4790 W 16th St, Indianapolis, IN 46222

Gentlemen {and Ladies} …start your engines & immerse yourself in the racing capital of the world with an entire museum dedicated to autos & racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum.

This isn’t just a speedway, it’s a full experience. The Museum and two gift shops are open year-round (with the exception of Christmas & Thanksgiving Day). While touring Indianapolis Motor Speedway, we learned so much about not only the Indy 500, but also about the history of racing itself.  NASCAR, Formula One, American short-track racing, drag racing and motorcycles are all represented inside the walls of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum.

DYK:

• Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s track was built in 1909 as a paved surface with crushed stone & tar, but this was not durable enough so it was repaved with over 3 million paving bricks, giving it the famous nickname “The Brickyard.”
• The first 500-mile race was run in 1911.
• Indianapolis Motor Speedway was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987.
• Today, drivers circle the track at over 230 miles per hour.

If you’re a big race fan, you may want to consider additional tours during your visit outside of The Visit Indy Attraction Pass such as the “Kiss the Brick” Tour which includes a 30-minute narrated lap around the 2.5 mile course and of course a stop at the start/finish line where visitors can “Kiss” the famous brick making for a fantastic photo! This tour costs $25 USD/per adult ages 16 & up, and it is on our list of things to do when we return to Indianapolis next year.

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Admission

Admission & parking to Indianapolis Motor Speedway grounds is free for all, except on race days. Admission to the Museum, which is located inside the Speedway’s oval, is:

• $15.00 USD/per adult ages 16 & up
• $8.00 USD/per child ages 6-15
• free for children ages 5 & under

Admission includes all-day access to the museum, a self-guided tour of the museum grounds & public exhibits that allows you to meander from exhibit to exhibit at your own pace. Guided tours are available for an additional $10.00 USD/per person where you will hear one-of-a-kind tales of speedway history. If this is your first time, we highly recommend adding on a guided tour!

Aside from getting up close and personal with so much of racing’s impressive history (the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame was amazing – there is so much history here!) we really enjoyed the complimentary simulator that put us in the driver seat to see how we’d handle the famous Speedway’s course. We’ll never turn down a healthy dose of competition & this was right up our millennial alley (we’d spend hours in arcades as teens competing in SEGA’s Virtua Formula, but that doesn’t even compare to this simulator). The Indy 500 is of course a 500 mile race, and our simulator only did one full lap, but it was a great way to see for ourselves how an Indy car handles. Needless to say we needed a few more practice runs to get the hang of things, but we didn’t want to keep the line waiting too long.

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Plan Your Visit

In case you didn’t know, Indianapolis is the “Racing Capital of the World,” but did you also know it is home to the largest one-day sporting event? That’s right, move over Kentucky Derby because the Indy 500 is the largest single day sporting event in the world! Every Memorial Day Weekend here in the United States, 300,000+ race fans from all over the world take over the city of Indianapolis for “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” with 2023 being the 107th running of the Indianapolis 500! The race is of course only one day in May, but throughout the entire month of May there are race-events taking place such as qualifiers, so speedway fans can catch a lot more than just one day’s worth of race events.

We grew up with The Fast & The Furious movies and we’ve been to our share of NASCAR races – there is nothing like the energy of race day, but attending the Indy 500, seeing the fly over done by the US Air Force & of course watching the race itself would be bucket list and has to be an absolutely unforgettable experience!

However, the Indy 500 isn’t the only race that takes place at The Speedway.  While we were in town visiting The Speedway, the Indy 8 Hour Intercontinental GT Challenge was taking place during our visit and our timing couldn’t have been better! This was an endurance sports car race that took place on the infield course at The Speedway and it was the second year for this race which started in 2020. 

Do yourself a favor and check the Speedway’s calendar of events to see what races will be occurring during your visit. To see the Speedway in person is definitely amazing given it’s size and the history within the museum’s walls, but to see and HEAR the sounds of a qualifier or a race itself is like nothing else on this earth.

Everyone at Indianapolis Motor Speedway made us feel right at home with their midwestern charm, and it was hands down the best “museum” experience we’ve ever had. We’d like to extend a very big THANK YOU to both Bob & Mike, guides at Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, for taking the time to sharing their wealth of not only racing but also Indianapolis knowledge with us during our visit.

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Thank you to our friends at Visit Indy for hosting our time in Circle City!

We hope our Indianapolis Motor Speedway Guide will help you discover everything this unforgettable experience has to offer. Safe travels & we hope to see you in Indy!