A crown jewel race, the Brickyard 400, finally makes its way back into the NASCAR schedule this Sunday after a three-year break. And with it, the sport is returning to one of the most famous oval race tracks in the world: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Although the reunion spells celebration, the event may never be back to the original glory with which it ran in the late 90s and the early 2000s.
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NASCAR visited the 2.5-mile oval layout for the first time in 1994. Roger Penske, the track’s current owner, says about the decision to host stock car races at the track, “We all thought it was crazy 30 years ago. When you own a facility like this, and you have the investment, you’ve got to utilize it, and it broadens the sport and the appeal for fans who want to come to a race here.” And it did.
Roger Penske on the significance of NASCAR at Indy: “We all thought it was crazy 30 years ago. When you own a facility like this, and you have the investment, you’ve got to utitlize it, and it broadens the sport and the appeal for fans who want to come to a race here.”
— PRN (@PRNlive) July 20, 2024
The Brickyard 400 became widely popular at the venue with 250,000 people in attendance when Jeff Gordon won the maiden race. 270,000 were still coming to watch the event over a decade later in 2008. But that was where the trouble began. The 2008 race saw NASCAR and Goodyear use a fresh tire compound on the Car of Tomorrow. This change resulted in adverse effects.
The track ate up rubber abnormally quickly and the tires had to be changed every handful of laps. Six preventative competition cautions were provided during the 160-lapper to allow teams to change tires before they failed. There were a total of 11 cautions for 52 laps. The longest green flag run was 12 laps. And just like that the Indianapolis Oval fell out of favor with the fans.
The aftermath of the disastrous 2008 Brickyard 400
As fate would have it, the event’s failure coincided with the economic recession that struck the world that year. The coming together of several such issues hit NASCAR hard and the race’s attendance began dropping. 180,000 people visited in 2009 and 140,000 came in 2010. By the time 2019 arrived, only 60,000 fans filled the largely empty stands.
The low demand caused NASCAR to take a break and run races on the Indianapolis road course. However, times have now changed and so have the preferences of the fans. The oval’s comeback has regained a lot of hope after the success of the heavy tire-fall race that unfolded at Bristol earlier this year.
Attendance for the upcoming event is 25% up from the 2019 numbers. In all possibility, an upward journey of redemption will begin this Sunday.
