“The lineage goes George, Henry, George, Henry, George, Henry—and I’m George.” So said George Steinbrenner IV, son of Hank and grandson of the Boss, on a recent afternoon at dusk. “My firstborn son would be Henry IV,” he added. He was walking into Central Park from Columbus Circle and talking about his emergence, at the age of twenty-two, as a person of prominence in the family business, which, as he described it, is not the Yankees but ownership writ large: baseball teams, thoroughbreds, race cars. “All the figures that I idolized as a kid, starting with my grandfather, were on the sports-business or sports-ownership side,” he continued. “And, especially when I started going to IndyCar races, the owners were the ones I looked up to more so than the drivers. So that was a big part of why I chose ownership.”

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The passion for IndyCar comes from his mother’s side. His cousin Tony Renna was a driver, who died in a crash, in 2003, and his uncle Chris Simmons is a five-time champion as an engineer. George IV speaks without bombast and cuts an almost stealthy figure, but he has the unmistakable broad Steinbrennerian forehead, which he exposes by gelling his hair back. He started in 2017, he explained, with Indy Lights—“which is Triple-A, basically”—and commissioned pinstripes to be painted on his cars’ shock-absorber covers. Then, in September, he formed a partnership with a Midwestern asphalt mogul named Mike Harding, and ascended to the majors. The new Harding Steinbrenner Racing team will make its IndyCar début next March, in St. Petersburg, Florida. “I want to take this sport into the next generation,” Steinbrenner said.

Bounding ahead of him down a park path were his drivers, Patricio O’Ward and Colton Herta, who are nineteen and eighteen, respectively. He likened them to the “Nos. 1 and 2 draft picks.” Pointing at Herta, who wore a Yankees cap, Steinbrenner said, “I know his dad through my stepdad. They actually raced each other in the minor leagues of racing back in the late eighties.” O’Ward is originally from Monterrey, Mexico, and he alternated between exclaiming at the cold (“Eskimo time!”) and marvelling at skyscrapers. “Oh, my God, that’s a big building,” he said, craning his neck to take in a slender tower going up on Central Park South.

“You’ll see a lot of those,” Steinbrenner said. “It’s not even done yet.”

As the youngest drivers and the youngest owner on the circuit, the three men reflected on the challenges of promoting motor sports to their peers. “When my dad was young, everybody couldn’t wait to get their driver’s license,” Herta said. “Now it’s, like, people don’t even want to drive anymore.” He added, “If you want young people to come, you need to do stuff young people like. Throw a rave on Saturday nights, or something like that.”

“It’s not quite a rave, but at the Indianapolis 500 every year they have something called the Snake Pit,” Steinbrenner said.

“It’s like a little E.D.M. festival in the middle of the track,” O’Ward said.

An assistant opened a suitcase containing two remote-controlled cars, which the young drivers planned to race around a fountain—a makeshift oval. As they warmed up, Steinbrenner attempted to characterize their respective racing styles. “It’s like a pitching windup, but it’s much more subtle,” he said. “Pato’s very aggressive. He’s going to kind of strong-arm the car to do what he wants. Whereas Colton is more about finding a way to engineer the car to do what he wants.” As if to demonstrate, the two teammates were by now engaged in contrasting pursuits, Herta kneeling down and trying to fix the circuitry on his toy car and O’Ward seeking permission to “jump that rock” with his. “Oh, look at the squirrel!” he shouted, and then started chasing it with his car. “Hee-hee, ha-ha! Oh, this is so cool!” Crash. The squirrel went up a tree.

The dropping temperature soon caused them to abbreviate their race plans. Steinbrenner volunteered to stand still at a convergence of pathways while O’Ward and Herta took turns making laps around his feet—which the cars kept banging into. “Look at those nice shoes,” O’Ward teased. ♦