Roger Penske's IMS investment nearing $50 million: What's new for 2023
Nathan BrownThe biggest change Roger Penske, Doug Boles and company have pulled together across the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s more than 900 acres since last year’s Indianapolis 500 is something Boles hopes customers hardly notice.
Starting with the 2013 Indianapolis 500, which came just over a month after the Boston Marathon bombing, IMS yellow shirts have routinely been asking customers to open their coolers for a quick search when they enter the grounds. In its early stages, it created massive pinch points for late-arriving customers – to the point in its first year that IMS stopped checking coolers to make sure fans wouldn’t miss the start of the race. Since then, it’s become a norm at the 220 entrance lanes around the Racing Capital of the World.
But when Boles recently learned of new metal detector technology that would allow fans to walk through with coolers in hand and without taking anything out of their pockets, “it was a no-brainer for us,” he told IndyStar this week. “We’ve got to get that here.”
Those metal detectors will make their IMS debut Friday for the opening day of on-track action that includes practice and qualifying for the GMR Grand Prix. They’ll be positioned all around IMS, and because of their bulk, the track has had to cut down the number of ticket-scanning lanes for customers – from 220 to 175. At places where there has only been one or two entry lanes, those will still exist Boles said, but more expansive entrances like Gates 1 or 9 will have fewer lines.
The goal, though, is for the process entering the track to be quicker without the need for yellow shirts to rummage through any coolers.
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“It should be faster, but they’ve never done an event like we’ll have on May 28, so we’re anxious to walk through it these next several days,” Boles said. “One of the things we’ve heard from our fans in the last several years is they’re comfortable with our safety measures. In 2013 and ’14, people weren’t used to it, and now people want more safety measures, so I think this answers a fan question as well.
“Before 2013, we just wanted to make sure your cooler was 14x14x18 (inches), but after the bombing, we knew we needed to start going through them. Now, we can both check for size, but you can just walk through. If you put your six-pack of beer in there, it’s not going to catch it. But if you come through with a big pocket knife, it’ll catch that, along with all sorts of weapons.”
With that latest infrastructure investment, along with several large paving projects, a new face to the scoring pylon and other more offseason additions and facelifts to IMS, Boles said Penske has now spent just under $50 million bringing IMS up to his ‘Penske Perfect’ standards since November 2019 when Penske and Tony George announced the sale of IMS and the IndyCar series from Hulman & Co. to Penske Entertainment.
Just under $20 million of that has been spent in the last year alone. Every week, when Penske makes his weekly flight from his company headquarters just outside Detroit to Indianapolis, Boles finds himself constantly amazed at Penske’s dedication and work ethic at 86 years old. On May 1, the pair registered more than 6,000 steps walking around the outside of half of the property, from Tunnel 2 to J Stand, touring every restroom, concession stand and first-aid station to make sure things were up to snuff for Month of May festivities in less than two weeks’ time.
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Ironically, Boles said, nothing may show that more than one of the few areas Penske hasn’t yet touched. There remains just two gravel lots inside IMS’s gates, with one of them at the foot of the Pagoda where the track’s high-rolling guests and celebrities would typically park and get their first impression of the place if they’ve never been before.
“And that just tells me where Roger’s focus is. It would’ve been really easy to come in and pave that right away, but he’s investing in asphalt everywhere else because he’s not ready to do that spot until he’s done it everywhere else,” Boles said. “He spends a lot of time trying to understand our customer surveys and how we can make the customer experience better. If (a project) makes sense and makes the customer experience better, he’s happy to invest in it.”
Here’s more of what Boles, Penske and IMS staff have been up to since Marcus Ericsson won the 106th running of the Indy 500 last year:
TV compound outside track leads to more connected midway
At most oval tracks, the TV compound is situated outside the gates. For whatever reason – perhaps its 300-plus acres inside that includes four golf holes and its ability to host more than 350,000 fans – IMS’ compound had been situated on the inside for NBC’s producers, technicians and talent. Lately, it’s been just east of the media center, behind the Tower Terrace suites and directly next to the fan midway area. With just under 700 acres of land outside the track, Boles and his team decided it was time to use some of that and fall in line with what’s typical at other venues – even if it may leave those folks working out of the compound a little farther from the action.
The result? A better flow for the fan midway that now will start at the top of Tunnel 6 by the Pagoda and run straight north, rather than heading east and crowding the barriers of the road course backstretch. Some old midway space will now be additional infield parking IMS didn’t previously have, and its new midway, Boles said, “will be more connected and in the center of the action with the Plaza.
“It’s about the same amount of midway space,” he continued, “but it just connects everything better.”
