UPDATE: Alex Palou, a 28-year-old Spaniard, prevailed at Indianapolis Motor Speedway Sunday to claim his first Indy 500 victory and the first for his home country,
Thanks to an aggressive renewal policy, as well as excitement on the track last year, the Indianapolis 500 has sold out the grandstands for the first time in almost a decade.
Around 350,000 people will be on hand for “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Sunday, the first sellout since 2016.
“We’ve just worked really hard at continuing to engage our fans more, tell the stories about our drivers more,” Doug Boles, president of both the speedway and the IndyCar racing circuit, said in a phone interview.
Right after Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden bested Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward in the final laps to win his second straight Indy 500 last year, the clock started ticking for fans who wanted to attend the race in 2025.
As soon as the race ends, fans have 500 hours (about 21 days) to renew tickets for the following year. Boles said that the renewal rate during that period was “significantly ahead year over year.”
Of the 232,000 permanent seats at the speedway, between 170,000 to 180,000 people secured seats during those initial 500 hours.
Many fans are looking to upgrade their seats or at least move to a different section during that three-week window. Since the organizers aren’t outsourcing ticket sales through Ticketmaster, SeatGeek and the like, all the shifting is done in-house.
Sales then reopen in late September for fans who did not renew in the spring. Finally, in mid-February, the last 50,000 tickets are sold, the second-biggest sales period for the event.
Selling out the grandstands means the local blackout of the race is lifted for just the eighth time ever, and fans at home in the Indianapolis market can watch the race live. That’s a small bonus for new broadcast partner Fox, which is supplanting NBC after the Peacock network aired the race for 16 years.
Boles praised NBC for advancing the TV production of IndyCar races, but he lauded Fox for bringing the overall IndyCar circuit closer to its affiliate stations, adding more promotional might to races and making the racing league “more of a household name.”
The sellout crowd will be showing up in the midst of controversy. During inspections, two of the three Team Penske cars (that of Newgarden and Will Power) were found to have an illegal modification to their rear crash structures. Boles announced that in addition to fines, both cars were penalized by being pushed to the back of the 33-car field.
Newgarden and Power, who qualified 11th and 12th respectively, lost the points they earned for those positions. On Wednesday, team owner Roger Penske fired his team’s top three executives: president Tim Cindric, managing director Ron Ruzewski and general manager Kyle Moyer.
In his statement about the dismissals, Penske cited last year’s scandal where his team’s cars had an illegal software for their “push to pass” engine boost. “We have had organizational failures during the last two years, and we had to make necessary changes,” he said. “I apologize to our fans, our partners and our organization for letting them down.”
Boles said the latest issue may not hurt IndyCar. “Certainly when there’s controversy, you get more eyeballs on you,” he said. “They’re more people talking about it, and you get outside of the endemic coverage and fans that you might have when the story becomes bigger than the on-track racing itself.”
He said watching how the Penske drivers adapt to starting in the rear may gin up fan interest. “I do think there are opportunities in challenges that allow us to grow.”
Editor’s note: The Indianapolis 500 race, IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway are owned by Penske Entertainment Corporation, a subsidiary of Penske Corporation that is owned and operated by Roger Penske. Sportico is owned by Penske Media Corporation (PMC), operated by Jay Penske, Roger’s son. PMC operates independently of Penske Corporation.
