INDIANAPOLIS — With the potential for storms in the forecast, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is preparing for every situation ahead of the 108th running of the Indianapolis 500.
IMS President Doug Boles isn’t making any definitive decisions right now. But when it comes to preparing for Mother Nature, Boles said IMS has numerous protocols in place should it rain on Sunday.
Boles said fan and driver safety is a top priority and his team will have numerous meetings this week to prepare for the potential for storms.
If storms pop up on race day, Boles said IMS will utilize all of its message boards and mass text alert system to keep fans in the loop. You can text Indy500 to 67283 to opt in to text alerts. Once the race is finished, Boles said you’ll be removed from the text alert system.
Since the 500 started in 1911, the race has been completely postponed three times, partially postponed twice and cut short by rain seven times.
Boles said his team at IMS often looks to Terre Haute, which is about 75 miles to Indy’s southwest to help determine what the weather could be like at the track.
If rain does put a damper on the day, Boles is optimistic about getting the track dried off in a timely manner. He said IMS brought in NASCAR’s Air-Titan track drying system this week to help dry the track. He said the system did the job in about 77 minutes, instead of the normal two to three hours.
Right now, Boles said IMS will do everything it can to hold the race Sunday.
“We will wait even if it looks terrible on midnight Saturday or 6 a.m. Sunday morning, we will wait as long as we can before we make a decision and we will do everything we can to get the race in on Sunday. Even if we have to wait around until 3-4 p.m. We will do everything we can to get it in on Sunday,” said Boles.
FOX59/CBS4’s Jenny Dreasler spoke one-on-one with IMS President Doug Boles about how IMS prepares for storms.
Question: How does the city of Terre Haute play into the decision-making process for weather
“It happens to be far enough out that you can really see what’s happening and pretty well predict where the weather is going to be and what’s going to happen to us. So it is an area that we are watching a lot because our weather typically is coming from that direction so that bubble over Terre Haute, that window over Terre Haute it is part of it. We will just continue to monitor weather, especially over the next couple of days, as the models begin to decide. They are all so varied right now.”
Question: Would you ever move up the race?
“I don’t think so. Because people know when it is. We’ve never really moved it up. Now I say that, I can see where we might say, ‘Look, people are basically in their seats by noon and ready to go.’ If for whatever reason we thought moving it up by 10 or 20 minutes, because right now I think the Green flag is roughly 12:35 p.m. so if we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to move the green flag up to 12:15 p.m.’ I can see that potentially happening, but I don’t see us making a wild change to say ‘Hey we’re going to start it early or whatever.’ So plan on it starting when it’s supposed to start.”
Question: Would you postpone the race before it starts?
“No. I’ve seen so many times in Indiana where you make a decision in the morning and then it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do and it’s sunny and you’ve wasted a whole opportunity and in order to live up to everything I said that we’re going to do everything we can to get it in on Sunday, you just kind of have to wait and see where we are. So we would not postpone it 12 hours ahead of the end of the day.”
Question: How many laps do you need to get in to declare a winner?
“You have to complete 101 laps. So you have to complete halfway. So the minute somebody crosses that 100th lap, and comes back around to finish 101, it’s essentially over.”
Question: How do you decide whether to shorten the race or postpone?
“We wouldn’t shorten it. If we had that 101st lap in on Sunday, and it rained and we couldn’t start again, then the race would be over. If we got 50 laps in on Sunday then we would come back and we would run the final 150 laps to get to 500 miles unless it’s rain-shortened again. So we wouldn’t say, ‘Hey we got 50 in today and we’re only going to do 50 tomorrow.’ So there’s not ever a time that we would shorten it in that instance where rain causes you to after that 101st lap.”
Question: How quickly can you dry the track?
“It’s typically been between two-three hours is sort of the window we normally think of. Earlier this week we had a couple of times that we dried it, and at one point it was 77 minutes. What was interesting to me was it was a point in time where there wasn’t sunshine. Normally sunshine helps it dry off quicker. But we were able to do it without sunshine. A lot of the factors are wind, how much rain we’ve had, what’s the humidity in the air, the less humidity, the quicker it is going to dry. So a lot of factors go in there. So there was a lot of encouragement and excitement that we were able to do it that quickly, and hopefully if we have an issue, we can keep that window as short as possible.”
Question: How do you evacuate 300,000 people safely?
“The biggest thing we do, and we’ll do it from the beginning of the morning as we go forward is make sure that our customers are aware of what’s coming, so oftentimes we’ll put a radar up, we’ll talk to them about weather. Some of us are more comfortable staying longer than others. We really encourage our customers to think about how comfortable do you want to be? I don’t know how far away your car is, so you may take longer than somebody else. We are going to give our fans as much information as we can to make sure that they can make that decision based on where they are. There is a point in time though where we may have to say, ‘Ok, time to leave the grandstands,’ we’ve done that before if there’s lightning coming or some of those things. Hopefully we don’t have to deal with that, but the biggest thing is just making sure that we give the tools to our fans to be able to say ‘Ok, I need to leave now or I’m going to wait.’”
Question: What will your meetings on Thursday and Friday look like?
“We’ll have not a normal, but a gathering of staff each day to say ok what are we seeing, what do we think? What are the challenges we have? We’ll wait until we really know what’s going to happen before we make decisions because we have to think about TV broadcast windows and all those things are impacted as well as the customer experience.”
