Indianapolis Motor Speedway has significant roles in the future of racing and the automotive industry, while preserving the history and tradition of a sporting spectacle that dates to May 30, 1911, when Ray Harroun won the first Indianapolis 500.
For Joe Hale, president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, this is an important moment in time. He is overseeing an extensive renovation project that will replace the old museum with a new version that celebrates the past with interactive displays while still featuring some of the priceless remnants and relics that have made the 2.5-mile race track famous around the world.
The concept of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum dates to Tony Hulman’s purchase of the facility in November 1945.
The original museum opened on April 7, 1956, in a building designed by C. Wilbur Foster and Associates. It also housed the ticket office.
It was very small and featured only a few displays and six cars, but the centerpiece was Ray Harroun’s 1911 Indianapolis 500 car, the famed Marmon Wasp. The museum quickly outgrew its space.
In 1975, speedway officials broke ground on a 96,000-square-foot museum and administration building located in the track’s infield. In addition to the museum, the two-story building housed the speedway’s administrative offices, ticket office, a gift shop and photography department.
The expanded museum opened to the public on April 5, 1976, coinciding with the yearlong U.S. Bicentennial celebration.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987, with a plaque on display outside of the museum.
Despite its impressive collection of history, over time the museum fell a few laps down to other modern museums that had kept up with technology.
“The museum was a little tired,” Hale told SPEED SPORT. “It really hadn’t changed in nearly 50 years now. And so, three years ago, we started looking around.
“We kept getting slammed as being an indoor parking lot. You would come in, and all the cars were in front of you, and there was very little storytelling integrated into the museum.
“When you think about it, our mission is really to preserve and tell the stories of the 500.”
Hale was hired and plans evolved to renovate the museum into something that will remain relevant well into the future.
The renovation has also extended to the building itself.
“We knew that the HVAC needed to be replaced, the windows, the fire suppression. So, we knew it was going to be an extensive renovation,” Hale recalled. “Another challenge we got from our landlord is, see if you can maybe double the size of the museum without going outside the footprint. So that was a challenge that I love taking on to see how we could do that.
“The way we doubled the museum space without going up or outside the footprint was when our contractor got in there and said there’s a lot of space above this drop ceiling. It turned out that we could put a mezzanine in the museum and add another 6,000-plus square feet of display space there.
“But then at the same time, we also needed a place to store about 150 cars.,” Hale continued. “We started planning a restoration shop that would hold about 150 cars, have a six -bay restoration area, two -bay detailing area, some event space, lobby, little gift shop. And so that became part of the project. And we said, ‘Well, you know, if we build a museum, we’re going to want to do bigger and better exhibitions.’
“So, then we wanted to put another $10 million into our endowment. Our project became an $89 million project, which we kicked off last July. And we’ve been fortunate. We’re close to $60 million now in terms of money raised. And we are on schedule and under budget, which is always nice.
“And the museum is now scheduled to open April 1 of next year.”
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum is a 501c3 nonprofit corporation. It relies on fundraising and donations to remain sustainable.
Because of that, it led Hale to the basement — an area of the museum that few people have ever seen as it includes some of the most priceless artifacts in racing history.
“The basement was off limits to everybody for so long,” Hale admitted. “And about three years ago, we created an exhibition around the basement. We called it ‘The Basement Collection’ and we needed to raise some money to pay for the feasibility study and pay for the planning of this new museum.
“We re-lit it and we painted it,” Hale said. “We didn’t do a lot of work beyond that, but many of our cool cars were down there and, obviously, people couldn’t see them because we didn’t allow anybody in the basement for some reason.
“We allowed six people to go down at a time, and it must be led by a member of our staff. You can stay for 30 minutes. Absolutely no photographs are allowed.
“Lo and behold it helped us raise about $400,000 in the next couple of years that helped pay for the planning of the new museum.”
What will the new IMS Museum look like when it opens? Hale provides a preview of what to expect.
