Indy 500 ticket sales threatening sellout
It’s not the 100th running, nor is it fans’ full-fledged return following a pandemic yet, every day, the president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway wakes up to daily ticket sales reports and sees the 108th running of the Indianapolis 500 tracking are nearly dead-even with the sellout eight years ago.
The 500 seems to be converting more and more casual fans into lifelong race attendees, pushing the race closer to the 350,000-fan sellout of its 100th running.
“Since the sellout in 2016, I think people are more apt to renew early, just to make sure they have their seats and people are getting trained that way,” Speedway President Doug Boles told IndyStar in a 1-on-1 interview last week. “But now, what’s happened is over time, literally day after day after day, when we look at the ticket numbers, it’s more tickets sold today, 93 days out, than it was last year 93 days out, and we’re still tracking almost dead-even with 2016, which is crazy.”
Boles said the Racing Capital of the World hosted more than 330,000 fans last year, the most since 2016 and falling less than 10,000 tickets short of a sellout of its grandstands that hold roughly 234,000 seats.
The key in 2016 was the sellout of the track’s grandstand seats on May 6, which was more than three weeks to race day and which led to a run on general admission access to the infield.
By May 25, IMS announced it was no longer selling tickets, leading to the lift of the local blackout for the first time in 65 years.
A year ago, IMS saw roughly a 1% uptick in ticket sales, moving from 12,000 unsold grandstand seats to 9,000 (and 325,000 to 330,000 race day attendees).
It will still need to see an improvement year-over-year to reach that grandstand sellout mark with enough time for fans to feel a scarcity in infield admission that led to 2016’s sellout.
“For a period of time there, we were slightly ahead (of 2016 sales), and now we’re slightly behind, but without that 100th-running conversation to drive it, it’s amazing it’s that strong,” Boles said. “I keep wondering if I’m going to wake up one day and realize, ‘Oh, everyone’s bought and set now.’ But it just continues to go.”
Along with edge-of-your-seat finishes the last three years in eventual victories from four-time champion Helio Castroneves and first-timers Marcus Ericsson and Josef Newgarden, Boles attributes the upward trajectory of tickets sales to track owner Roger Penske’s continued investment into the track that presently stands around $50 million just over four years since he completed the purchase of IMS and the