If you’re into horsepower, racing or just about anything built to go fast, there’s really nothing else quite like PRI in Indianapolis
The 2025 Performance Racing Industry Trade Show, better known simply as PRI, returned to Indianapolis, Indiana, December 11-13, bringing the racing and performance industry together for three packed days of race cars, engines, new products, fabrication, technology and more performance parts than you could possibly see in one trip through the show.
And that’s not an exaggeration. PRI is huge.
You can walk around for hours, think you’ve covered a pretty good chunk of it and then realize there’s an entire section of the show you haven’t even touched yet.
Every December, Indianapolis becomes the center of the racing world when PRI comes to town.
The Performance Racing Industry Trade Show isn’t your typical car show. This is where the business side of racing meets the people actually building, racing and developing the cars and parts.
Walk into PRI and you’re immediately surrounded by companies showing off their latest products, race teams displaying their cars, engine builders talking horsepower and fabricators showing parts that make you want to go home and tear your own project apart.
That’s probably the dangerous part of attending PRI. You show up just wanting to look around and a few hours later, you’ve mentally rebuilt half your vehicle. There’s something new around nearly every corner, and that’s what keeps the show interesting year after year.
You’d expect a show called the Performance Racing Industry Trade Show to have a few race cars. PRI has more than a few drag cars, circle track cars, road racing machines, off-road vehicles, open-wheel cars and all kinds of purpose-built race vehicles fill displays throughout the show. Some are instantly recognizable while others make you stop because you aren’t exactly sure what you’re looking at—you just know you need a closer look.
That’s one of the best parts about walking PRI. You might spend ten minutes checking out a beautifully finished race car and then turn around to find something completely different sitting twenty feet away. The variety is crazy.And unlike a traditional car show where you’re mainly looking at the finished vehicle, PRI gives you the chance to see what makes these machines work.
The parts are everywhere.
Naturally, engines are a huge part of PRI and if you’re somebody who can stare at a well-built engine for way too long, this place can become a problem.
Complete racing engines, cylinder heads, intake systems, fuel systems, superchargers, turbochargers, ignition components and just about every other piece needed to make horsepower can be found throughout the show. Some displays are filled with polished, detailed engines that almost look too nice to fire up; almost.
Others are strictly business. Everything has a purpose, and that purpose is usually finding more horsepower, improving reliability or figuring out how to make something survive under conditions that would destroy a normal engine. The technology involved in modern racing continues to move at an incredible pace, but there’s still something satisfying about standing in front of an engine and seeing all the mechanical pieces that make the power happen.
This is probably one of our favorite parts of the show; fabrication.
PRI gives you an up-close look at how some of the best builders in the industry put things together. Chassis components, suspension systems, brakes, rear ends, steering components, welding equipment and fabrication tools are everywhere and the quality of some of the work is ridiculous.
You start looking at welds, then brackets, then how something was mounted.
Before you know it, you’re underneath a display car trying to figure out how they routed everything. For anyone building a custom truck, hot rod or performance vehicle, there’s a ton of crossover between racing fabrication and the custom automotive world. A good idea is a good idea no matter where it came from.
Plenty of things developed to make race cars lighter, stronger or easier to service eventually find their way into street and show builds; that’s one reason PRI is such a cool event even if you aren’t building a dedicated race car.
It’s hard to imagine a better home for PRI than Indianapolis; this is a city with racing built into its identity. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indy 500 have made the city famous around the world, while race shops and performance companies throughout central Indiana keep that motorsports connection going year-round, then PRI arrives in December and turns the volume up even more.
For a few days, downtown Indianapolis fills with people from virtually every corner of the racing industry. You see racing shirts everywhere. Hotel lobbies become meeting spots. Restaurants fill up with people talking about engines, cars and next season. The show might technically be happening inside the convention center, but you can feel PRI throughout downtown.
Photo by: John Mumaw
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