“There are going to be two rotating galleries that can be combined into the one, larger one,” he explained. “Your ‘Tour of the Track,’ your ‘Kiss the Bricks’ tour, your ‘View from the Top Tour,’ those will now leave from the lower level.
“There will be some food and beverage opportunities down there, a projection map of the track from 1908 to the current day that shows how it’s evolved by decade.
“There’s going to be an ‘In-the-Race Experience.’
“You walk down a hallway and suddenly you start feeling wind on your face and all of a sudden cars are going by at 230 mph and you see it and you feel it. And that’s going to be kind of that in-the-race experience for people.”
There are about 55,000 items in the museum’s archives and the renovation will bring many of those out of storage.
“What this museum is going to allow us to do is display many of the things that have never been on display before because we simply didn’t have the room,” Hale said. “When you walk down Gasoline Alley, there’s going to be seven garages on your right, beginning in 1908, when the speedway was a farm, and that oval was drawn in the dirt, and this might be a good place for a race track.
“It starts there and it’ll have one of the earlier cars there. And the nice thing about these seven garages is we’re going to be able to trade out cars in those garages as long as they’re of that era.
“You’ll walk down Gasoline Alley. You’ll see the evolution of design, technology, of media. As you walk down Gasoline Alley, these seven garages are going to be huge display cases where we can now display a lot of our artifacts to kind of relate to that period. So, there’s going to be a lot of learning going on.
“If you want to, walking down Gasoline Alley, and then you turn the corner, and suddenly you’re on the starting line of the Indianapolis 500 on race morning.
“There’s going to be a lot more interactivity in the new museum.”
Education is going to be a keystone of this museum. It will feature a dedicated innovation lab and a STEAM classroom.
“There will be stuff for the casual visitor,” Hale said. “There will be things for field trips. But we also want kids to understand.
“We’ve talked to Bobby Rahal; he is on our board. Chip Ganassi is a good friend. We talk to Roger Penske a lot. He is our landlord.
“What we found is that the race shops, Ganassi as an example, he now has over 200 employees, average salaries over $100,000 a year,” Hale continued. “And he needs more employees. And he said, ‘If a kid will take the right math and science classes in high school and do well, I’ll take him from there and I’ll put them into my internship program, my apprenticeship program and really teach them what else they need. And so, they don’t necessarily have to go to a four-year university. They don’t have to leave their hometown because these lucrative jobs are right here.’
“We can’t teach kids how to be engineers, but we can help them focus on taking the right classes if they are interested in a career in motorsports.”
How much of a balancing act will it be for this museum to honor both the history and future of the sport?
“Our focus is on telling the stories of what’s happened at the track,” Hale said. “Now, you’ve got Purdue University doing the electric vehicle program that they’ve got going. We don’t have too much planned about trying to predict the future, but once you see it, you’re going to agree that we’ve done a really good job of telling the stories of the past and the present.
“Every year, on race day, we get many new stories to tell, and I think that’s what we really excel at. And like I said, that and, you know, this education program, we’ve got a new education director who started on July 1, a dynamic young man who I think is going to do a wonderful job. But with so many people coming from outside of Indiana, our goal is to really mobilize the local population and get them more involved in the museum.
“That’s going to be one of our objectives.”
The museum is evidence that Indianapolis Motor Speedway is not just a sporting venue; it is part of the fabric of Indiana and America as a whole.
“I think it’s very important,” Hale said. “The Indianapolis 500, the museum, the whole complex, it’s such an economic development driver for the state of Indiana as well.
“I don’t care where you are in the world, if you write down that you’re from Indianapolis, most people are going to think of the 500 before they think of anything else if they know where Indiana is.
“I think it’s very important for us to, as I said, maintain those stories so that we can preserve the past and at the same time try to take a glimpse at the future.”
THIS ARTICLE IS REPOSTED FROM THE July 10 EDITION OF SPEED SPORT INSIDER
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