Well my last stop of my trip is the Indianapolis speedway. They had time trials and pratice the 18th and 19th for the race next weekend. The great thing is I could stay over night in the parking lot 2, which was better than my first option of a truck stop. I was about 100 feet from the entrance gate. Now I got a say there were many campers, obvious serious race fans staying for the weekend. The nice thing about going there this weekend, is you can easily walk around. The only mistake I made was not getting tickets to Gasoline Alley, basically being able to enter the garage area to be up and close to the cars. I was amazed at what the fans brought in, coolers, wagons with food, etc, something you wouldn’t see at an NFL game.
Now, I am not a race fan, the only car races I have been too has been dirt track and demolition derby’s. The practice runs were for the teams to experiment with tires or other car adjustments. We are talking about improving your time by 10ths of a second. It appeared the time to make was 232 MPH or better. Interesting watching the pit crews, now one guy on the pit crew has the job to hold the umbrella over the driver while in the pit. The second mistake I made was not bringing my good camera, was hard to get pictures of the cars running on the track with my cell phone. You can leave and re-enter, so when I wanted lunch, just had to go back to my tiny home. They said 330 thousand people will be in attendance for the 500, to put that in perspective, the largest attendance for a Superbowl is 104 thousand, over 3 times more people will be at the race. Personally, if you really want to watch the race, stay home and watch it on tv. But if you get a chance go see the track on an off time. The museum was closed for renovations, so I was a bit bummed about that.
