In the final post of his series on branding in the age of AI, Bill Sparks asks the practical question the first seven built toward: who's actually doing this well? From Nike to a neighborhood bakery, the answer looks surprisingly consistent.

Chip Ganassi just passed Roger Penske for the most championships in IndyCar history. Paul Pfanner on the racer behind the record, and why he is nowhere near done.

The car brands you grew up with are being repriced all at once, and the sport that depends on them hasn't gotten the invoice yet. Paul Pfanner on Porsche, the yen, China, and a pattern he has watched form before.

The agency-of-record era that ran for a century is coming apart. In part seven of his branding series, Bill Sparks tracks what the industry's biggest players are doing as the ground shifts, and what it means for anyone trying to keep a brand's story straight.

Bill Long on the big ideas that reinvent an industry, from a brick racetrack built in 1909 to IndyCars running the streets of Washington, DC in 2026, and why playing it safe carries a real risk of its own.

Paul Pfanner published the magazines you grew up on. Fifth in his series on the next IndyCar, on the half of the question the IR-28 can't answer: who still reaches the seat.

In 1978, a young art director with almost no racing experience talked his way into a 550-horsepower Can-Am car. Paul Pfanner on the lifelong pattern that day set off, why stepping outside your lane draws the people you're meant to find,

Part six of Bill Sparks' series on the evolution of branding. Can a machine tell your brand's story? Bill separates the AI that is quietly making marketing better from the AI that keeps embarrassing the companies that trust it in the open.

Last week Paul Pfanner argued the barrier to making anything had fallen away. So he wrote and produced an album in a week to test it, and came back with the harder question waiting on the other side: what part of the work, and what part of him, is still real.

Paul Pfanner spent a weekend testing whether he believed his own argument. He set out to write and produce a twelve-song blues album with no musical training and no idea how to begin, and finished with more than he planned.

Bill Sparks on why handing your story to your customers is the hardest brand strategy to pull off, and the loyalty it earns that no ad budget can buy.

Paul Pfanner on reading the news posted to X by RACER Editor David Malsher-Lopez, and other news outlets that issue 341 will be the magazine's last in print, and on the people, readers, and advertisers who built it.

Paul Pfanner takes apart the word "media" in 2026 and finds a surveillance economy sitting under the pull, then makes the case for the one thing paper can still do that a screen can't.

Bill Sparks looks at how creator partnerships became a $44 billion channel, and the tradeoff every brand faces: the authenticity that makes a creator worth hiring is the same thing you can't fully control.

The new IndyCar IR-28 didn't come from nowhere. Paul Pfanner traces the forces that shaped it, and the cars that were drawn but never built, to show how the sport arrived here and the choice it faces next.

Paul Pfanner on what the next Indy car should be built to prove once raw speed has reached its useful limit. Third in his series on the future of the sport.

Paul Pfanner asks whether IndyCar has permanently turned its race car into standard equipment, what that trades away, and why the choice that builds what comes next has to be made now.

Paul Pfanner sets the reimagined IMS Museum against today's paddock and asks what the Indy car after the IR-28 should add to a century of cars that made change visible

Paul Pfanner renders the Formula 1 car he drew in 1987 for engineer Paul Van Valkenburgh, and remembers a brilliant friend the sport lost in 2024.

Bill Sparks on how a handful of brands became publishers, why owning an audience beats renting one, and where most companies go wrong.