Brickyard 400 sees slight attendance dip. Will NASCAR race return to IMS oval? What we know
An approximation from just over 70,000 in 2024 to just under 70,000 fans attended Sunday, according to an IMS spokesperson. Down on pit lane in the moments after Sunday's race won by Bubba Wallace that featured a pair of overtimes where the 23XI Racing driver was forced to fend off reigning race-winner Kyle Larson, IMS and IndyCar president Doug Boles guesstimated IMS would end up down 5,000 to 6,000 tickets from 2024 and land around 65,000, but he had yet to see the walk-up numbers, which weren't expected to be spectacular, given the intense heat index, coupled with the lingering weather concerns.
The dip, though, comes after the monumental return to the oval for NASCAR in 2024 after three years away while simultaneously celebrating the Brickyard 400's 30th anniversary of its first running — a pair of milestones that, while not exactly having 100th Indy 500-level impacts, were believed to have notably helped the track achieve year-over-year growth for race day (when compared to 2019, the last year NASCAR ran on the oval with fans) for the first time since 2002. Last year's race topped 2018's Brickyard 400 attendance numbers, too, and approached — but didn't nearly reach — 2017 and 2016.
In the vein of its approach to the post-2016 Indy 500 era of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, Boles spoke last year of wanting to keep a significant amount of 'lift' from 2024 to 2025 and then use the latter as a foundation off of which to build from moving forward. He said Sunday he doesn't expect the race to be on anything but the oval track in 2026.
'We just have to keep building it,' he said, hence why it was so important to make a pair of cross-country commercial flights in the span of 36 hours in order to wear both of his hats this weekend. 'From an IndyCar standpoint, I think it just shows that I'm serious about it. By not going, it would have left some doubt, and (the Brickyard 400) is one of our two massive events we have (at IMS).
'I just felt like I needed to be here. NASCAR's been such an awesome partner of ours, so I just wanted to try and manage through both of those.'
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