Paving projects galore
In addition to the old and new TV compounds, Penske has also undergone several other paving projects around the facility, including:
>>a long section behind the Turn 1 grandstands over to Tunnel 2
>>a section inside oval Turn 4 that will be used for 165 RV camping spots and 200 tent and camper spots for the IMSA race weekend in September (which Boles said may be used when and if camping is permitted for the GMR Grand Prix and Brickyard weekends in the future)
>>down Shaw Drive, which runs between the golf course and the oval backstretch
>>around many of the concession stands where asphalt was buckling
Fans get another viewing mound, more video boards
A couple years ago, a new spectator mound inside of oval Turn 4 was created at Boles’ request and duly named “Mt. Boles.” Now, the IMS president practically has his own mountain range, after separate mounds along Turns 2-4 of the road course were connected this offseason to create what Boles believes is now one of the better viewing areas in the infield of the track.
Previously, there had been one of IMS’ several new ‘big board’ video screens that fans sitting on the outside of the track to watch from the grandstands. Now, IMS has attached a similar screen to the back of it, so those in the infield on that new large mound – as well as those camping in the future – can see everything happening on-track.
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Along with that new video board, IMS has also added one on the front-straight, mainly for fans sitting in the temporary bleachers that are positioned just in front of the Gasoline Alley bleachers, or for those walking down pitlane or standing at the base of the Pagoda, which is a popular area during qualifying weekend.
Last year, you’d have to be standing much farther down the front straight to have proper access to a video board or you’d have to crane your neck around back towards Gasoline Alley in order to catch qualifying results as cars crossed the start-finish line.
New faces of the pylon, but Pagoda scoring monitor still broken
In concert with the dozens of video boards that have been added around the track in the last three years, IMS has now updated the faces of the scoring pylon that was last replaced in 2014 as part of IMS’s $92 million ‘Project 100’ that readied the facility for the historic 100th running of the 500 in 2016.
“The technology has changed so much since then,” Boles said. With new LED panels that come with far better resolution, the graphics and stats are even brighter and can be seen from much farther away.
“And we can incorporate a lot of what we’re doing with the video boards on the pylons,” Boles said. “So you’ll see live action on the video boards, and the pylon then can show relevant graphics so everything connects.”
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With that, though, IMS has yet to fix the scoring carousel that sits on top of the Pagoda. Not long before the 2022 500, the displays that show a live top-10 for races and allows fans not to have to wait for a live scroll to come back to the top of the field broke, and it’s a part Daktronics, the supplier of the original boards, doesn’t make any more. Boles said there’s nothing that can be done to fix the broken part.
“We’re still trying to figure out what we want that to look like in the future,” Boles said. “We’ve been focused on getting the video boards and the pylon that our fans have wanted. But those boards (around the top of the Pagoda) require some more thinking. The 9th floor (of the Pagoda) houses our production room for all of our boards, and we’re not sure that’s going to be there forever, so if we think we might be moving that in the next couple years, we don’t want to invest a whole bunch in these until we know where everything’s going to be.”
What's next? Entertainment space south of 16th Street
Amazing as it may seem, there’s so much more that Penske now owns around Speedway that he’s yet to tap into. In April of last year, IMS purchased a small property south of the track across 16th Street that used to house Speedway Monogramming and has yet to decide what to do with that building and/or land. Penske Entertainment also owns some office space further south in that parking area that’s currently part of a strip mall that includes the IndyCar series offices. That space, Boles said, could one day be part of a much larger entertainment-focused project that would include input and investment from Indianapolis and the town of Speedway and help connect Speedway’s ever-growing, vibrant Main Street restaurant and entertainment district to the south corridor of the Racing Capital of the World.
It all stems back to one of the first things Penske said in his introductory press conference in November of 2019: “We look around these thousand acres, and we say, ‘Can this be not just the Racing Capital of the World, but the Entertainment Capital of the World in Indiana?’ We hope it can support the state, the governor, the region, the city, the town of Speedway and continue to grow.”
With the onset of the pandemic, Boles said much of Penske’s focus has been inside the facility to, at first, take advantage of the lack of foot traffic to spruce things up for the return to 500 race days as we know them in 2022. Still with much work going on inside the track, Penske is starting to shift his focus outward nowadays.
“It’s just been in the last handful of months we’ve started to have conversations and think about what our opportunities are,” Boles said. “I think it’s definitely something Roger wants to do, and we’ve talked with (Speedway) to try and have a more comprehensive plan so it’s not just us, but the town and city involved too.
“We want to work with the neighborhoods and neighborhood advocates because we don’t want to displace anybody. We want to work together to make things better. And Roger doesn’t want to invest without knowing it’s going to be for the greater good – more than just our 1,000 acres.”