With rain in the forecast for the 108th Indy 500 on Sunday, Indianapolis Motor Speedway President Doug Boles said the track is monitoring the potential impact on the race but won’t make any decisions until several hours after the green flag.
According to Thursday morning’s hourly forecast on the Weather Underground websitethere is an 85 percent chance of rain at the green flag (12:45 p.m. ET).
Noting that Indiana is notorious for its notoriously fickle weather, Boles remains hopeful for improvement on race day. In 2019, the forecast called for a 100 percent chance of rain, but only a passing shower fell mid-morning on Sunday.
When is the Indy 500? That answer and more in this primer on the greatest race in the world
All the relevant details and information you need for the 108th Indianapolis 500 on May 26.
“It’s Indiana, so even though things may seem a little uncertain right now, we’ll see how it goes,” Boles said at a news conference Wednesday. “We will continue to monitor that. We will have more formal meetings (Thursday). We’ll have another formal meeting on Friday to really start looking at what we think the weather will do as it gets closer and that will allow us to really make decisions about what we’re going to do.
“I’m just going to hope that that weather, that the Tony Hulman bubble coming out of Terre Haute, comes to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Sunday, and that we don’t have to deal with it.”
Boles said he was “99.9 percent certain” there would be no schedule updates before Sunday morning.
“Unlike a lot of our other events, I think we’ll wait,” Boles said. I mean, even if the weather is terrible at midnight on Saturday night or it looks bad at 6am on Sunday morning, we’ll wait. We will do everything we can to make the race happen on Sunday. So if that means we have to wait until about three or four o’clock before we really find out, we will do everything we can to get it in on Sunday.”
Sunset will be around 9:00 PM ET on Sunday.
Boles said IMS also leased the NASCAR Air Titan system used to push water off the asphalt.
Several Indy 500 practices were affected by rain last week. In one instance, Boles said the track set an unofficial record by drying the 2.5-mile surface in 77 minutes.
“A lot of that has to do with the aging of the track, just like it can shed water if it’s just a small amount of water,” Boles said. “Things that affect drying time are humidity, sunshine, wind and how much rain we’ve had before. The more rain we have beforehand, the longer it might take to get some of that water out of the asphalt.
“But we’ll do everything we can to get it in on Sunday, which means we probably won’t make a decision to change anything until it rains at 11am, then we’ll start.” race ceremonies, but we will do everything we can at that time to ensure we have the race.”
Sunday’s broadcast of the 108th Indy 500 begins at 11 a.m. ET on NBC and Peacock.
Boles said 345,000 people are expected on Sunday, about 15,000 more than last year. As of Wednesday, there were fewer than 5,000 grandstand seats left (all in the North Vista between Turns 3 and 4).
