plan would most hurt poor people, at a time of economic concern, by curtailing or eliminating credit lines, driving them to high-cost alternatives like payday loans or pawnshops.
“We will no longer let the American Public be ripped off by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Researchers who studied Trump’s campaign pledge after it was first announced found that Americans would save roughly $100 billion in interest a year if credit card rates were capped at 10%. The same researchers found that while the credit card industry would take a major hit, it would still be profitable, although credit card rewards and other perks might be scaled back.
About 195 million people in the United States had credit cards in 2024 and were assessed $160 billion in interest charges, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says. Americans are now carrying more credit card debt than ever, to the tune of about $1.23 trillion, according to figures from the New York Federal Reserve for the third quarter last year.
Further, Americans are paying, on average, between 19.65% and 21.5% in interest on credit cards according to the Federal Reserve and other industry tracking sources. That has come down in the past year as the central bank lowered benchmark rates, but is near the highs since federal regulators started tracking credit card rates in the mid-1990s. That’s significantly higher than a decade ago, when the average credit card interest rate was roughly 12%.
The Republican administration has proved particularly friendly until now to the credit card industry.
Capital One got little resistance from the White House when it finalized its purchase and merger with Discover Financial in early 2025, a deal that created the nation’s largest credit card company. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is largely tasked with going after credit card companies for alleged wrongdoing, has been largely nonfunctional since Trump took office.
In a joint statement, the banking industry was opposed to Trump's proposal.
“If enacted, this cap would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives," the American Bankers Association and allied groups said.
Bank lobbyists have long argued that lowering interest rates on their credit card products would require the banks to lend less to high-risk borrowers. When Congress enacted a cap on the fee that stores pay large banks when customers use a debit card, banks responded by removing all rewards and perks from those cards. Debit card rewards only recently have trickled back into consumers' hands. For example, United Airlines now has a debit card that gives miles with purchases.
The U.S. already places interest rate caps on some financial products and for some demographics. The Military Lending Act makes it illegal to charge active-duty service members more than 36% for any financial product. The national regulator for credit unions has capped interest rates on credit union credit cards at 18%.
Credit card companies earn three streams of revenue from their products: fees charged to merchants, fees charged to customers and the interest charged on balances. The argument from some researchers and left-leaning policymakers is that the banks earn enough revenue from merchants to keep them profitable if interest rates were capped.
"A 10% credit card interest cap would save Americans $100 billion a year without causing massive account closures, as banks claim. That’s because the few large banks that dominate the credit card market are making absolutely massive profits on customers at all income levels," said Brian Shearer, director of competition and regulatory policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, who wrote the research on the industry's impact of Trump's proposal last year.
There are some historic examples that interest rate caps do cut off the less creditworthy to financial products because banks are not able to price risk correctly. Arkansas has a strictly enforced interest rate cap of 17% and evidence points to the poor and less creditworthy being cut out of consumer credit markets in the state. Shearer's research showed that an interest rate cap of 10% would likely result in banks lending less to those with credit scores below 600.
The White House did not respond to questions about how the president seeks to cap the rate or whether he has spoken with credit card companies about the idea.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who said he talked with Trump on Friday night, said the effort is meant to “lower costs for American families and to reign in greedy credit card companies who have been ripping off hardworking Americans for too long."
Legislation in both the House and the Senate would do what Trump is seeking.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., released a plan in February that would immediately cap interest rates at 10% for five years, hoping to use Trump’s campaign promise to build momentum for their measure.
Hours before Trump's post, Sanders said that the president, rather than working to cap interest rates, had taken steps to deregulate big banks that allowed them to charge much higher credit card fees.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have proposed similar legislation. Ocasio-Cortez is a frequent political target of Trump, while Luna is a close ally of the president.
Seung Min Kim reported from West Palm Beach, Fla.
President Donald Trump arrives on Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport, Friday, Jan. 9, 2025, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
FILE - Visa and Mastercard credit cards are shown in Buffalo Grove, Ill., Feb. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)
